Fadden: Ortiz to Hall of Fame is No Sure Thing

David Ortiz will be on the ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2022. Ortiz is viewed as one of the best designated hitters of all-time so he should get in pretty easily right? Not so fast.

Ryan Thibodeaux is known as the Hall of Fame Tracker and he surveyed 15 Hall of Fame voters and observers about what percentage of the vote they believe Ortiz would receive in his first year on the ballot. The results were surprising.

The average percentage total that the voters believed Ortiz would get was 65.8%. The results ranged from as high as 80% to as low as 50%.

People in Boston would obviously think that he is a Hall of Famer, but the reason why there’s so much uncertainty of if Ortiz will get in is due to his involvement in PEDs.

He was named as one of the players that tested positive for PEDs in 2003 in what was supposed to be an anonymous test. He hasn’t received as much criticism as Alex Rodriguez because he never actually was suspended for any period of time for it, and he hasn’t ever tested positive during official testing done by Major League Baseball.

Ortiz will be a subject of interest for the next year, and we’ll see if he will be grouped with Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens or not.

(Photo: Elise Amendola/AP)