A year ago, a change of heart among Baseball Hall of Fame voters gave a boost to the drug-tarnished candidacies of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, although it did not win them induction, or even get them that close.

Now, with a little more than one-third of the ballots for the class of 2018 already made public, Bonds and Clemens do not appear to be picking up any new converts from established voters, which strongly suggests they will fall substantially short of induction this time as well.

However, it also appears that they continue to make strides through the evolution of the Hall of Fame electorate, with newly eligible voters inclined to back their candidacies. And as those ballots are being cast, other voters, many of them older and less inclined to support Bonds and Clemens, are losing their voting eligibility and coming off the rolls.

Whether this gradual evolution will eventually pull Bonds and Clemens close to the 75 percent of the vote needed for induction remains to be seen. But they do not have much time, because they are already in their sixth year of a maximum of 10 years of eligibility.