Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 1964

Elections to the Baseball Hall of Fame for 1964 followed the system introduced for even-number years in 1962. The Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) voted by mail to select from recent major league players with provision for a second, "runoff" election in case of no winner. The runoff was necessary this year, with Luke Appling the winner. Meanwhile the Veterans Committee was meeting annually to consider executives, managers, umpires, and earlier major league players. It selected six people: Red Faber, Burleigh Grimes, Miller Huggins, Tim Keefe, Heinie Manush, and John Montgomery Ward.

Further, the eligibility of retired players was reduced from having retired thirty years prior to election to twenty.

BBWAA election

The BBWAA was authorized to elect players active in 1944 or later, but not after 1958. All 10-year members of the BBWAA were eligible to vote.

Voters were instructed to cast votes for up to 10 candidates; any candidate receiving votes on at least 75% of the ballots would be honored with induction to the Hall. A total of 58 players received votes; 201 ballots were cast, with 151 votes required for election. A total of 1,632 individual votes were cast, an average of 8.12 per ballot.

No one reached the threshold so there was a runoff election featuring the 30 leading candidates. There would be one winner regardless of numerical support on the second ballot; in fact, winner Luke Appling tallied 189 of 201 votes or 94%. A total of 939 individual votes were cast in the run-off, an average of 4.67 per ballot.

Candidates who were eligible for the first time are indicated here with a †. Candidates who have since been elected in subsequent elections are indicated in italics. (Al Lopez, line seven, is in the Hall of Fame, too, as a manager.)

Chuck Klein, Lloyd Waner, Pepper Martin, Leo Durocher, and Lon Warneke were on the ballot for the final time.

The results show that voters in the second election concentrated their support on the four leaders. In the previous BBWAA election (1962), Luke Appling received 30%, while Red Ruffing received 45%. On Jan. 27, 1962, soon after the election results had been announced, recently elected Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller wrote in an article for the Saturday Evening Post that, "If I were voting, the first two names on my list would be Ruffing and Luke Appling." In the next election, Ruffing's vote total jumped by 112 (from 72 to 141), while Appling's jumped 94 votes (from 48 to 142). While many players' vote totals jumped between 1962 and 1964 (many popular candidates, including Sam Rice who had finished third and Eppa Rixey who had finished fifth, became ineligible, as the BBWAA's window of players shrunk from those who had been retired for at most 30 years to those who had been retired for at most 20 years), Ruffing's and Appling's jumps were most significant.

External links

• 1964 Election at www.baseballhalloffame.org
• 1964 Runoff Election at www.baseballhalloffame.org