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
— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (@baseballhall.org) November 3, 2025 at 8:05 AM
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That leaves us with the other four names to cover today: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy. This part gets frustrating to write about, and I think that is in large part because it’s the worst kind of Hall of Fame discussion: one where the real focus of the talk isn’t the players up for induction, but instead about the Hall itself and its various rules and politics. It’s like when the umpires become the focus of a game, it’s a sign that something is not going right.
(Stats are from Baseball-Refernce unless otherwise noted.)
In fact, we can probably knock out the player discussion in much less time than I spent on the other four, in large part because all of them have been the subject of Hall discussions for ages now (despite little actual movement in the central cases). Mattingly and Murphy have been up for election since even before I started writing about this, spending fifteen years on the annual BBWAA ballot (beginning in 2001 and 1999, respectively), aging off of that, and then making it to three additional (non-annual) Veterans Committee ballots prior to this year.
I last covered them in depth for the 2020 Veterans Committee ballot, and I think I’m basically in the same place I was back then. Both of them are high-peak guys, so I wouldn’t blame anyone for voting for them, but I usually err a little more on the side of long careers. I think Murphy is a little better of the two, and falls more or less at the bottom of my borderline for the Hall, especially given that he’s a center fielder. Mattingly is probably closer to Delgado than McGriff in my first base rankings, but he’s frequently done a little better than Murphy in voting.
I don’t know that I even need to go into the cases for Bonds and Clemens at this point. If you’re reading this site, you’re almost certainly already aware of them; they’re arguably the best batter and pitcher of all-time, and haven’t been inducted because of their ties to steroids. There are a bunch of other complicating issues there, but that’s still the long-short of it. If they hadn’t been tied to steroids, they’d be in Cooperstown by now.
To continue to streamline my thoughts on this topic to keep this article manageable: even if you wanted to apply some sort of numerical penalty to Bonds and Clemens’ cases to account for their rule-breaking, even the harshest one is still going to find them well over the line. I think that performance-enhancing drugs fall within the long baseball history of bending the rules to get an advantage, and there’s not really a reason to carve them out as an exception in the Hall when it’s never been done for other types of cheating (in fact, several notable ones are already inducted).
The Hall of Fame itself, though, has tried to have it both ways: trying a wide variety of tactics to keep both of them out of Cooperstown while relying on everything but an official ruling to try and dodge any scrutiny or skepticism that would come with an actual decision, and then pretending to be an impartial officiating force the entire time.
It initially relied on the massive crowd of worthy players on the ballot and the ten-person cap, an issue that I discussed even while it was still going, to help suppress their votes. Because when there were too many players for the number of slots, somebody had to lose out, and inevitably, at least some of those lost votes would be voters who thought that steroid players had the numbers, but decided to vote for less complicated players.
The Hall clearly knew it was a problem, as they tried a few times to find a solution while the logjam was at its peak in the form of various committees and polling. They tried dropping the number of years a player could be on the BBWAA ballot from fifteen to ten in an effort to end the traffic earlier, but this didn’t actually solve anything in-the-moment (in part, because they grandfathered in a ton of very specific cases). Meanwhile, they rejected any offer that involved more votes, not just extreme ideas like an unlimited ballot but even mild compromises like a 12-person limit, especially as Bonds and Clemens’s vote totals crept upwards.
Were other candidates being hurt by this? Of course. Did players with interesting and potentially worthwhile Hall of Fame cases get overlooked and dropped after just one cycle, in part because of this overcrowding? Absolutely! (Jim Edmonds, Kenny Lofton, and Johan Santana all spring to mind here, especially as guys like Chase Utley and Felix Hernandez are now getting to stick around from multiple hearings.) Eventually, Hall voters themselves (along with the help of others, like Ryan Thibodaux and his Ballot Tracker team) got better at working around this and trying to optimize their votes to make sure players were actually still getting inducted; the Hall itself mainly continued to stand aside.
There was just one moment where the Hall consciously stepped in and actually intervened in the whole process, and it was in response to them accidentally intervening in the process twice. First, for the 2016 BBWAA election, the Hall announced that they’d be trimming the voting rolls. My memory of this moment was that it was mostly because a lot of people were starting to publicly remark about how badly the induction process was gummed up as elections slowed; and voters who had long since moved on to covering other sports or even entirely different fields bragging about how their insight was the only way for the average fan to appreciate how good Willie Mays or Mike Schmidt were did little to endear themselves to those who were looking for answers.
I can’t really say how big of a mover that all was for the more general audience, since I’m pretty firmly within the Baseball Hall of Fame bubble. It was really just a small rule change in a niche part of the baseball world… but my cursory search turned up that specific “we’re why you know Schmidt and Mays were great” case at least, so it doesn’t seem like a huge stretch. And at the very least, the institution actually would like it if somebody got elected (Cooperstown and the Hall depend on it and the crowds inductions bring, if nothing else).
Honestly, “this doesn’t seem like a big deal” might have been a big part of why the Hall actually made the change in the first place; remove the loud and cranky guys who are kind of causing you a headache. The effect was actually kind of shocking, although it was easy to miss.* Vote totals started rising, and I firmly believe that this smaller and more plugged-in electorate is why it was able to adapt in the ways that we saw over the next few years. And not only that, but contrary to the desires of the board of directors, it seemed like that crankier, out-of-the-loop set was disproportionately against voting for players with steroid ties.
*If you just went by topline numbers, BBWAA members in 2016 voted fewer players on average than 2015 by about half a vote. However, that offset came with Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, and Craig Biggio all getting in and Don Mattingly aging off; Ken Griffey Jr., Trevor Hoffman, and Billy Wagner were big additions, but that was essentially two whole slots per ballot that were freed up. Only dropping half a slot showed that the remaining voters were much more willing to vote for more players on the whole.
Then, in the 2017 Veterans Committee balloting, the Hall inducted Bug Selig immediately after he became eligible. In the abstract, a quick induction was fairly standard treatment for a Commissioner Emeritus… except there was an obvious problem here. The Hall had already shown a general indifference to punishing managers who benefited from having players who used steroids on their rosters. Now here they were, outright honoring the man who was more responsible for the Steroid Era than any other single person (whether through complete indifference, sheer incompetence, or possibly even implicit encouragement).
It’s not hard to see why this would have moved voters towards players with PED ties. If you actually believed that steroids were a serious issue, worth even denying the best position player and pitcher of the last 50+ years over, then how else were you supposed to take this other committee stepping in and waving Selig in without issue other than a total refutation? It was hard to divide blame in a way that didn’t fall on all of them, and fans and historians would almost certainly gain more from having actual historic players inducted rather than executives.
As a result, 2016 and especially 2017 wound up providing Bonds and Clemens with the biggest one-year gains in their voting totals, taking them from just above a third of the vote to comfortably over half (a sign that had generally assured a future induction). And even leaving that aside, Hall of Fame elections are in large part based on momentum; picking up over 15% of the vote was a big shift in their favor, even with their remaining years on the ballot slashed from ten to fifteen.
So, the next election cycle, the Hall finally took one actual, intentional decision on the matter: when they sent that year’s ballot out to voters, they also sent along a letter from Joe Morgan openly begging voters not to induct players with steroid ties. They weren’t willing to actually change their rules for an issue they claimed was important, they weren’t willing to forgo electing any of their own favorite candidates with responsibility for the supposed stain of the era, they weren’t willing to do any sort of work to research or take accountability for the era, they weren’t especially willing to take any sort of decisive action at all.
They just wanted it to quietly go away on its own, and when it wouldn’t (in no small part because of their own screw-ups indicating that the issue was actually a worthwhile topic to entertain), all they were ultimately willing to do was send a strongly-worded letter on their behalf telling voters “PLEASE just drop it”. And worst of all, it worked! Maybe it was the letter swaying some voters, maybe that two-year window was always going to be the biggest swing and there weren’t that many more gettable votes left. But either way, Bonds and Clemens stalled out, only picking up around 10% in their final five years on the BBWAA ballot.
I bring that all up, because the Hall’s leadership is once again trying to game its own system, instituting new rules this year and hoping that their second-order effects take care of the issue that they’re too cowardly to actually address head-on, even if it ends up harming other candidates along the way. The new Veterans Committee rules state that any candidate who doesn’t reach 5 votes on the ballot will not be added to the ballot the next time their era comes up for consideration*; additionally, any candidate who fails to hit that mark twice in a row is considered ineligible for future Veterans Committee votes.
*As a reminder, the current VC process is structured around rotating through three different pools of candidates, one each year. The current divisions are Classic Baseball (which covers anyone whose primary impact came from before 1980), Contemporary Players (which covers players after that 1980 cutoff), and Contemporary Non-Players (which covers managers, umpires, executives, or anyone else from the same time period).
What makes this rule an even bigger shame is that I think something in this direction could actually go a long way in fixing a different issue that the VC has slipped into lately, one that I’ve even written before! One of the Committee’s issues has been ignoring a ton of interesting candidates in order to keep running out choices who have had their cases discussed to death. At its worst moments, it’s felt like the only way to get the usual suspects out of the way (so that you can move on to discussing different underrated players) is to just give in and induct them
Of course, the downsides of this implementation are immediately apparent. Cycling out players on the ballot makes a lot of sense, but “permanent ineligibility” is a hell of a punishment for failing to meet the minimum threshold just two times, and applying that standard historically would wipe a lot of deserving players from the Hall’s ranks. Of course it’s going to have a similar sort of effect going forward, how could it not?
Especially given that five-vote minimum. Just keeping all eight players on the ballot eligible would eat up 40 votes, and there are only 48 total to go around (sixteen voters, with three slots each). That’s enough wiggle room to get one candidate just over the line for induction. Of course, if that top player gets in unanimously, at least one player will have to fall short; add a second inductee on top of that, and a whole bunch of other names will be dropping.
And given how packed some of these Veterans Committee ballots would get, that could be absolutely devastating. Just take last year’s slate for example. I raved at the time about how I would have voted for seven of the eight players; in the end, Dick Allen and Dave Parker were inducted, and Tommy John got seven votes. The other five candidates didn’t have their vote totals reported, but all of them fell below five votes and would be halfway to permanent ineligibility.
Whatever the merits are of switching out lagging players and getting new blood on the ballot, it’s severely outweighed by the possibility of permanently ending the candidacies of Luis Tiant, Ken Boyer, Vic Harris, and John Donaldson. I’m already worried about the odds for Fernando Valenzuela, who I was surprised to find last time had a strong case if you take into account his wider impact and post-playing days career in baseball. That kind of underrated or unusual candidate seems like the one who’s likely to suffer the most here. Shoot, I don’t even think Carlos Delgado has a particularly strong case for election, but declaring him permanently ineligible seems unnecessarily harsh! There’s no reason you need to go that far, you can just not put him on the next ballot and give someone else a try.
Of course, that’s not a real tradeoff they’re making. Nothing is tying those two sides together, and the Hall could easily just implement the rule as “one ballot off if you fall short” with no threat of ineligibility. The Hall’s governing body is just using the guise of a long-needed reform as an excuse to quietly put away candidates it doesn’t want to deal with anymore, rather than actually facing the issue directly. It’s an incredibly cowardly move even before getting into all of the unintended problems it’s going to cause.
The other two names on the ballot, Mattingly and Murphy, are even more frustrating to see here because they’re the exact type of candidates who probably should be given a rest (again if it weren’t for the whole “threat of ineligibility” thing). Maybe they aren’t the most over-discussed players (Gil Hodges, for example, shows up twenty different times on Adam Darowski and Graham Womack’s Veterans Committee Tracker in addition to his fifteen turns on the BBWAA ballot), but it’s not like either’s case has been ignored, either. Again, both appeared on all fifteen BBWAA ballots that they were eligible for, with at least a solid dozen each coming prior to that 2013 tsunami of candidates, on top of making all four Veterans Committee ballots (including this one) since they became eligible for that.
There’s no possible way you can call them overlooked as candidates, at least.* Nobody involved in the voting process at this point is unfamiliar with their cases, and most people who could induct them have had multiple opportunities to weigh in. Their numbers have been almost entirely stagnant, too. In fact, on the 2020 VC ballot, both dropped low enough to fall behind Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker. Those two players fell off the BBWAA ballots in their first three years, and both of them are textbook cases of “players who were overlooked at the time and deserve a second look now”. They did well enough to get their vote totals reported while Mattingly and Murphy failed to reach that level, and yet, Evans and Whitaker have yet to return to the VC committee while Murphy and Mattingly keep getting included.
*I could see "underrated" if you think voters haven't appreciated them enough and they deserve votes, but voters have absolutely looked at their cases!
I feel really bad about saying “maybe at least we’ll finally move on from Mattingly and Murphy”, because like I said earlier, I don’t think either are horrible additions to the Hall! Sometimes, it feels like somebody on the Hall of Fame’s board wants them in and has decided to keep adding them until it just kind of happens, which can feel frustrating. But it’s also not like the Hall has had issues doing that without interference from on high, either; in fact, it’s a big part of why the VC ballot has felt so calcified, at times. Regardless of whether it’s intentional or not, it isn’t Mattingly or Murphy’s fault they keep getting added to these ballots at the expense of less-discussed guys.
But in any case, I also don’t think they’re the ones who are going to get hit here; their last VC appearance in 2023 saw them finally do well enough to get their vote totals reported, likely in part because it was the first VC ballot with a large presence of controversial players like Bonds and Clemens. In fact, if you wanted to believe the Hall was interfering on Mattingly and Murphy’s behalf, that seems like a solid theory: that the board realized that they do best in voting when they’re directly compared to those steroid players, and so made sure they were here to be the ones to sponge up the support rather than any other non-PED player, like Whitaker or Evans.
Of course, votes will still be tight, and it may not be enough to get either of them over the line. The most likely outcome these rule shenanigans seems to be “the Hall gets an excuse to start sweeping steroid guys under the rug on what they pretend is a technicality, while also setting us up for Round #20 of Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy hanging around in neutral for the 2029 Veterans election”.
But on the other hand, the actual endgame there will still take some time (2029 will be the cycle Bonds and Clemens have to sit out, meaning 2032 will be the one where eligibility is actually on the line), even if the Hall doesn’t drag things out even longer. Is there anything even mandating that those two be included on that 2032 ballot? It’s not like there’s a lack of alternatives they could discuss in the meantime.
And yeah, seven years is not forever. But the Hall tinkers with the rules of the Veterans Committee so often these days that I’m not convinced that we’ll be operating on the same ruleset by then. There was at least one recent rule change that didn’t even last for the entire cycle of eras that were initially laid out before the entire system was scrapped and redone (there might have even been a second ruleset that failed to make an entire cycle too, and it’s just blended together in my memory).
As frustrating as the Hall is, part of me keeps thinking that it’s hard to stay too worked up when there’s a real chance that something stupid happens and this rule gets completely thrown out, possibly even before anyone can actually get hit with that permanent ban. Maybe one of the designated favorite candidates of the Hall’s board slips away, maybe an older player gets passed over at a key moment and it comes back to blow up in their faces, maybe it becomes clear that it makes electing players too much of a hassle and voters complain… It’s not hard to imagine a number of ways this could go wrong, and that’s just in the time it takes before any players actually become ineligible.
The underlying reasoning here is the real problem, and I’m not sure how to fix that in the short- or long-term, but this rule will probably be one of the shorter-term issues. It will be dumb to work around in the near future, and whatever follows it will probably also be dumb, but maybe the next step will be marginally less objectionable?
But just for the 2026 Veterans Committee Election, I think the end result will be that it flattens the votes a little. I still think Jeff Kent is going in, but I think the spread of votes will make a second inductee difficult. I wouldn’t be shocked if Bonds, Clemens, and Sheffield get removed from consideration for 2029, but maybe the voters will lash out unexpectedly too, and spread their votes in a way that prevents that. It can be hard to tell, especially since they have time to discuss amongst themselves before submitting their ballots.
We’ll see if the announcement of this year’s actual voters changes my thinking at all, though. In year’s past, I’ve usually added a quick, final piece once the Hall announces the actual voters, to see if we’re in for another Harold Baines situation. If you’d like to know about a piece like that going up in the next few days (edit: the voters were officially announced on Tuesday; I have started working on a follow-up, and should have it up before the announcement!), consider signing 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!)
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