Gone without a trace: 10 of the best players never to get a single Hall of Fame vote

They were all terrific players at one time or another, but these 10 men all disappeared from Hall of Fame ballots without a single defender when their time came.

Last week, I highlighted a selection of 10 popular players of recent vintage who fell off the Hall of Fame ballot after their first year of eligibility because they failed to receive the minimum 5% of the vote. The appearance of seven-time Gold Glove winner Devon White—the only one I profiled who failed to receive a single vote—spurred me to dig even deeper through modern voting history. In doing so, I noticed something that had never caught my attention in all of my years of research: Until 1978, the names of players who didn't receive a vote weren't even reported, presumably so as not to embarrass anyone. It was only a year later that the first iteration of the "Five Percent Rule" was even put into place.

What follows here is another batch of 10 very good-to-great players who couldn't sustain their greatness long enough to assemble strong enough Hall of Fame cases to avoid being completely shut out by the voters. With more than 200 such players to choose from, it's far from a comprehensive list, but it should help one appreciate just how hard it is even to make a dent in the Hall of Fame voting, let alone get to the 75% needed for election. Players are presented alphabetically, and JAWS wasn’t my sole consideration, as I wanted to highlight things such as postseason heroics, great individual seasons and other slices of baseball history.