[molenick]

There are a lot of reasons why the voting percentages don't always reflect the greatness of the player. In 1936, players were competing with everyone who played in the 20th century (there was a separate vote for 19th century players). I don't even think there was a ballot...you just wrote-in 10 players and it seems like there were different rules in effect (or maybe no rules at all). There was no five-year rule (Ruth got in) and active players could be voted for (Hornsby, Gehrig, Grove, Foxx, and others got votes). I doubt there was even a ballot because Young got votes in both the 19th century and 20th century (I assume because people weren't sure where to vote for him). The theory is that this is what kept him out of the first class...if he was on one ballot or the other he probably would have gotten in.

If you look at the list of all the great players with votes, it's a pretty good result that five people were named on over 75% of the ballots (even if, in retrospect, these choices are obvious to us). Especially because the voters couldn't just sort by WAR and pick the top 10 players.

As someone mentioned, for many years after that, there was a large backlog of great players who weren't in yet, so the competition was much tougher in terms of getting the 75% needed.

So, it is true that Walter Johnson got 83.6% of the vote on the first ballot competing with all the 20th century greats who had played up to that point, and that is less than the 86% Raines got on on his tenth ballot competing with Jeff Bagwell, Ivan Rodriguez, Trevor Hoffman, etc. and the 85.9% Gossage got on his ninth ballot competing with Jim Rice, Andre Dawson, Bert Blyleven, etc.

I think there is a lot to question in the HOF voting but at least these results seem okay to me....Johnson as one of the the five greatest players in baseball through 1936 and Raines and Gossage as tenth and ninth ballot HOFers.

I think there used to be some voters who simply did not vote for a player on his first ballot out of some "principal". I think that's what kept Williams, Musial, Mays, Aaron, etc. from being unanimous (or from getting higher percentages). I think now that we know pretty much who everyone voted for, that "principal" no longer exists because of the "public shaming" aspect someone mentioned.

Rivera is the only unanimous player. That doesn't mean voters thought he was better than every previous player ever elected. It just means every voter thought he was a HOFer, which seems like a reasonable opinion. They were not voting for him compared to everyone else who ever played...it was just yes or no as to whether he belonged. No one was thinking, I won't vote for him to stop him from having a higher percentage than Babe Ruth.

I think like all the other stats in baseball from batting average to ERA to complete games, the HOF percentages need to be taken in the context of when the voting occurred...they certainly cannot be interpreted as a reflection of the comparative greatness of a player.