It’s been a month since we got our last big piece of news on the 2026 Hall of Fame election, that the first member of this year’s class of inductees would be Veterans Committee choice Jeff Kent. In the time since, we’ve gone fullbore on the main question of Hall of Fame Season: who the Baseball Writers will induct off the main ballot. However, the actual ballots are technically all submitted (the deadline for that was the start of the new year), and there’s not really going to be any real major updates to cover there until the actual announcement on January 20th.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren't other things to write about. As usual, the Ballot Tracker team is hard at work documenting and tallying up the results in real time as individual voters reveal their ballots. They were already at over 100 votes counted before the clock struck 2026, and have only continued to grow from there, currently sitting at 152 tracked ballots. That’s an impressive number, and if you’re a long-time follower of this type of news, you might know that there are already some things that we can intuit about where the final results might wind up, especially with so many votes being public knowledge.
(As a note, all stats in this piece are either from the Ballot Tracker, or Baseball-Reference. Ballot Tracker numbers are as of Friday evening.)
Except… there’s a lot more uncertainty on that front this year. Notably, we actually don’t know what percentage of the vote we already know. Last year’s election closed with 394 votes on record, which would put us at over 30% of the vote for this year. But the 2026 election is also a special case where we can’t just take last year’s total and slap a “give or take 10 votes” on it.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Hall of Fame’s voting rules, voters must have written for 10 years at an accredited outlet for the BBWAA to give them a say. Usually, we can count on a fairly stable churn, with some voters retiring or aging out each year, but getting offset by a steady trickle of new ten-year veterans. That’s not the case this year, though; the BBWAA was extremely slow to recognize online outlets, which you might have realized over the last few years as longtime veterans of major sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus only just began to get their ballots.
This year represents another major wave of ten-year “newcomers” from online sites, the biggest among them being MLB.com. Yeah, for some reason, it took the BBWAA until the middle of the 2010s to officially recognize sportswriters from the league’s site. I don’t get why it took so long either, nor do I understand why they didn’t retroactively award credit to those writers for their years working there prior to that decision.* But I guess what’s important is that it’s finally not a problem.
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Saturday, January 10, 2026
Monday, December 8, 2025
The Veterans Committee Elects Jeff Kent to the Hall of Fame, But Some Other Confusing Stuff Happened Too
On Sunday, we got our first official Hall of Fame announcement for the Class of 2026, with the Veterans Committee’s Contemporary Era panel revealing the results of their election. And somehow, the results were both very predictable and rather baffling. But first, we’ll start with the big headline: former Giant/Astro/Dodger/etc. Jeff Kent will be joining the Hall of Fame in 2026.
I wrote several pieces previewing this election (thank you to everyone who read them!), and if you read those, this is in some ways unsurprising. I more or less began that mini-series by saying “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”, and finished it by saying “If you want that broken down to ‘which outcomes are the most likely’, it probably comes out to ‘only Kent gets in’”. Those are both direct quotes, by the way; good job, past me!
If you’d like a fuller accounting of his career, I’ve done a longer write-up of the merits of his case before. The short version of it is that Kent was a big power hitter at a position that normally isn’t home to power hitters, and he racked up some impressive totals as a result. His 377 home runs are the most ever for a second baseman, blowing by Rogers Hornsby’s seven-decade old record of 301, and he looks set to stay at the top for some time still. His 1518 RBI make him one of just three second basemen to pass 1500, along with Nap Lajoie and Hornsby again. And despite a bit of a delayed start to his career, he still managed nearly 2500 hits, too.
(Stats from Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs unless otherwise stated, by the way.)
Welcome to Cooperstown, Jeff Kent! baseballhall.org/hall-of-fame...
— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (@baseballhall.org) December 7, 2025 at 4:35 PM
[image or embed]
I wrote several pieces previewing this election (thank you to everyone who read them!), and if you read those, this is in some ways unsurprising. I more or less began that mini-series by saying “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”, and finished it by saying “If you want that broken down to ‘which outcomes are the most likely’, it probably comes out to ‘only Kent gets in’”. Those are both direct quotes, by the way; good job, past me!
If you’d like a fuller accounting of his career, I’ve done a longer write-up of the merits of his case before. The short version of it is that Kent was a big power hitter at a position that normally isn’t home to power hitters, and he racked up some impressive totals as a result. His 377 home runs are the most ever for a second baseman, blowing by Rogers Hornsby’s seven-decade old record of 301, and he looks set to stay at the top for some time still. His 1518 RBI make him one of just three second basemen to pass 1500, along with Nap Lajoie and Hornsby again. And despite a bit of a delayed start to his career, he still managed nearly 2500 hits, too.
(Stats from Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs unless otherwise stated, by the way.)
Friday, December 5, 2025
Reviewing the 2026 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 3: Breaking Down the Voters and Final Predictions
Earlier this week, I reviewed the Veterans Committee ballot ahead of their upcoming December 7th announcement. Part 1 (which can be read here) covered the cases of Gary Sheffield, Carlos Delgado, Fernando Valenzuela, and most-likely inductee Jeff Kent; Part 2 (which can be read here) covered the new rules shenanigans that are likely to impact the candidacies of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy. Check both of those out if you haven’t already, I think I did a pretty good job on them!
And now, we finally have the final piece of the puzzle: earlier this week, the Hall of Fame officially announced the sixteen people who will be serving as voters for the vote this weekend. If you haven’t been following the most recent iteration of Veterans Committee elections as closely, this has kind of become a big deal over the last few years. The VC has always been unique in that they meet to discuss votes in person, and these conversations can have a notable impact on the final results as members try to strategize or campaign for certain candidates. Of particular note was the 2019 election, where Harold Baines swung a surprise induction while going in front of an especially-favorable set of voters.
Nothing since has been quite that shocking, but looking at the committee can sometimes give you clues to what’s on the horizon. For example, last year’s sixteen panelists tilted me towards predicting Dave Parker would make it in, which did indeed happen. It’s not a guarantee to have an effect (I thought last year’s panelists might be sympathetic to Luis Tiant too, which did not occur in the slightest), but it’s always worth taking a look. This year’s set of voters is:
Hall of Fame Players: Fergie Jenkins, Jim Kaat, Juan Marichal, Tony Perez, Ozzie Smith, Alan Trammell, and Robin Yount
Executives: Owners Mark Attanasio and Arte Moreno, plus General Managers Doug Melvin, Kim Ng, Tony Reagins, and Terry Ryan
Writers: Jayson Stark and Tyler Kepner of The Athletic, plus historian Steve Hirdt
I don’t know that there’s one overriding theme this time, in the way that there was with the Baines ballot. However, that has been kind of the norm since then; I think the Hall realized that it was a bad look (even if probably unintentional), and has been going out of its way to avoid a repeat. But there are smaller trends that can play a part, and sometimes add up. Going through my thoughts on those, roughly in order that they occurred to me:
And now, we finally have the final piece of the puzzle: earlier this week, the Hall of Fame officially announced the sixteen people who will be serving as voters for the vote this weekend. If you haven’t been following the most recent iteration of Veterans Committee elections as closely, this has kind of become a big deal over the last few years. The VC has always been unique in that they meet to discuss votes in person, and these conversations can have a notable impact on the final results as members try to strategize or campaign for certain candidates. Of particular note was the 2019 election, where Harold Baines swung a surprise induction while going in front of an especially-favorable set of voters.
Nothing since has been quite that shocking, but looking at the committee can sometimes give you clues to what’s on the horizon. For example, last year’s sixteen panelists tilted me towards predicting Dave Parker would make it in, which did indeed happen. It’s not a guarantee to have an effect (I thought last year’s panelists might be sympathetic to Luis Tiant too, which did not occur in the slightest), but it’s always worth taking a look. This year’s set of voters is:
Hall of Fame Players: Fergie Jenkins, Jim Kaat, Juan Marichal, Tony Perez, Ozzie Smith, Alan Trammell, and Robin Yount
Executives: Owners Mark Attanasio and Arte Moreno, plus General Managers Doug Melvin, Kim Ng, Tony Reagins, and Terry Ryan
Writers: Jayson Stark and Tyler Kepner of The Athletic, plus historian Steve Hirdt
I don’t know that there’s one overriding theme this time, in the way that there was with the Baines ballot. However, that has been kind of the norm since then; I think the Hall realized that it was a bad look (even if probably unintentional), and has been going out of its way to avoid a repeat. But there are smaller trends that can play a part, and sometimes add up. Going through my thoughts on those, roughly in order that they occurred to me:
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