Doc's MLB Hall of Fame ballot. Have at him.

The MLB Hall of Fame Class of 2018 will be announced Wednesday at 6 on the MLB Network, which can mean only one thing in this small corner of the sports typing world:

Time for youse to tell me how stupid I am. How could you? How could you not? Oh, the outrage.

Time for the baseball elitists to want me banned from voting. This guy is why media shouldn’t vote for the Hall! Time for weirdos with lots of time to look back at my prior voting to check for inconsistencies. (You’ll find ‘em!)

Before I reveal my ballot and open myself to stoning in the village square, lemme give you a few of my Hard and Fasts that you can also see as stupid:

I do not/have not/will not vote for Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and Manny. Bonds and Clemens are gaining on the 75 percent required for admission. They won’t make it this year, but at around 65 percent, they have four more cracks at it. Their chances are good, which stinks.

Baseball considers its stats sacrosanct. Those guys messed with the stats. As did McGwire before them. They cheated. How do I know? I believe what has been written, most notably about Bonds. I have eyeballs and common sense. At age 40, Clemens had an ERA of 3.91. At age 42, he had an ERA of 1.87, best in the NL. This is not a court of law. It is a court of public opinion. I have one way and one way only to protest what they did. I’m gonna use it.

I have a very hard time voting for closers, because the save rule is far too generous. Entering a game to start the 9th inning with a 3-run lead and no one on base is not my idea of a tough gig. Tighten the requirements and I’ll change my mind.

I take what I guess could be seen as a curmudgeonly view on voting. I don’t vote for a lot of players. You can vote for as many as 10. Lots of people do. To me, that cheapens the honor. This is not the Hall of Very Good. I’ve never voted for Larry Walker, for example. (Neither have a majority of the voters. Walker’s at 40 percent in his 8th year on the ballot.) Very, very good player. Not great.

I will not vote for Edgar Martinez because he was great at half the game.

I will not vote for Curt Schilling because he made his fame in the postseason. Not every deserving HOFer gets to the postseason. To keep the playing field level, I try not to take October into consideration. Schilling won 216 games in 20 years. His 162-game average record was 15-10. That’s a HOFer? Jack Morris won 254 in 18 seasons and needed the Modern Era committee to tap him last November.

Doc, you’re awful. No one judges a pitcher anymore by how many games he wins.

Eh. I do. If you’re winning a lot as a starting pitcher, you’re pitching well a lot of the time. That means you’re keeping your team in games most of the time. Wins aren’t the bottom line. They’re the only line.

Who’d I vote for this time? Chipper Jones, Jim Thome and Vlad Guerrero. Sharpen your pitchforks, experts.

MEANWHILE, Ryan Thibodaux has it nailed. He tracks the voting. Here’s where we are down the stretch:

With 202 ballots revealed/~47.6% of the vote known: Chipper - 98.5% Vlad - 95% Thome - 93% Edgar 79.7% Hoffman - 77.2% ----- Mussina - 71% Schilling - 65% BB/RC - 64% Walker - 41% Vizquel - 30% Manny - 24% McGriff - 18% Rolen - 12% Andruw - 6.4%

If that holds, your Class of 2018 is Chipper Jones, Vlad Guerrero, Jim Thome, Edgar Martinez and Trevor Hoffman.

Now, then. . .

BECAUSE I KNOW YOU WANT IT. . . J. Lunardi’s latest Bracketology has UC a #4 in Boise, playing South Dakota State. Xavier’s a 2 in Nashville, playing Fla. Gulf Coast.

XAVIER IS NO. 8 AND UC IS NO. 9, making us the de facto capital of the quasi-am basketball universe. So here’s a question:

Which team has bigger opportunity for improvement between now and Selex Sunday?

I vote for UC. The Bearcats have further to go on offense than XU. Their defense is typically beastly, maybe even a little better than normal. The offense is a work in progress. I’d like to see from Kyle Washington the every-night consistency of Gary Clark. I’d like to see more growth from the bench. I’d like to see Jacob Evans take over a big game. I’d like to see the whole team shoot better than 69 percent from the line.

It’s like an old house: The bones are good, the foundation solid. Just a little updating is required. You have to score to win in March.

Xavier, meanwhile, has looked like midseason for a couple months. I’d like to see more minutes for Kerem Kanter. What he lacks defensively he more than makes up for offensively. He’s a difficult matchup and a very heady player.

He’s 8th on the team in minutes played, just under 16 a game.

In the four-game stretch before Saturday at Seton Hall, Kanter averaged 22 minutes and 18 points on a combined 30-of-45 shooting. At Seton Hall, he played nine minutes and didn’t score.

IN OTHER UPLIFTING BENGALS-RELATED, SORT OF, NEWS. . . The Titans fired coach Mike Mularkey after 9-7 and a playoff W. The Steelers fired OC Todd Haley after four Top-10 offenses (and, yeah, a dropoff the last two years). The Browns have scooped up Haley.

WHADDAYA THINK ABOUT THIS? My pal BengalBoy proposed this wager. I took it immediately:

We bet $20 on Tiger Woods’ chances to win a major in 2018. B-Boy said he would. I said monkeys would fly outta my nose first. Who wins?

Tiger’s Return is great for golf. Who doesn’t want to see him strolling the grounds of Augusta? It’s also the most overhyped sports story of 2018. Let’s see how his back and his swing hold up on Sunday afternoons. I’d love to be wrong. It’d be worth the $20.

BOOKED AN AIR BNB ON A FARM in Aiken, SC for the Masters. For the incredible rate of $55 a night. Meanwhile, in Augusta, the Motel 6 or its equivalent will set you back $300 or more. Which prompts today’s. . .

ESSENTIAL QUESTION: Do you stay at Airbnbs? Your reaction?

Best for me: Last spring training, my wife and I stayed on a ranch at the base of the Estrella Mountains, 10 minutes from Goodyear Ballpark. Beautiful home, great food, nice hosts, tranquil setting, reasonable rate of something like $119 a night. Scott Schebler is staying there all February.

Worst: A tiny room near The Presidio in SF. $400 a night and when the TV didn’t work and I called the host, who said I needed to be there “sometime in the afternoon’’ when the repair guy showed up. In SF two nights, gonna spend an afternoon waiting on a repairman. Right.

Anyway, my overall experience w/Air bnb has been outstanding. Economical, quirky, fun. You? Where have you gone that Air BnB has added to the experience?

RUFUS ALERT. . . With a few notable exceptions (such as Vikings, which has had an epic season) TV hasn’t done it for me lately, forcing a switch to movies. Seen two in the last 2 nights: The Witch, and Get Out.

I had high hopes for Witch, a movie about a family exiled from a colonial town in Mass., for suspected witchcraft. But the English accents and olde world-isms (thee, thou etc.) were almost unintelligible. And it wasn’t scary enough. I give it half a pinky-finger up.

Get Out had its moments, but it wasn’t as good as it should have been. A weird story about a black guy visiting the home of his white girlfriend’s parents goes off the rails in the final 20 minutes or so. Lots of movies do this. Writers can’t think of a smart way to end a creepy drama, so they just start whacking everyone. I give it half a thumb-up, and an index finger.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Escaping the post-Lucy funk is almost impossible, but if anything will help, it’s high-energy tunes. If you’ve got a mere 12 minutes, 21 seconds to spare. . . vintage Dickey with, I believe Warren Haynes on slide.

‘Cause there’s a man down there/

Might be yo’ man, I dunno