One thing that I thought about while writing my most recent update on Hall of Fame voting was to revisit an older topic with new information. Two years ago, I looked at Scott Rolen’s Hall of Fame chances in the run-up to the 2023 announcement. That wound up being the year that he was elected, coming up just ahead of the needed 75%, but prior to that moment, things were genuinely up in the air. Projections had him at more or less coin-flip odds of making it.
The biggest uncertainty at that point was “private voters”. For those who don’t follow Hall voting: whereas some voters will announce their ballot publicly before the election (and get picked up by Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker project), and another subset will reveal their ballot in someway after the official announcement, a chunk of voters never do; a rough current breakdown of these three groups right now is something like 55%/25%/20%, respectively. The last group had traditionally been the big damper on Rolen’s chances, but in 2023, they went from voting for him at a 34% clip to over 57% of the time. That was still his worst segment overall, but that big swing was enough to get him over the line.
I theorized that Rolen hitting 60% of the vote the year before was the indication that he would see a big leap in private voter support. That call may seem odd, but it’s actually pretty normal: a big part of Hall voting really is momentum, and seeing other voters come around on a player does in fact move another chunk of voters, like a domino effect. That ended up being more or less correct, but I was also going off of a pretty small set of examples, around ten or so players who had hung around the ballot since the Tracker started and who had definitive moments of crossing over the 50% and 60% lines.
In just the two years since then, we’ve had a few more players join their ranks, so I wanted to update my findings and see how we might be able to apply them to the 2025 Ballot. Is there a type of player more likely to see this effect? Are there cases who might not see this boost?
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Friday, January 17, 2025
Thursday, January 9, 2025
Hall of Fame 2025 Early Ballot Preview: Who's Trending Towards Induction?
2025 Hall of Fame voting has technically already finished. For a BBWAA writer to have their vote counted in this year’s election, the vote had to be completed and returned by the final day of 2024. I’m not sure if that date is a “postmarked by” deadline, or if Cooperstown actually has every ballot in hand already, but the larger point is that everyone who has voted has already weighed in. We just don’t know it yet, and we won’t know the official final tally until the Hall’s announcement on January 21st.
However, the baseball writers who vote on the Hall are free to write about who they’re voting for basically at any point, and many of them have already been doing so. For over a decade now, Ryan Thibodaux and his team have been collecting and tallying those various articles and tweets into one big early vote-tracking spreadsheet (helpfully available every year at tracker.fyi!). It’s become an indispensable part of the Hall of Fame process, and one that even the voters themselves use.
Right now, for this year’s election, they’ve already tallied nearly 120 ballots, likely closing in on a third of the total votes we’ll get (we won’t know the exact final number until the Hall’s announcement, so we’re going off of past years’ totals). And we tend to see more ballot drops as we get closer to the deadline; by the time you see this article, we might even be well on the way to 40% of the vote total. One-third of the total vote of course means there’s a lot that we don’t know, but much like estimating the final vote totals, there’s a lot we can learn by looking at both the results from years’ BBWAA elections, and their early ballot tracking.
A basic overview of the Hall’s rules, for those who don’t know: players need careers of ten years or more to become eligible for the Hall, and can be added to the ballot five years after being retired for five seasons (meaning the newcomers this year retired after the 2019 season). This year’s ballot has 28 names on it (you can see this year’s names and their numbers here), and each writer can vote for up to ten names. Players need to hit 75% of the vote in an election to get inducted, and fall off after either ten years on the ballot or if they fall below 5% of the vote at any point.
However, the baseball writers who vote on the Hall are free to write about who they’re voting for basically at any point, and many of them have already been doing so. For over a decade now, Ryan Thibodaux and his team have been collecting and tallying those various articles and tweets into one big early vote-tracking spreadsheet (helpfully available every year at tracker.fyi!). It’s become an indispensable part of the Hall of Fame process, and one that even the voters themselves use.
Right now, for this year’s election, they’ve already tallied nearly 120 ballots, likely closing in on a third of the total votes we’ll get (we won’t know the exact final number until the Hall’s announcement, so we’re going off of past years’ totals). And we tend to see more ballot drops as we get closer to the deadline; by the time you see this article, we might even be well on the way to 40% of the vote total. One-third of the total vote of course means there’s a lot that we don’t know, but much like estimating the final vote totals, there’s a lot we can learn by looking at both the results from years’ BBWAA elections, and their early ballot tracking.
A basic overview of the Hall’s rules, for those who don’t know: players need careers of ten years or more to become eligible for the Hall, and can be added to the ballot five years after being retired for five seasons (meaning the newcomers this year retired after the 2019 season). This year’s ballot has 28 names on it (you can see this year’s names and their numbers here), and each writer can vote for up to ten names. Players need to hit 75% of the vote in an election to get inducted, and fall off after either ten years on the ballot or if they fall below 5% of the vote at any point.
Monday, December 9, 2024
2025 Hall of Fame Season Kicks Off as the Veterans Committee Inducts Dick Allen and Dave Parker!
The first half of 2025’s Hall of Fame election is done: on Sunday, the Veterans Committee announced that they would be sending two new members into Cooperstown’s next class, Dick Allen and Dave Parker. I’ve written quite a few pieces on this vote recently, between my two-part analysis of this year’s eight-player ballot and my breakdown of this election’s sixteen-member voting body. So before moving on to the upcoming Baseball Writers’ election (which will be announced towards the end of January; Ryan Thibodaux and his ballot tracking team is already hard at work compiling announced votes!), let’s take a minute to appreciate both the new Hall of Famers, and what we can learn from their election.
(Stats from Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs, with Veterans Committee voting results from Veterans Committee Data)
Leading the official announcement was Dick Allen. The 1972 AL MVP was one of the game’s all-time great power hitters, hitting 320 doubles, 351 homers, and a .292/.378/.534 batting line. For a long time, he was overlooked by most audiences, partly because of his relatively short career brought about by injuries (his last 100-game season came at the age of 33, just two years after that MVP win). But another big component of that was that Allen had the misfortune to play in the biggest deadball era of the last century (and I mean that literally: if you look at the league-wide OPS by season for the last 100 years, the twelve lowest marks all fall into the windows of “Dick Allen’s career” or “World War II”, with another three of Allen’s seasons in the next five lowest spots after that).
Without the longevity to stick around and build up counting numbers (or at least make it into a better offensive era), Allen got a little lost in the shuffle. But over time, modern analysis and a few devotees helped show just how good of a hitter he was: that .912 OPS translated to a 156 career OPS+, twenty-fifth on the all-time leaderboard! Even with his short career, he stacks up well with plenty of Hall inductees, like Hank Greenberg or Ralph Kiner or Johnny Mize or Edgar Martinez (and most of those choices were elected by the Baseball Writers!). Other context-corrected stats (like his 58.7 bWAR, 61.3 fWAR, or 52.3 JAWS rating) continued to show him among the best in the game’s history.
Allen’s election comes after 15 BBWAA misses, plus another six Veterans Committee whiffs, making this attempt number 22 for him. Even more frustrating, his last two VC elections both saw him finishing merely one vote short of induction, spanning back nearly a decade: first in 2015, then again in 2022. And of course, he passed away in the seven years between those two votes, making this election posthumous.
Dave Parker, thankfully, is alive to celebrate his election. The longtime star came back from injuries after his first decade to build a long career and some solid career totals, including 339 homers and 2712 hits. He also piled on the accolades in that time, including the 1978 NL MVP, 7 All-Star selections, 2 World Series wins, a trio of Gold Gloves and Silver Sluggers, 2 batting titles, and even an All-Star Game MVP and Home Run Derby victory to boot.
(Stats from Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs, with Veterans Committee voting results from Veterans Committee Data)
Leading the official announcement was Dick Allen. The 1972 AL MVP was one of the game’s all-time great power hitters, hitting 320 doubles, 351 homers, and a .292/.378/.534 batting line. For a long time, he was overlooked by most audiences, partly because of his relatively short career brought about by injuries (his last 100-game season came at the age of 33, just two years after that MVP win). But another big component of that was that Allen had the misfortune to play in the biggest deadball era of the last century (and I mean that literally: if you look at the league-wide OPS by season for the last 100 years, the twelve lowest marks all fall into the windows of “Dick Allen’s career” or “World War II”, with another three of Allen’s seasons in the next five lowest spots after that).
Without the longevity to stick around and build up counting numbers (or at least make it into a better offensive era), Allen got a little lost in the shuffle. But over time, modern analysis and a few devotees helped show just how good of a hitter he was: that .912 OPS translated to a 156 career OPS+, twenty-fifth on the all-time leaderboard! Even with his short career, he stacks up well with plenty of Hall inductees, like Hank Greenberg or Ralph Kiner or Johnny Mize or Edgar Martinez (and most of those choices were elected by the Baseball Writers!). Other context-corrected stats (like his 58.7 bWAR, 61.3 fWAR, or 52.3 JAWS rating) continued to show him among the best in the game’s history.
Allen’s election comes after 15 BBWAA misses, plus another six Veterans Committee whiffs, making this attempt number 22 for him. Even more frustrating, his last two VC elections both saw him finishing merely one vote short of induction, spanning back nearly a decade: first in 2015, then again in 2022. And of course, he passed away in the seven years between those two votes, making this election posthumous.
Dave Parker, thankfully, is alive to celebrate his election. The longtime star came back from injuries after his first decade to build a long career and some solid career totals, including 339 homers and 2712 hits. He also piled on the accolades in that time, including the 1978 NL MVP, 7 All-Star selections, 2 World Series wins, a trio of Gold Gloves and Silver Sluggers, 2 batting titles, and even an All-Star Game MVP and Home Run Derby victory to boot.
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