Barring a shocking change of heart from MLB and the Players Association, the only real Giants-related news this month will come Jan. 25 when Hall of Fame voting results are announced. For the 10th consecutive year, it's not shaping up to be a positive day for Barry Bonds.
Bonds leads a ballot heavy on players with Giants ties, and he currently has by far the most known votes of any former Giant. But a deeper look inside the numbers -- presented, as always, by Ryan Thibodaux's essential Hall of Fame tracker -- shows that Bonds isn't getting nearly the support he'll need.
Of the 140 public ballots, Bonds has been listed 80.4 percent of the time. You need 75 percent for enshrinement, but Bonds will likely need to be well above that number to survive the annual drop once the rest of the ballots are revealed. Bonds finished at 61.8 percent of the vote last year, dropping nearly 12 percent from where he was tracking on ballots released before the Hall of Fame's announcement. Once again, he is doing well with the voters who have chosen to announce their ballots, but is expected to get hammered by the rest of the voters, many of whom have anonymously kept him off for years.
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While 80.4 percent looks good, Bonds has picked up just three votes thus far from voters who left him off in 2021. He also lost one voter, so he's gained just two votes from last year, when he finished 53 short of enshrinement (full disclosure: I'm a voter for the first time and voted for Bonds, so there's one more vote in his favor).
Bonds currently ranks second to David Ortiz (83.8 percent), who is on the ballot for the first time. The best hope for Bonds in his final year on the ballot was to get a massive bump from voters who couldn't differentiate him from Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez, two others who put up Hall of Fame numbers but have PED connections, but that doesn't appear to be happening.
The path doesn't look any better for other former Giants. Jeff Kent is at just 29.1 percent and has already dropped seven votes from returning voters, although that's likely because of how crowded the ballot is. He should get most or all of them back next year.
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San Francisco Giants
Tim Lincecum has just three votes thus far and is running at two percent, well below the five percent necessary to make it to a second year on the ballot. Tim Hudson just cleared that bar last year but currently has just four votes.
Jake Peavy does not have any votes so far and A.J. Pierzynski has one. Joe Nathan, once traded for Pierzynski, has four votes but doesn't look likely to see a second ballot. Jimmy Rollins, who was once in Giants camp, is at 11.5 percent and looks like he'll get more chances.
The biggest drop in early voting has come for Omar Vizquel, who is at 9.5 percent but has already lost 40 votes from last year. The Giants shortstop for four seasons, Vizquel has been accused of domestic abuse and sexual harassment over the last couple of years.