Mike Piazza on doorstep of Hall of Fame but may miss cut

Mike Piazza is on the cusp of election the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, but may miss the cut by an agonizingly small margin.

Piazza, currently in his third year on the ballot, received a shade over 57.8 percent of the votes in 2013 and saw his support increase to 62.2 percent in 2014.

Using the tremendous voting trackers from Baseball Think Factory and Ryan Thibs, one can see that as of 9:45 AM on Tuesday, Piazza’s name had been checked off on roughly 76 percent of the roughly 180 ballots that have so far been made public.

While only 75 percent is needed for election, history shows that the public ballots for players such as Piazza, who have been accused of using steroids although there isn’t a shred of evidence, tend to skew higher – mainly because many of the voters who make their ballots public skew younger and more progressive than their counterparts who choose to not share their ballots.

Those counterparts, who make up the close to 400 ballots that have yet to be made public, will almost certainly knock Piazza’s current percentage down.

Last year, Piazza’s name was checked off on 68.06 percent of the public ballots that were known prior to the election, while his actual result was 62.2 percent.

If you take last year’s differential between the public and private votes (roughly 4.4 percent), Piazza would wind up at around 72 percent.

However, a trend that is in Piazza’s favor is the amount of new votes he has gained this year compared to last.

So far, Piazza has gained 19 new votes – the most of any candidate on the ballot.

According to Ryan Thibs, if Piazza’s current pace of added votes holds, he’ll add 73 votes to his total and wind up with 74.596 percent of the vote. That would leave him one vote shy of election and would be incredibly disappointing for both Piazza and the fans who are pulling for him.

The players who are elected as part of this year’s class for the Hall of Fame will be announced Tuesday afternoon at 2 PM live on the MLB Network.