More than a fortnight has passed since Barry Larkin was announced as the BBWAA's sole (regular-ballot) choice to be inducted into the hallowed halls of Cooperstown in July, but the memories of this year's version of the annual Hall of Fame debate firestorm remain.

Potential dopers aside, the most controversial candidate on this year's ballot was Jack Morris. In general, he had the support of writers who view the game more traditionally, while sabermetrically inclined analysts seemed to think he fell short. But beyond the tired arguments about whether a great Game 7 is more important than an underwhelming ERA+, there was another issue in play: Many of Morris' supporters cited his alleged intangible aura of greatness that could be understood only by having seen him pitch in a big game. As Jon Heyman so stridently put it:

i love the folks who never saw jack morris pitch who are certain he isnt hall of famer bec their stat guru said so

I bring this up not to malign Heyman but because it betrays a mistaken assumption about the balloting process: that writers' own observations of players were expected to be primary factors in their votes.

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There are no special qualifications voters in democratic societies need to go to the polls except for citizenship, and all a fan needs to cast his or her vote for the All-Star Game is internet access or a ticket to the ballpark. But not just anyone can decide who deserves to be immortalized in the hallowed halls of Cooperstown—only those who have been part of the selective Baseball Writers Association of America for 10 years are issued ballots. Voting for the Hall of Fame isn't a right, it's a privilege.

Given that suffrage is limited to writers with demonstrated expertise in (or at least experience) covering the game, it stands to reason that each participant would be responsible enough to think through his or her choices and vote only based on his or her rational convictions. Their opinions may be unpopular, but as some of the most knowledgeable baseball people on the planet they should at least be capable of defending their choices.

In the run-up to the announcement of the results, at least two people undertook the task of compiling exit polls based on publicly released ballots. These counts may be intended to estimate how the vote will turn out ahead of schedule, but they also make it possible to compare public ballots with private ones. In doing so, we find some evidence of a disturbing trend: those who revealed or explained their picks voted differently—and, I would say, better—than those who maintained their anonymity.

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On Monday, the Baseball Writers Association of America will release the results of its 2012 Hall of Fame vote. Given the history of BBWAA Cooperstown voting (both recently and not so recently) it's safe to say that the voters' decisions will be met with some frustration.

Rather than wait to see what the BBWAA does, we here at Beyond the Box Score decided to take matters into our own hands. Twelve members of our "BtBWAA" held a mock vote to see who would get into our version of Cooperstown.

As with the real vote, each writer was allowed up to 10 picks per ballot. A player must be named on 75 percent of ballots (in this case meaning nine votes) in order to be elected to the Hall of Fame. Any candidate who gets less than five percent support (in this case, anyone who was named on even one ballot would clear that) would be dropped for the 2013 vote.

Without further ado, here are our picks for who should join Ron Santo's (our Veterans Committee election winner) widow in Cooperstown in July:

Full results—in both text and graphic form—after the jump.

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On Monday, the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee (whose official name, according to Wikipedia, is actually 15 words long) will announce that up to five of the 10 players and executives on the Veterans Committee ballot will be inducted into Cooperstown in July. Any candidate who gets the support of at least 12 of the 16 committee members (i.e., 75 percent—just like the main BBWAA balloting) will be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

Rather than wait for the results to be announced, we here at Beyond the Box Score decided to take matters into our own hands and held a mock vote, just as we did for the BBWAA's end-of-season awards. Our BtBWAA Veterans Committee was just like the real one, but instead of Hank Aaron and Brooks Robinson we have a bunch of nerds glued to our calculator screens in our moms' basements.

Eleven BtBWAA writers cast ballots for our election, so the magic number was nine votes, or 82 percent. Check the results after the jump.

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With Tuesday's announcement that Ryan Braun had been named the NL MVP came the end of the 2011 BBWAA awards revelations. All the major hardware has now been handed out, leaving us with nothing left to do but complain.

Here at Beyond the Box Score, the BtBWAA held our own awards votes for the Rookies of the Year, Cy Youngs, and MVPs. Judging by the winners (and assuming that our voters are infallible), the BBWAA hit just 2-for-6 in their major player awards: we agreed on Justin Verlander for AL Cy Young and Craig Kimbrel for NL Rookie of the Year, but we would have allocated the other trophies very differently.

But to look only at the winners is too simplistic. The first-place finishers are all that really matter, I suppose, but there's a big difference between the rightful winner finishing second and him finishing, say, seventh or eighth.

In order to assess how much we and the BBWAA agreed across so many awards with different amounts of voters and scoring systems, I broke down each group's results in every category by easy-to-compare award shares. Here's how the results came out:

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Ever since slugging percentage ascended to the mainstream consciousness, some form of bases accumulated as a rate statistic has become a (if not the) primary means by which we measure power. Slugging percentage was a great start, but because a player who gets four singles is seen as just as powerful as a guy who hits one home run in the same number of at-bats, it fails to differentiate between players whose total base totals are high (or low) based on power or those that are inflated (or deflated) by contact skill.

The development of isolated power (slugging percentage minus batting average—i.e., extra bases per at-bat) was a step in the right direction in the quest to accurately measure raw power. ISO would show that our hypothetical four-singles hitter was not, in fact, as powerful as the batter who hit a home run. But ISO has a bias towards contact hitters too: the more hits a batter gets, the more extra-base hits he'll get:

Let’s take two hypothetical players: Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne. Stark hits .350 with a .550 SLG. Wayne hits .200 with a .400 SLG. Both weigh in at a .200 ISO, suggesting their raw power is roughly equal.

But that’s not right. If Wayne somehow managed to bring his average up 150 points, would all the extra hits be singles?

My favorite example of this is the case of Carl Crawford and B.J. Upton in 2010. I don't think it's controversial to say that Upton has more raw power than Crawford, but ISO rated them as essentially equal (Crawford's was .188, Upton's was .187), and they had just about the same numbers of extra-base hits (Crawford: 62, Upton: 60). The reason: Crawford got 57 more hits and hit 70 points higher than Upton did. Tautologic as it may sound, he wouldn't have equaled Upton in extra-base hits had he not gotten so many hits. Thus, ISO does not really isolate power, but is largely dependent on contact ability, speed, and (in some cases) BABIP luck.

Enter Power Factor:

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We've named our Cy Youngs. We've covered the Rookies of the Year. For good measure, we even picked an Executive of the Year. Today, the BtBWAA awards results show finally comes to an end.

Earlier this week, we named Jose Bautista our AL Most Valuable Player. Today, we move to the NL MVP voting.

As with the real vote, ballots were scored using a 14-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 system. First-place votes are in parentheses.

Full results after the jump.

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We've already covered the MLB Executive of the Year, the Rookies of the Year, and the Cy Youngs, meaning there's only one set of BtBWAA awards left: the Most Valuable Players.

The AL MVP race is particularly interesting this year because there are legitimate arguments for many different types of players. In addition to the usual tension between sabermetric definitions of "valuable" and those based more in traditional back-of-the-baseball-card stats and intangibles, the top candidates are a group of diverse players who have different strengths and primary sources of value. As a result, this was one of the BtBWAA's closest votes this year.

Without further ado, here are the results of our AL MVP vote. As with the real vote, ballots were scored using a 14-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 system. First-place votes are in parentheses.

Full results after the jump.

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