Likely no one expected Andruw Jones to be voted into the Hall of Fame. But the Curaçao Kid’s numbers improved compared to last year. For a long time it looked like the improvement would be close to 20% but eventually the improvement stuck on 14.5 %.
Where Jones got 19.4% of the votes last year, those numbers improved to 33.9% this year.
Even though he is nowhere near a spot in the HOF yet, this percentage gives him the right to be on next year’s ballot again.
If he will keep improving like he did in the past four votes, he may get into the HOF in about 3-5 years. In 2018, his first year of eligibility, the Jones barely made the five percent to stay on the ballot. In 2019 he already got more votes as the percentage rose to 7.3% of the votes. In 2020, the percentage jumped to 19.4% which means that he got 78 votes.
Feared for his power, Jones’ career batting average wasn’t that great. In seventeen seasons, his batting average only topped .300 once. But he had some pop in his bat for sure. Even in his last MLB season, in which his average dropped below .200, he still managed to hit fourteen home runs.
In a time in which the focus is on batting, one may think that Jones may have a hard time staying on the ballot. He was one of the best defensive outfielders. As a matter of fact, Jones is ranked No. 1 all-time among outfielders and No. 2 all-time among all positions behind Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson as he was a five-time All-Star, won 10 straight Gold Gloves from 1998 to 2007.
In seventeen years in the Majors, Jones played for the Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox, and the New York Yankees. After his MLB career, Jones played two more seasons in the NPB for the Rakuten Golden Eagles where he was a teammate with Kevin Youkilis. Jones helped the Golden Eagles to win their sole NPB championship in 2013.
In 1996, the year he broke into the Majors, he worked his way up through A Advanced, AA and AAA within just one season before he was called up and became the youngest player to hit a home run in the World Series.
None of the eligible players were voted into the 2021 Hall of Fame. The two former players that were regarded the biggest candidates, Curt Schilling and Barry Bonds, did not make the needed 75% of the votes. Schilling got stuck at 71.1%, while Bonds did not reap more that 61.8% of the votes. As a result, the 2021 class will be the 2020 edition only as that class did not get its induction last year due to the corona pandemic.
Dutch Baseball Hangout 
In all honesty, I would be surprised if he gets voted in eventually, but let’s hope he makes it. The writers, for some reason, don’t seem to value defensive qualities that much.
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