Beltré, Mauer eligible for Baseball Hall of Fame next year

Scott Rolen is headed to the Hall of Fame. Joe Mauer, Chase Utley, David Wright, José Bautista and Matt Holliday are also expected to make their debuts on the ballot next year. “Helton’s going to be pulling something like three-quarters of the vote, and Beltré might be the first guy to threaten a hundred percent since Jeter and Mariano, and then there’s certainly going to be a lot of Mauer and Utley support, I’d think,” said Ryan Thibodaux, who runs the online Hall of Fame ballot tracker that allows fans to follow the voting process as it unfolds each year. I think that’s going to be really interesting to watch next year.” DECENT START Next year “I made a bit of a joke in our Slack of our tracker team, that we should have, this entire time, been tracking who either said explicitly or sort of hinted that they were giving like a one-year punishment,” Thibodaux said. “I can only kind of anecdotally say that I think there are a significant number of voters who are planning to vote for him next year who didn’t vote for him this year.” Bonds and Clemens, dogged by performance-enhancing drug accusations, seemed to hit a ceiling in the vote after a while.