Brad Penner/USA TODAY SportsMike Piazza may have to wait one more year for Hall of Fame election.
NEW YORK -- Mike Piazza and the rest of the Hall of Fame candidates will learn their election fates at 2 p.m. Tuesday. And it continues to look as if Piazza will narrowly miss the 75 percent threshold required for enshrinement to Cooperstown.
Roughly 32 percent of the ballots are public and have been collected by Baseball Think Factory as of Tuesday morning. Piazza appears on 76.1 percent of those ballots -- seemingly enough for election.
However, the public ballots typically overstate the percentage the candidate ultimately will garner by several points. That's partly because hardliners are less likely to make their ballots public, perhaps because they skew older and may be retired from sports writing and are less inclined to use social media and other means to disseminate their ballots.
So Piazza's third turn on the ballot may be a narrow miss, with ex-Met Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, Randy Johnson and Craig Biggio being elected.
Piazza recently told ESPNNewYork.com: "I'm a super-traditionalist. As I said many times before, the fact that Joe DiMaggio took three ballots, and Yogi Berra, I think it’s a process. And that’s part of the prestige of the Hall is the actual debates and all the discussions that go around it. I just try to step out of it a little bit and just let the experts do what they do. And I get a lot of support. So I’m optimistic. We’ll just see what happens. For me, I just let the process play itself out and just be as positive as I can be.”