Veterans Committee Voters Announced: What Does It Mean for This Weekend's Election?

Hopefully by now, with some downtime over Thanksgiving week, you’ve had time to read my major piece on the Hall of Fame’s upcoming Veterans Committee ballot. If not, you can catch up on Part 1 here (covering Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, and Steve Garvey), and Part 2 here (covering Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant). The actual voting will be occurring this weekend, and in the lead-up, we finally got the last piece of information in that puzzle: who the actual sixteen voters from the Veterans Committee will be.

This year’s voting body will consist of Hall of Famers Paul Molitor, Eddie Murray, Tony Pérez, Lee Smith, Ozzie Smith, and Joe Torre; MLB executives Sandy Alderson, Terry McGuirk, Dayton Moore, Arte Moreno, and Brian Sabean; and writers/historians Bob Elliott, Leslie Heaphy, Steve Hirdt, Dick Kaegel, and Larry Lester.

Built with Kit

So, why is this relevant? Well, as I mentioned in those preview pieces, a big problem facing the Veterans Committee these days is that the ballot is actually too crowded. The process was neglected for, really, the majority of the last three decades, which allowed for a bit of a backlog of candidates to build up. And on top of that, they keep a stricter limit on vote totals than even the main Baseball Writers ballot, only allowing VC voters to choose up to three of the eight candidates they bring up for each vote (despite the fact that they require every candidate to first be approved by a panel of baseball historians to even reach a vote in the first place).

I made an affirmative Hall case for seven of the eight players up for consideration on this year’s Veterans ballot, but if I were a real voter in the process, I wouldn’t be able to officially vote in the affirmative for even half of them. Because they’re all competing for those same handful of votes, the question moves from “is this player Hall-worthy” to “are they the most Hall-worthy on the ballot”, something that is much more nebulous. Is it better to vote for the best player available? The ones from underrepresented eras or positions or leagues? The ones actually still alive to enjoy the honor? Do players who passed away in recent memory garner more attention, since they’re at the front of voters’ minds? Is it better to focus on players with a chance to get in, even if there are strictly “better” options available? There really isn’t any guidance here, so it’s up to our specific voters to decide.

Reviewing the Jam-Packed 2025 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 2

Earlier this week, I began posting my thoughts on this year’s Veterans Committee Hall of Fame ballot, which includes Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant. Those first four were covered in Part 1 (along with a general overview of the election rules), which you can read here if you missed it. Part 2 picks up right where that one leaves off.

Who ya got? Results will be announced at 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 8 on MLB network.

[image or embed]

— Bruce McClure ⚾ (@brucemcclurenh.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 11:54 AM

Built with Kit

Vic Harris: In my blurb on John Donaldson, I mentioned that the pitcher finished fourth place on the 2022 Early Baseball Ballot, behind eventual inductees Buck O'Neil and Bud Fowler. However, you may have noticed that I conspicuously did not mention the third place finisher. Top runner-up status went to Vic Harris, who finished just two votes shy of induction.

That seems like the type of thing that would set him up for an easy path to induction this year, but I’m really not sure how combining the Early Baseball Ballot into one big “Everything Before 1980” Ballot will play out. After all, you may notice that Harris and Donaldson are the only candidates here who would have come from that Early Baseball set; everything post-1950 would have been classified as either “Golden Days” or “Modern Baseball”. That seems like an easy way to spread the votes even more thin than they already are, and I don’t know how that will play out.

Reviewing the Jam-Packed 2025 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 1

This piece wound up running a little long, so it will be posted in two parts. If you’d like to be notified when the second part goes up and you haven’t already signed up for Hot Corner Harbor’s mailing list, maybe consider signing up now!

Built with Kit

With the 2024 Postseason in the books, we can now officially move on to the off-season. And one of the first orders of business will be the Veterans Committee portion of 2025 Hall of Fame voting: this year’s eight-person ballot has officially been announced. Our candidates (for posterity’s sake in case of link decay, and so you have a quick reference to their stats on Baseball-Reference) are: Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant .

Who ya got? Results will be announced at 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 8 on MLB network.

[image or embed]

— Bruce McClure ⚾ (@brucemcclurenh.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 11:54 AM

If you’d really like to parse the full details on the process, here’s the official post from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s website. But if you’d just like a quick summary of the important points, the main things are:


-Results will be announced in under a month, December 8th.

-This will almost immediately follow the 16-person Committee’s deliberation at the Winter Meetings

-Any nominee will need to be selected by 12 of the 16 members to get in (we don’t know yet who will be voting, although that has occasionally been relevant in the past)

-Each voter will only get to vote for up to 3 players


I think that last point is the most relevant; the extreme constraints these ballot caps have on the elections have become a recurring problem not just on the BBWAA’s ballots, but on the VC’s process too. There just isn’t much margin for error when a player needs 12 votes for induction, but there are only 48 votes total to go around, which shifts the question from “Is this player deserving of Cooperstown?” to “Are they more deserving than everyone else who was nominated?”. The first question is already fairly nebulous, given that there really isn’t a hard-and-fast definition of “Hall of Famer”; trying to rank them on “deservedness” of that nebulous title on top of that just makes everything a confusing mess.