For the second year in a row, the Baseball Writers sent a three-person group to Cooperstown. Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia made it in their first election, while longtime Astro closer Billy Wagner made it on his tenth and final try. Those three, along with Veterans Committee picks Dave Parker and Dick Allen, will serve as Baseball’s Hall of Fame Class of 2025.
It’s a pretty well-rounded bunch, spearheaded by the first Japanese player in Cooperstown history. Ichiro, in his first ever ballot, fell just one vote shy of unanimity (393/394), tying him with Derek Jeter for the second-best performance in BBWAA ballot history. The right fielder finished with 3089 hits over nineteen seasons with the Mariners, Yankees, and Marlins, thanks in part to nine straight 200-hit campaigns to start his MLB career.
That total is made all the more impressive by the fact that his debut season in the US came at the age of 27, making him one of the latest-debuting Hall of Famers in history; if you count his nine seasons in Japan before that, he has a staggering 4367 professional hits in his career, which started at the age of 18 and lasted until he was 45 (stats from Baseball-Reference unless otherwise stated, by the way).
It's hard to argue against Suzuki’s case, which includes both the 2001 AL MVP and Rookie of the Year Award, plus a pair of batting titles, three Silver Sluggers, and a full ten All-Star Selections and Gold Gloves. The Mariners have already announced that they’ll be retiring his number #51 (no word yet on whether his predecessor for the number, Randy Johnson, can expect a similar honor later).
There was an outside chance that he would hit 100%, as he was still perfect through all 216 Early ballots in Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker, but alas, that was not the case. We’ll see in the coming days if the one No vote steps forward (and the tracker will continue to update as more voters reveal their ballots), but it’s worth keeping in mind that we still don’t know who the one vote against Derek Jeter was back in 2020, so we may just never learn.
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Friday, January 17, 2025
Can We Predict the Private Voters for the 2025 Hall of Fame Election?
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?
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?
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.
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