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.
— Bruce McClure ⚾ (@brucemcclurenh.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 11:54 AM
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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.
And while the ten-vote cap on the BBWAA ballot is already kind of dumb (the thresholds are already pretty darn high, no one is going to get 75% of the vote on a one-year fluke), it’s extra dumb with the VC. These guys have already gone through so much screening to get even here! You already need to be screened by a panel of serious baseball historians to make it onto the Veterans ballot, and most of the guys they chose here were already on multiple BBWAA ballots before now in addition to that.
Worrying about no-chance candidates on the writers’ ballot like James Shields or Brandon Phillips (who make it there largely based on hitting the minimum qualifications of “playing ten seasons”) picking up too many votes is already kind of silly, since you’d need something like 20 votes most years just to get them back for a second ballot, and I really don’t think there are 20 voters who’d vote that way for many candidates even if you gave them unrestricted ballot slots. But there’s zero chance one of those types makes it to the Veterans Committee ballot in the first place! And yet, the VC’s ballot limit is even more restrictive than the BBWAA’s! How does this make any sense?
As you can probably guess by my focus on this point, I think there are more than three deserving candidates on this list. In fact, you could double the ballot size here, let me vote for six of the eight players they’d name, and I’d still have a difficult time making that final cut. I’ve talked about a majority of these guy’s cases in the past, but it’s been a while for some of them, so a quick summary of their cases and why I think they’re deserving Hall of Famers (mostly):
Dick Allen: Simply put, Dick Allen is one of the best power hitters in the game’s history. It’s a little easy to miss, because his career was on the short side and he played in a very low-scoring environment, both of which hurt his numbers; he has only 351 career homers, his .534 slugging percentage is 45th, and his .912 OPS is a respectable 60th.
But as soon as you start accounting for his environment (the midpoint of his career lined up with the famous “Year of the Pitcher” in 1968), that moves from “pretty good” to “incredible”. For example, his adjusted OPS+ is 156, tied with Frank Thomas for 25th all-time. And while he wasn’t incredible defensively, he did manage to stick at third base for the first third of his career or so. He also had a solid display of awards, including 7 All-Star selections, the 1972 AL MVP, and the 1964 NL Rookie of the Year.
That led to a career 58.7 Baseball-Reference WAR/61.3 Fangraphs WAR, and even with his shortened career, there are plenty of similar careers already in the Hall, like Johnny Mize, Hank Greenberg, Ralph Kiner… I’d disagree with BBWAA voters saying his career seemed too short to vote for him, but with the VC ballot, there’s even less argument. Allen looks exactly like the kind of player the Veterans Committee was made to recognize. There was also always some sort of narrative that Allen’s “attitude” hurt his teams, but in retrospect, that seems to have been something applied by outside forces like writers (meanwhile, Wikipedia has actually built up a nice collage of quotes from his former teammates attesting just the opposite).
Following a fifteen-year run on the BBWAA ballot (where he topped out at just under 19% of the vote), this will be Allen’s seventh appearance on a Veterans Committee ballot (going off of data from Graham Womack and Adam Darowski’s Veterans Committee Data project). Over those seven ballots, his chances have grown from a similar starting point to the cusp of induction; he finished one vote shy in both 2015 and 2022. That latter appearance, which I covered at the time, was incredibly frustrating: the Hall’s slow cycles for this type of thing meant Allen had to wait five full years to try again, despite nothing in his case changing. Except that chance was delayed an extra year on top of that thanks to the VC deciding not to meet in-person during the COVID pandemic, and totally canceling the vote rather than just moving on-line.
Allen passed away in December of 2020, right around when the canceled Veterans election would have announced their results for 2021. A year later, he again fell one vote short, a close fifth-place finish on a Golden Days ballot that saw four different Hall of Famers elected, meaning ballot spots were very tight. It’s also not hard to notice that two of the four players inducted that year (Jim Kaat and Tony Oliva) were still alive at the age of 83, something that only could be said about one other player on the ballot at the time (the since-departed Maury Wills). It’s hard not to feel like it wasn’t the voters taking Allen’s passing as a grim reminder that delaying considering a player’s case for so long can have major consequences. I wonder if he’ll again be the odd-man out this time, or if that was a one-year thing due to the duel urgencies of Kaat and Oliva; for what it’s worth, Tommy John is the only living candidate over 80 years old this time.
(I realize I said I’d keep these blurbs short and mostly to their stats, but I think this is important context in discussing Allen’s ballot history, and it will become relevant again towards the end of this piece).
(ed.: I wrote this blurb first, and as it turned out, I lied; I actually felt very verbose about most of the candidates. Sorry!)
Ken Boyer: The last time I covered Ken Boyer’s case, it was back when Scott Rolen got inducted to the Hall, as part of explaining the context of third base and the Hall of Fame. That’s actually fairly apt, as Boyer’s Hall case is like the prototype that Rolen’s was built off of: a combination of elite hitting and defense at the hot corner. It’s easy to miss how good he was though, because the position doesn’t get the recognition of being hard to field like shortstop or second base does, even though it’s closer to those than it is first base.
His 2143 hits and 282 homers are solid, but they look even better when you account for era, giving him a 116 OPS+. And that number may not seem impressive, but among players with a majority of their games at third base (and a minimum 7500 plate appearances), it’s actually tied for fifteenth all-time. Most defensive stats also seem to put him around the top 20-to-30 third basemen as well (for example, he’s tied for 20th in Total Zone Rating for third basemen, and among all positions, he’s tied for 109th all-time). There’s no one area where he stands out as “best of all-time”, but if you’re simultaneously one of the 20 best hitters and fielders at your position you’re in pretty rare territory! Perhaps not top ten, but maybe in the eleven-to-fifteen range, which seems extremely strong for a Veterans Committee candidate (keep in mind, even at positions that are relatively under-represented in Cooperstown like third base, we're still nearing twenty inductees in the Hall already!).
Boyer’s WAR totals ended up fairly respectable (62.8 bWAR, 54.8 fWAR), and he racked up plenty of hardware during his playing days, including the 1964 NL MVP and World Series trophy, 5 Gold Gloves, 11 All-Star selections (across 7 seasons, due to some years with two All-Star Games). Given all of that, it’s kind of shocking he didn’t do better in Hall balloting? He actually had to be re-added to the BBWAA ballot in 1985 due to dropping off after initial low support his first five tries (much like his contemporary, eventual posthumous Veterans Committee selection Ron Santo), and in fifteen tries, he eventually made it past 25%.
I’ll also note that voters have historically struggled to elect third basemen. In fact, when Boyer reached the ballot in 1975, the BBWAA had only inducted one third baseman in their forty years of existence: Pie Traynor. And by the time Boyer had aged out of voting in 1994, they had only added two more, Eddie Mathews (who somehow took five attempts) and Brooks Robinson. Boyer himself wouldn’t even live long enough to see the BBWAA take up his case again after those first five elections, and in the thirty years since his initial candidacy ended, he’s made half-a-dozen VC ballots, but is yet to even reach that 25% mark.
John Donaldson: Four years ago, Major League Baseball announced that they were retroactively designated seven different Negro Leagues* as major leagues, recognizing their players as major league veterans and officially adding their stats to the record books. I’ve seen skepticism about this move, as it doesn’t really change the discrimination that they faced during their careers, and a vast majority of them are no longer alive to enjoy the reclassification anyway. There has been a lot of good work poring over old news items and box scores to tabulate stats, which is good work, but it’s mostly by independent researchers and not MLB itself (shoutout to Seamheads for having the most comprehensive data here, and sites like Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs for pretty seamlessly integrating these numbers into their services. And Jay Jaffe** and Adam Darowski’s various write-ups on some of these players over the years have been great overviews).
*Just to clarify, for those who didn’t already know: while they’re grouped together like one official unit, the “Negro Leagues” were closer to 1800s baseball leagues in structure than the AL-NL arrangement of the 1900s, with a lot of leagues coming and going, regular barnstorming tours, teams moving between leagues as they collapsed, smaller regional leagues, and so on. Seven specific leagues were granted Major League status in 2020, spanning from 1920 to 1948 (some of them existed outside of that window, but they were judged to not have been at the same quality at those times, and those years did not receive the major league status), but none of those seven existed for that entire timespan.
**Jaffe’s 2022 Candidate Profiles were especially great overviews for Donaldson and Harris on their last ballot, and he almost certainly has newer ones up at Fangraphs now. But he hadn’t started his 2024 series by the time I started writing this, and I didn’t want to go check until I finished my piece, just to focus on my own thoughts.
Really, the biggest outcome of that decision might be on Hall of Fame voting, in that it seems to have reignited Hall of Fame discussions for a lot of long-overlooked stars of the Negro Leagues. Three years ago, in the first elections since the reclassification, Buck O’Neil, Bud Fowler, and Minnie Miñoso all finally made it over the line, but the system of elections the Veterans Committee uses rotates through “eras” in long cycles, so it looked like it would be a while, maybe even a decade, before further discussion could crop up…
Except the other thing is that the VC is constantly shifting their rules. So, in the interim, they actually smashed together two formerly-distinct ballot eras into one big, ultra-generalized “Pre-1980” era. Which is how you wind up with guys like Dave Parker (retired in 1991) running on the same ballot as John Donaldson (born 1891). This certainly does not make the incredibly tight vote limits feel less restrictive.
That actually makes Donaldson an especially tough candidate to evaluate; the seven Black baseball leagues that were officially re-classified as Negro Major Leagues did not actually begin operation until 1920, at which point Donaldson already had nearly a decade of playing time under his belt. And even then, he wasn’t mostly known for playing in the first Negro National League, which you might be able to tell by the relatively light stats on his Baseball-Reference page.
Instead, Donaldson made more money as a barnstormer, joining traveling integrated teams and drawing large crowds on the road as local fans came out to watch the pitcher that multiple AL and NL figures wished they could sign. There’s been work by researchers with the John Donaldson Network to collect and aggregate his stats and news stories. The stats are eye-popping, but the quality of the competition was almost certainly not as strong as what other players faced. It’s also kind of hard to blame him for going that route, though, given he was banned from the AL and NL, and more formal Negro League options were still in their infancy until he was nearly 30. (Shoot, the Hall of Fame itself wouldn’t even be a thing for almost three more decades after he started playing!)
Negro League historians have talked him up as one of the best pitchers in their history, right alongside guys like Satchel Paige or Joe Williams, and that recognition got him 8 of the needed 12 votes back in the 2022 VC election, good for fourth place on a very competitive ballot. He seems closer to a pioneer than a player in a lot of ways, though, so figuring out how to slot him onto this ballot feels very confusing. Maybe shunting all of “Pre-1980” baseball into one ballot just isn’t a good idea, but at least the three-year rotation they have now makes more sense and brings back different groups more regularly than their old method (which I believe would have delayed consideration for Early Baseball another ten years??). But like… surely, we can do even better than this, right?
Steve Garvey: I’ll be upfront about this: Steve Garvey is the one guy on the ballot that I just can’t see myself voting for. I’m not confused about why he’s here, as his popularity has always outrun his performance by quite a bit (10 All-Star selections despite only 38.0 bWAR/37.8 fWAR in his career), and he’s the type of player that a lot of Hall voters historically have gone crazy for (a charismatic first basemen on a winning team in a big city).
He had some decent career totals, like 2599 hits and 272 homers, but neither of those totals are close to the lead even among eligible un-inducted players. Not to mention they’re as much a factor of Garvey’s playing time as they are actual dominance; his .294/.329/.446 career batting line is just okay. That translates to 117 in OPS+, which puts him in a tie for 34th place just among first basemen with 8000+ plate appearances (and that’s using 50% of games at first base, meaning it’s not even counting Dick Allen or other guys who split their time there).
There are plenty of first basemen, like Keith Hernandez and John Olerud, with better numbers and better gloves than Garvey. Really, despite his four Gold Gloves, he was probably overrated there as well, as most modern fielding stats have put him closer to a net zero of his career, far behind top guys like Hernandez and Olerud, but also Mark Grace and Mark Teixeira and Adrian Gonzalez and Don Mattingly and etc. His 1974 MVP feels similarly overrated, in retrospect; it’s not hard to look back on that year’s voting and see plenty of other position players with better numbers, whether it’s perennial MVP favorites like Mike Schmidt and Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan, or other more directly comparable players to Garvey like his teammate Jim Wynn, or fellow first baseman Willie Stargell.
Once upon a time, Garvey probably could have ridden that voter love and his public persona to an induction, getting extra credit for his “wholesome family man” image and general fame. But he ruined his reputation back in the day with a series of public cheating scandals and children with mistresses, and ever since then, he mostly seems to bubble up in stories designed to remind people that he’s kind of a deadbeat, like getting busted for shilling “deceptive” weight loss supplements, or making ill-advised Senate runs that caused his numerous estranged children to publicly call-out his attempt to re-claim that “family man” label.
If he made it into Cooperstown, Garvey wouldn’t be the worst Hall of Famer, but he’s also a candidate who needs a lot of extra credit in his favor, and little about his case inspires that kind of generosity in me, even before considering how packed this ballot already is. And that’s not even mentioning how many better candidates couldn’t even get a second look here in the first place, while Garvey is on his sixth crack at the VC ballot (and twenty-first total Hall election). Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker both directly matched or out-performed Garvey in his last VC election back in 2020 (and both in their VC debuts, at that!), but couldn’t come back for a second time? And I’ve already mentioned Keith Hernandez multiple times as a comparison, yet he’s still yet to appear on a Veterans ballot at all.
I’ll return later this week with the second half of this ballot overview. And as I said above, consider subscribing to the mailing list if you haven’t already, so that you see Part 2 when it goes up!
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