The Baseball Hall of Fame announced Wednesday that Andre Dawson will be the newest member of the Hall of Fame. Bert Blyleven and Robert Alomar narrowly missed being elected as well. The fact that Alomar did not make the HOF was surprising but that did not stand out the most when looking at the voting results.

I noticed that David Segui, the known steroid user, who bounced around his entire career and was nothing more than a slightly above-average first baseman, received one vote. Who in their right mind would have voted for this guy? So then I got to thinking: What other marginal players have received votes over the years? Thanks to baseball-reference.com (one of my favorite sites) I looked through the final hall of fame ballot over the past ten years and found quite a few of these people.

Jay Bell, 2009 Ballot
Jay Bell received TWO votes for the hall of fame in the 2009 ballot. Bell, a middle infielder, played 18 seasons in the majors for five different teams. He was a career .265 hitter, made the all-star team twice and won a gold glove in 1993. In 1991, he finished 12th in the MVP voting, after hitting .270 with 16 HR’s, 67 RBI’s and 96 runs scored. In 1999 he put together his best year hitting 38 home runs and 112 RBI’s, finishing 13th in the MVP voting. A pretty decent career but not worthy of hall of fame discussion.

Shawon Dunston, 2008 Ballot
Dunston, who spent most of his 18-year career with the Cubs in the 80’s and 90’s received one vote in the 2008 ballot. Dunston was a career .258 hitter with a .296 OBP, who smacked 150 HRs. Granted he was a shortstop for most of his career, but it’s still not very good.

His career OPS+ was 89. For the non-sabermetric people, an OPS+ of 100 would mean he was average. So basically, Dunston was a below average hitter but somehow received a vote for the hall of fame. Maybe his Mom is a baseball writer.

Walt Weiss, 2006 Ballot
Weiss was a shortstop, who played with the A’s, Marlins, Rockies and Braves. He won the Rookie of the Year award in 1988 after hitting .250 with a .312 OBP and .321 slugging (must have been a bad year for rookies). He never hit higher than .282 in his career and belted 25 career home runs in 4,686 at-bats.

Jim Abbott, 2005 Ballot
Abbott had a career record of 87-108 and an ERA of 4.25 but managed to receive 13 votes! He finished third in the Cy Young voting in 1991 with the Angels and pitched a no-hitter with the Yankees. Now, on the other hand, he did only have one hand, which is pretty remarkable and that was probably the reason he garnered so many votes.

Mark Davis, 2003 Ballot
Davis received one vote in the 2003 ballot and finished his 15-year career with a record of 51-84, an ERA of 4.17 and 96 saves. His career WHIP was 1.4 and he had an ERA+ of 89.

He did win the Cy Young Award in 1989 with the Padres when he saved 44 games and had a 1.85 ERA with 92 strikeouts in 92.2 innings pitched. He somehow beat out Mike Scott that season, who finished 20-10 with a 3.10 ERA and 229 innings pitched.

Jim Deshaies, 2001 Ballot
Deshaies pitched for six different teams in his 12-year career. His career numbers are 84-95 with an ERA of 4.14 and a WHIP of 1.32. He did manage to finish seventh in the Rookie of the Year balloting in 1986 though! His best season, by far, was in 1989 when he went 15-10 with a 2.91 ERA for the Houston Astros.

On baseball-reference.com there is a stat called Hall of Fame Monitor (HOFm) which rates the likelihood of a player being elected to the Hall of Fame. Anything over 100 mean the person is likely to be elected. The lower it gets, the worse the person’s chances are. Deshaies HOFm was 6, which was the lowest I could find during the ten-year period.