Inspired by the previous post on the 2009 Hall of Fame voting compared to the players' career WAR, I was curious how things looked from previous years.

I grabbed all of the BBWAA ballot results [through 2008] for players who debuted 1955 or later and had atleast 3000PA in their career. 

Just some quick factoids:

• Hal Lanier (-5.3 WAR), Jesus Alou (-1.6) and Sonny Jackson (-0.5) are the worst players that made it onto a Hall of Fame ballot.  It has to be an impressive feat to manage to be a below replacement level player for ten or more years and get your name on to the Hall Of Fame Ballot.
• Perhaps even more impressive...?  Bobby Richardson (5.8) had enough support to get himself onto THREE ballots.  The next lowest that were on multiple ballots are Manny Mota (2 ballots, 15.4 WAR), Bill Virdon (2, 17.4) and Leo Cardenas (2, 23.7)

I dropped all of the data into a scatter plot and with a linear trendline and it had a .247 R2.  I was thinking that voters HAVE to be getting better and better over time; Breaking it (roughly) into fifths:

• 1972-1984, R2 .285
• 1985-1990, .226
• 1991-1995, .139
• 1996-2002, .191
• 2003-2008, .413

Not entirely sure why they would have initially gotten worse and worse at voting, but definately looks like the age of sabermetrics has changed things over the last dozen years or so.

The players inducted on their first ballot (21) had a median career value of 72.7 WAR; the [elidgible] players not inducted on their first ballot were all below that.  That is a good sign atleast. 

Here is my data if anyone cares to look at anything else with it:

www.buttonsarenttoys.net/ESPN/attachments/WAR.xls