Reviewing the 2026 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 2: The More Complicated Half (and the New Rule That Caused It)

Earlier this week, I began breaking down the 2026 Veterans Committee’s Hall of Fame ballot. I started with the four cases that I think needed the least context or rules-gaming, specifically Jeff Kent, Gary Sheffield, Carlos Delgado, and Fernando Valenzuela (plus, there’s a general refresher on voting rules, too). If you missed it, take a minute to check it out now! Especially since the election itself is coming up soon (specifically, on December 7th).

The Contemporary Baseball Era player ballot features eight candidates for consideration in the Hall of Fame Class of 2026. Results will be announced at 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 7: ow.ly/Agwx50XlQRH

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— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (@baseballhall.org) November 3, 2025 at 8:05 AM

That leaves us with the other four names to cover today: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy. This part gets frustrating to write about, and I think that is in large part because it’s the worst kind of Hall of Fame discussion: one where the real focus of the talk isn’t the players up for induction, but instead about the Hall itself and its various rules and politics. It’s like when the umpires become the focus of a game, it’s a sign that something is not going right. 

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(Stats are from Baseball-Refernce unless otherwise noted.)

In fact, we can probably knock out the player discussion in much less time than I spent on the other four, in large part because all of them have been the subject of Hall discussions for ages now (despite little actual movement in the central cases). Mattingly and Murphy have been up for election since even before I started writing about this, spending fifteen years on the annual BBWAA ballot (beginning in 2001 and 1999, respectively), aging off of that, and then making it to three additional (non-annual) Veterans Committee ballots prior to this year. 

Reviewing the 2026 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 1: The Less Complicated Half

It is once again the time of the baseball calendar where Hall of Fame talk takes over! The Baseball Writers Association of America has released their 2026 Ballot (and some writers have already even released their official votes for it), while the Veterans Committee’s Contemporary Baseball Era panel will be announcing the results of their election on December 7th.

The Contemporary Baseball Era player ballot features eight candidates for consideration in the Hall of Fame Class of 2026. Results will be announced at 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 7: ow.ly/Agwx50XlQRH

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— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (@baseballhall.org) November 3, 2025 at 8:05 AM

In case the embedded link has stopped working, this year’s slate of candidates consists of eight names: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela. And for further housekeeping, the panel consists of sixteen voters, who will meet in-person at the Winter Meetings to discuss their options before casting their vote. Candidates need twelve votes for induction, and while I couldn’t find anything confirming it would still be the case this year, in recent years each voter has been limited to three choices.

There’s actually another big rule change in this year’s VC process, but I want to hold off on discussing it for now. Once again, my write-up got kind of long, so I decided to split it up into two parts for posting. And as it turned out, the easiest splitting point wound up being “the half of the ballot that will be deeply affected by this rule, but doesn’t really need their individual cases discussed” and “the half of the ballot that could stand to have their cases discussed a little more, but which probably isn’t going to be affected by the new rule all that much”. The former is a little more complicated, so we’ll be focusing today on the latter to ease us in.

(Stats are from Baseball-Refernce and Fangraphs unless otherwise noted.)

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And within that latter half, let’s start with the candidate that I think is the most straightforward one to cover: I believe that Jeff Kent is the most likely Veterans Committee inductee this voting cycle, and probably the only one I would place above 50/50 odds. This is actually something that I’ve been saying at least since he fell off the BBWAA ballot back in 2023 too (if not earlier). His reasoning reminds me of Fred McGriff’s in a lot of ways too, and that was another case where I predicted a Vet Ballot debut would sail in; in the end, the voters wound up doing exactly what I predicted, electing him unanimously on his first go-around in the process.

2025 World Series Trivia Wrap-Up + Best Players Without a World Series

With the final game of the 2025 Season in the books, I can follow up on my initial column with another trivia tradition here at Hot Corner Harbor: the Annual Best Active Players Without a World Series Sporcle Quiz! I’ll include a little more writing here before we get to the break (to give the spoilers within some breathing room), but I’ll also add that if you’d like more World Series fun facts, you can take a walk down memory lane through a full Sporcle playlist collecting past years’ editions of this quiz (I think it’s actually kind of neat to watch the list of names change slowly over time), as well as an entire second playlist of various other playoff quizzes that I’ve made.

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