Reviewing the 2026 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 1: The Less Complicated Half

It is once again the time of the baseball calendar where Hall of Fame talk takes over! The Baseball Writers Association of America has released their 2026 Ballot (and some writers have already even released their official votes for it), while the Veterans Committee’s Contemporary Baseball Era panel will be announcing the results of their election on December 7th.

The Contemporary Baseball Era player ballot features eight candidates for consideration in the Hall of Fame Class of 2026. Results will be announced at 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 7: ow.ly/Agwx50XlQRH

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— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (@baseballhall.org) November 3, 2025 at 8:05 AM

In case the embedded link has stopped working, this year’s slate of candidates consists of eight names: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela. And for further housekeeping, the panel consists of sixteen voters, who will meet in-person at the Winter Meetings to discuss their options before casting their vote. Candidates need twelve votes for induction, and while I couldn’t find anything confirming it would still be the case this year, in recent years each voter has been limited to three choices.

There’s actually another big rule change in this year’s VC process, but I want to hold off on discussing it for now. Once again, my write-up got kind of long, so I decided to split it up into two parts for posting. And as it turned out, the easiest splitting point wound up being “the half of the ballot that will be deeply affected by this rule, but doesn’t really need their individual cases discussed” and “the half of the ballot that could stand to have their cases discussed a little more, but which probably isn’t going to be affected by the new rule all that much”. The former is a little more complicated, so we’ll be focusing today on the latter to ease us in.

(Stats are from Baseball-Refernce and Fangraphs unless otherwise noted.)

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And within that latter half, let’s start with the candidate that I think is the most straightforward one to cover: 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. This is actually something that I’ve been saying at least since he fell off the BBWAA ballot back in 2023 too (if not earlier). His reasoning reminds me of Fred McGriff’s in a lot of ways too, and that was another case where I predicted a Vet Ballot debut would sail in; in the end, the voters wound up doing exactly what I predicted, electing him unanimously on his first go-around in the process.


I’ve done a fuller accounting of Kent’s case in the past, if you’d like to read that; it’s still largely the same, outside of maybe a few placements on all-time lists and some results. But to summarize it here: he’s not an overwhelmingly obvious choice, but that’s more than fine for a Veterans Committee pick. He’d still be a little below the Hall’s median for second base by most value stats, but nowhere near the bottom.

It also helps that his case is rather straightforward, which also tends to play towards the interests of Veterans Committee voters. Kent was a second baseman who could hit dingers, to a genuinely rare extent. His 377 career homers are the most for any player who spent half their games at the position, breaking Rogers Hornsby’s seventy-year-old record of 301. And despite offensive inflation, Kent will probably hold the title for a lot longer; only one other second baseman has even touched 300 since (Robinson Canó), and active leader Jose Altuve still trails him by 122.

Sure, his batting average and on-base percentage were a little lower than you’d like for a slugger, and his defense at second could be best described as “enough that it wasn’t worth the effort to move him somewhere else”. As mentioned above, in the end, it still got him a career that seems to be roughly one of the twenty best in the history of the position, and wouldn’t you know it, there are already 20 inductees. He seems famous enough for the Hall, and putting him in doesn’t drop Cooperstown’s standards; ergo, I don’t really see any issues with putting him in.

The biggest reason Kent isn’t in the Hall already is largely an issue of timing, I think. He joined the Baseball Writers ballot coming off of a historically crowded year, and as part of a freshman class that included first ballot choices Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas, plus eventual inductee Mike Mussina. That 2014 Ballot contains 14 players who have already been inducted (plus another one who might be some day, depending on how Mattingly fares), as well as current non-inductees Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling. Writers had to whittle all of those names down to just 10 picks, since the Hall of Fame refuses to budge on ballot limits.

Given that crowd, it’s a miracle that Kent debuted at 15% of the vote. The next few years continued the onslaught of strong candidates (go check out that longer piece on his case that I linked earlier if you’d like the full accounting), but Jeff held steady, and once he came out the thickest part of the mess, he climbed all the way up to 46.5% before aging off. Had he debuted a decade earlier, there’s a good chance his campaign would have looked closer to Andre Dawson’s or Jim Rice’s, starting in the 20-40% range and building up to 75% over seven or more elections. I also think that, as a more fringe choice, Kent was especially hurt by the crowd, and could have pulled off something similar on a less limited ballot. But he too often fell around that final tenth spot on the ballot, making him a tough cut for a number of voters several years in a row and delaying any attempts to build momentum for his candidacy until it was too late (especially after the Hall cut his eligibility from fifteen years down to ten right after his first election; voters for the first few years he was on the ballot were still feeling out how best to handle the new voting environment).

But that’s the other reason I feel pretty confident about his chances this time around: the recent Veterans Committee has actually been pretty good about trying to rectify those cases. Both Jack Morris and Lee Smith were inducted on their first Veterans ballots after their momentum on the BBWAA ones slammed into that 2013 blockade. Alan Trammell and Fred McGriff didn’t seem quite as inevitable as those two, never reaching the 50% mark, but they did have some initial success flipping voters to their side before the 2013 apocalypse shut that down; once again, the VC put both of them in on the first try. Since Kent’s case looks a lot like those, it makes me like his chances this time around.



Our other super-recent candidate is Gary Sheffield, who just aged off the BBWAA ballot in 2024 (one year after Kent). Sheffield’s ten years on the ballot were impressive, starting at 11.7% back on the crowded 2015 ballot, surviving through all the remaining years of gridlock, and eventually climbing all the way to 63.9% by that final go-around.

All of that would normally be a good indication of a possible Veterans Committee choice. However, Sheffield also has ties to Performance-Enhancing Drugs; historically, the VC voters have been much harsher on those players than the BBWAA voters. The unique wrinkle in Sheffield’s case is that BBWAA voters were especially willing to vote for him, in a way that they haven’t seemed to be for other PED guys?

Sheffield’s numbers, while still Hall-worthy, were still not the best in that group. And yet, he still finished with the third-highest percentage for any steroid-linked player. I’ve never really come up with a good reason for why that is; I’ve seen some people hypothesize that his ties seemed more minimal than others’, or that he was more forthcoming about his usage. Maybe one of those is it? I’m not really sure how to test them, or even how well the explanations hold up, but I really don’t have any better guesses right now.

It seems risky to say “I don’t really understand where this player’s votes in years past were coming from”, and then turn around and make a confident prediction on how their upcoming candidacy will fare. However, I think it’s safe to say Sheffield won’t be making it this time. I never really figured out why BBWAA voters were less harsh on Sheffield than other PED guys, but the Veterans voters seem to be so much stricter that I don’t think it will matter this year either way. Even doing twice as well as the previous best PED-connected-vote-getter still leaves him many votes short of where he needs to wind up.

Also, remember when I said that Sheffield had the third-most BBWAA support from the PED crowd earlier? Well, both of the guys who finished ahead of him are also on this ballot, and remember that voters only get three votes. That means that Sheffield is either going to be relying on a lot of “Bonds, Clemens, and Sheffield” votes (in a year where Jeff Kent seems likely be getting a lot of votes already), or hoping for a lot of guys to make exceptions for him while also holding a grudge against those two.

I’m not sure how that would work; mind you, given that the voters will get to discuss things and may work out some weird shared logic for it, that’s technically a very different argument than “it can't happen” (see: the Harold Baines election, for example). But it does speak to the crowded field here. When you only get three spots and there are somewhere from five to seven fairly reasonable picks… well, Sheffield seems like he’ll be a logical cut for a lot of the panel, which makes it very hard to reach twelve votes. And if he somehow does defy expectations and outperform any other steroid guy, at least it might help us start to understand why his case has been treated so differently.



His results aren’t as recent as those two since he went one-and-done on the Writers’ Ballot, but we do have one other candidate who just became eligible. Carlos Delgado seems… fine, I guess? I don’t think he would be the worst player in Cooperstown, so that’s a plus! But he also doesn’t seem to have an overwhelming case just on the numbers from his playing career; he seems just a step behind Fred McGriff, who I already kind of think of as the Hall borderline for first basemen. It also doesn’t help that he looks like the second-best first basemen just within this eight-person set.

I think any induction for Carlos would have to swing heavily on intangibles. I don’t think you can argue that he was famous to an outsized extent (2 All-Star selections, 4 top 10 MVP finishes). There might be something there if you give him extra credit for being a good person with a career in the game; he was a Roberto Clemente Award winner, was known for doing charity work and speaking out for good political causes, and to my understanding, has remained involved in the game, especially helping with training and coaching for his home of Puerto Rico. All of that’s really nice, and like I said, I wouldn’t mind it if he was inducted! I’ve also mentioned that I don’t mind giving guys extra credit for stuff like that.

But… I still can’t convince myself that he's more deserving than the other seven guys on the ballot. That’s a big problem when each voter only gets three spots on their ballot*, and especially when it looks like Jeff Kent will already be taking up somewhere between 12 and 16 of those 48 potential votes. It also doesn’t help that Delgado’s one appearance on the BBWAA ballot saw him fail to reach 5% of the vote. Yeah, once again, it was that crowded 2015 ballot, but four of the guys who finished ahead of him back then are back on this ballot too! I just don’t see a path forward for him this year.



I’m having a difficult time getting a hard read on what kind of support Fernando Valenzuela will receive on his first VC ballot. On the one hand, his stats are generally on the low side for the Hall of Fame, with a 173-153 record, 2074 strikeouts over 2930 innings, a 3.54 career ERA (good for a 104 ERA+), 41.4 bWAR/40.9 fWAR… He doesn’t really hit any of the traditional marks, and his history in Hall of Fame voting is pretty short, appearing on just two ballots in 2003-4 (where he got 6.2% and 3.8% of the vote, falling off due to the second total). That’s not a sign that voters were especially wowed by his case, and the best thing you can say in favor of inducting him based just on those playing numbers is “he still wouldn’t be the worst starting pitcher in the Hall, especially with any major consideration given to era”.

But I do think that “major consideration given to era” point actually means something. You may have noticed that starting pitcher inductions slowed down pretty dramatically for a few decades, and it’s a subject that I went into much greater depth on just last year. Valenzuela was a particularly interesting data point in my initial research; those two results on the BBWAA ballot may not seem like much, but during this stretch, it was legitimately impressive for a pitcher without 300 wins or 3000 strikeouts to make it past one ballot.

Part of that was that he does relatively well in Cy Young Shares, which I proposed as a new-ish way of evaluating pitchers within the era (one which Hall voters seemed to already be subconsciously referring to, too!). I’m not sure if I would say that VC voters this year seem primed to vote for him in the way that they might be for Jeff Kent, but the metaphorical ground there may be more fertile than I first thought. He does seem to have at least a few of the qualities that they like to see from modern starters.

And of course, the other complicating factor here is that Valenzuela’s case is much more than just his stats. Fernandomania was a legitimate cultural phenomenon, a major part of the story of Baseball in the 1980s and a big deal to anyone who takes the “Fame” part of the Hall of Fame’s name seriously. It was the kind of thing that had major reverberations, too, including but not limited to boosting the game’s popularity among Mexican and Mexican-American communities. And he went on to work in the game well beyond his playing days, serving as part of both the Dodgers’ Spanish-language broadcast team for multiple decades and Team Mexico’s coaching staff in multiple World Baseball Classics.

I’ve long said that the Hall of Fame needs to do better at recognizing the legacy of players who had a multi-faceted impact on the game, and I think Fernando definitely falls into that realm. And as I mentioned in my Rethinking Hall of Fame Pitching mini-series, voters also seem to be recovering from their strict era of starter voting. Add in that this is Valenzuela’s first appearance on the ballot since his death in October 2024, and there may be enough things in his favor to get him over the line!

But as a word of caution, I thought that might be the case last year with Luis Tiant, and then he didn’t even end up with enough votes to have his final total reported. There were some complicating factors there (like Tiant’s long-time outspokenness against being elected posthumously), but sometimes the ballot math is just too crowded and the votes don’t work out. And it doesn’t help that those calculations this year are harder to game out than they’ve ever been before.



Those four players (Kent, Sheffield, Delgado, and Valenzuela) are, in my mind, the first group of players on the ballot: guys who I think will be unaffected by the ballot rules and any attempts at vote gaming. I think Kent falls on an opposite side of the spectrum from Delgado and Sheffield, but for all intents and purposes, I think they’re all safe calls in or out.

Valenzuela isn’t as clearly on one side or the other, but I’m still putting him here too. I think he’s going to trend towards one of the extremes, either second place or the very bottom of the ballot. And whether he makes it in or not, I believe that it will happen more or less independently of the messy middle of the ballot: either the voting body will coalesce around his hybrid candidacy and sympathetic case and vote him in, or they won’t and he’ll get close to nothing.

It’s difficult to make a read like that both from the outside and ahead of time, especially given that the voting body actually gets to discuss the cases among themselves before voting. Those arguments have apparently played a big role swaying voters in the past. And even the voting body itself can vary wildly from year-to-year, but at least we might get some more insight on that front once this year’s voters are announced. Either way, I think his case stands apart from everything else going on.

Join us later this week, as we discuss the other half of the ballot and the big new rules that could make or break their Hall of Fame cases. If you’d like to get an email when that goes up, you can sign up for the Hot Corner Harbor newsletter below! It’s only used to notify you of new articles, so there’s no need to worry about getting flooded with emails. (And if you’ve already signed up but haven’t gotten any emails, make sure to check your spam filters!)

Edit: You can now read Part 2 here!

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