We haven't changed much since the last time

https://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/hall_of_merit/discussion/election_results_we_like_first_basmen_gehrig_foxx_anson_mize_and_brouthers_

Connor moves up this time, that was a surprise. Bagwell, Thomas, Thome, Palmeiro and Helton are a new placements who pushed some guys further down the list. Murray and Killebrew drop a little.

Thank you, DL, for guiding this drawn-out election through, despite the ups and downs of the site!

Overall, this looks like a high-consensus set of rankings. Some of the third-quartile players received a fairly wide range of rankings, but even these are mostly contiguous: there are only a handful of true outlier votes, so their impact on the rankings is rather small.

Palmeiro and Suttles came fairly close, though, to getting a different ranking on every single ballot submitted.

While I have a text box, I'm going to go ahead and post the first base election history!

First Base Election History

Unanimous First Ballot Electees 2: Gehrig (all #1), Brouthers
First-Ballot Electees 19: Brouthers, Connor, Anson, Terry, Gehrig, Foxx, Greenberg, Leonard, Mize, Killebrew, Allen, McCovey, Hernandez, Murray, Clark, McGwire, Bagwell, Thomas, Thome
Initial Top 10 placement 23: All First-Ballot Electees + Suttles, Beckley, Palmeiro, Helton
Started Outside Top 10 : Start (11), Sisler (14)

More than 10 years to election (4): Suttles 11 (1946-56), Start 15 (1898-1912), Sisler 44 (1936-1979), Beckley 86 (1913-1998)

<U>The Order of Election</u>

Dan Brouthers 1902. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot, elected unanimously. Appeared on all 42 ballots and received 42 elect-me votes, 39 of which were first-place votes. The other three first-place votes went to Charlie Radbourn, who placed fourth behind Brouthers, Buck Ewing (elected), and Jack Glasscock.
Roger Connor 1903. First Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on all 44 ballots and received 37 elect-me votes, 12 of which were first-place votes.
Cap Anson 1903. First Ballot Electee. #2 on ballot. Appeared on 38 of 44 ballots and received 37 elect me-votes, 31 of which were first-place votes. Anson was boycotted by 6 voters, which led to Connor placing ahead of Anson. Connor received 984 points to Anson’s 900, even though most voters ranked Anson ahead of Connor.
Joe Start 1912. #2 on ballot. Appeared on 38 of 42 ballots and received 15 elect-me votes. First eligible in 1898, when he finished in 11th place.
Bill Terry 1942. First-Ballot Electee. #2 on ballot. Appeared on 42 of 53 ballots and received six elect-me votes.
Lou Gehrig 1944. First-Ballot Electee. Unanimous #1, receiving the top vote on all 52 ballots cast.
Jimmie Foxx 1951. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on all 49 ballots and received 48 elect-me votes.
Hank Greenberg 1953. First-Ballot Electee. #2 on ballot. Appeared on all 49 ballots and received 34 elect-me votes.
Buck Leonard 1955. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on 47 of 48 ballots and received 37 elect-me votes.
Mule Suttles 1956. #2 on ballot. Appeared on 41 of 46 ballots and received 16 elect-me votes. First eligible in 1946, when he finished in 3rd place.
Johnny Mize 1959. First-Ballot Electee. #2 on ballot. Appeared on all 47 ballots and received 44 elect-me votes.
George Sisler 1979. #2 on ballot. Appeared on 34 of 51 ballots and received 3 elect-me votes. First eligible in 1936, when he finished in 14th place. Of the 13 players finishing ahead of him, all but George Van Haltren were subsequently elected. (Jake Beckley finished in 7th place in that election, but he was still unelected in Sisler’s election year, finishing in 7th place in that year as well.
Harmon Killebrew 1981. First-Ballot Electee. #2 on ballot. Appeared on 53 of 54 ballots and received 41 elect-me votes.
Dick Allen 1983. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on 50 of 55 ballots and received 20 elect-me votes.
Willie McCovey 1986. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on 51 of 52 ballots and received 48 elect-me votes.
Keith Hernandez 1996. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on 40 of 54 ballots and received 16 elect-me votes.
Jake Beckley 1998. #3 on ballot. Appeared on 23 of 49 ballots and received 3 elect-me votes. First eligible in 1913, when he finished in ninth place.
Eddie Murray 2003. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on all 53 ballots and received 51 elect-me votes.
Will Clark 2006. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on 51 of 54 ballots and received 28 elect-me votes.
Mark McGwire 2007. First-Ballot Electee. #3 on ballot. Appeared on 46 of 48 ballots cast and received 40 elect-me votes.
Jeff Bagwell 2011. First-Ballot Electee. #1 on ballot. Appeared on 38 of 39 ballots and received 38 elect-me votes.
Rafael Palmeiro 2012. #1 on ballot. Appeared on 32 of 37 ballots and received 19 elect-me votes. First eligible in 2011, when he finished in 4th place.
Frank Thomas 2014. First-Ballot Electee. #2 on ballot. Appeared on all 34 ballots cast and received 22 elect-me votes.
Jim Thome 2018. First-Ballot Electee. #2 on ballot. Appeared on all 30 ballots cast and received 27 elect-me votes.
Todd Helton 2020. #4 on ballot. Appeared on 22 of 30 ballots and received 6 elect-me votes. First eligible in 2019, when he finished in 5th place.

The top ten are pretty well stratified, and there is a clear cluster right behind them of [Thome, McCovey, McGwire, Murray]. I'm not sure any other position has had such a clear top half! The third quartile there of [Allen, Palmeiro, Killebrew, Hernandez, Suttles] is also quite distinct.

Helton is an interesting figure as a good marker of the borderline - he didn't take too long to get in or anything, but he wasn't an overwhelming electee either. Sisler and Start (!) are quite close, so you'd have to assume both would do at least somewhat well in today's voting. By my count Start placed higher than Helton on the majority of ballots! The previous results for anyone who needed pre-1871 credit were rather lackluster, so color me surprised that Start, someone who needs significant 1860s credit to be a quality candidate, would rank so well.

Beckley ranking last is not a surprise, and, while I'd consider myself a friend of Bill Terry, he's placement isn't surprising either. Will Clark's does intrigue me - he made it in without too much difficulty at all. It was a relatively weak ballot, and there had been a fair amount of backlog electees in the years prior, so it's not all surprising he was first ballot, but it is surprising how much consensus there was - over half of the electorate had him in an elect-me spot. But by these results, he's really not looking particularly strong at all - into the territory where I have to assume he might not get elected super quickly today, if at all. Typically, the bottom of these re-rankings has been the territory for pretty early guys, which makes Clark's poor showing even more unique.

Yes, Will Clark is definitely an unusual case, and I don't know that, if we were to re-run the last, say, 30 elections in sequence, that he would be elected.

I think Win Shares likes Clark a great deal, especially his peak, so that contributed to a more positive assessment.
Regardless of the comprehensive metric used, Clark's early retirement benefits him in any year-by-year selection process
because he became eligible a few years ahead of the big wave of 1990s stars who retired around the middle of the 2000s.

I think Bill Terry benefited from a similar circumstances with respect to Win Shares and timing,
especially with respect to his NeL contemporaries.

I guess I am an outlier on Bill Terry. I have him as just below the median HOMer. To me he is very comfortable (though it still makes him just #18 among 1B). Is it the shortness of the career that others don't like? I guess, contra Jaack, Terry's placement does tend to surprise me, as I don't think it would be hard to argue placing him higher than six of the guys ahead of him (since I did that myself, lol).

Terry has a bit of a Bob Johnson problem where he has neither a huge peak nor a ton of total career value. I tend to really like guys in that class, at least relative to the rest of the electorate, so it doesn't shock me that I'm higher on him than most.

I am a little bit surprised at Clark finishing ahead of Terry, but it was a lot closer between them than in the last positional rankings.
In the last rankings, Clark finished ahead of Hernandez, Suttles, and Sisler, so his standing slipped quite a bit.

This ranking reaffirms the last positional ranking in putting Sisler ahead of Terry, reversing the historical electorate on that.
Terry remains in next to last place, ahead only of Jake Beckley, but he beat Beckley more handily on points than he did last time.

Beckley's hold on the first basement seems very solid at present.