As expected, none of the five candidates on this year's Hall of Fame ballot got enough votes to enter the Hall, although two- starting pitcher Art McMartin and right fielder Josh Ackland- did get enough votes to stay on the ballot for next year.
For McMartin, who mostly pitched for the Boston Berserkers in the late '60's and early '70's and led the league in wins in 1968 (19) and was a 3-time All-Star, it was his second ballot but while he stays on the ballot he got nearly the exact same number of votes this year as last year (actually he slipped from 6.0% of ballots to 5.9%) and his chances of ever actually making it are nearly non-existent.
Ackland led the league in home runs twice, first with San Antonio in 1965 and then with El Paso in 1968 and was a 5-time All-Star. Still, given that he was already 31 when the WPK was formed, he just didn't have enough time to put together a credible Hall of Fame career and just barely survived his first ballot.
The biggest what-if story on this ballot though is that of Frank Hernandez, who was the SJL MVP in the WPK inaugural season of 1965 and was one of the most dominant power hitters in the league for the first four years of its existence. But after that the big, slow first baseman's game just sort of fell apart. He too was 31 when the league started and it is not too hard to imagine that if the league had started about ten years earlier we would be talking about the Hall of Famer Frank Hernandez. But alas, it was not to be.
Mike Sayers was a fine pitcher, mostly for the Detroit Falcons and Baltimore Lords, and although he was a 5-time All-Star he really didn't have any reasonable expectation of being enshrined in Dubuque.
And finally, David Brown was an unheralded relief pitcher for four different teams during his career, including four really excellent seasons with the Denver Brewers- the best seasons of his career- but a Hall of Famer he was not and having received no votes any remote hopes he might have harbored (and I'm sure he harbored none) are now fully dashed.
