Editor’s note: My weekly Tuesday column “Does he belong in the Hall of Fame?” will resume next week.
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It’s a little shy of midnight as I write these words. My cat’s curled up on my couch next to me, I’m flopped out myself, and for the last couple of hours, I’ve gotten very little done. In a little less than one week exactly, this year’s edition of my project on the 50 best baseball players not in the Hall of Fame will go live. We’re getting into crunch time, and I have a lot of work ahead of me in the next week. I’m already a little stressed, and my current procrastination is the byproduct.
So far, 161 people have requested ballots to vote in this year’s project, and without checking, I estimate close to half have voted. About 95 people asked for ballots last year, with 63 people voting, and if the completion rate holds steady this time around, we should have over 10o voters. This is a good thing, as more votes leads to truer, better-separated rankings. But it’s also nerve-wracking, as I count every ballot by hand for quality control purposes, and last year, they took about 20 minutes a piece on average. I estimate I’ll need to tally at least 20 ballots a day the rest of this week to have enough time to write the results post and avoid pulling another all-nighter before my project goes live, like I did last year. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if another sleepless night is in my near future.
To everyone who’s voted so far: Thank you! To everyone else: Votes are due by Thursday at 9 p.m. PST, and I’m happy to answer any questions between now and then. Please feel free to comment or email me at thewomack@gmail.com. After the deadline passes, my plan is to have something up by the evening of next Monday, December 5, after the Veterans Committee announces whether it will be enshrining anyone next summer. Hopefully, folks will take notice of our work. Last year’s project got linked to on ESPN.com and received so much traffic my server crashed. So far, this year’s project is looking bigger and better. I’ve even created the first-ever t-shirt in the history of this Website for it, a t-shirt won by voter Nick Diunte, I’ll add, for identifying I put every starter from the 1989 San Francisco Giants on my ballot.
All things considered, I suppose a word of warning to my tech guys may be in order.