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
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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.)
In truth, the total sum of his career was probably a little less than those offensive numbers suggested, especially given that he played in an offense-heavy era. His batting average was fine for his era, and his on-base skills were a little weak for what you’d normally expect of a power hitter, but he was still good enough to rank as one of the best dozen or so offensively at his position of all-time. His defense was pretty rough, but never so awful that teams felt the need to move him to the outfield or first base.
Add it all together, and you get 55.4 bWAR/56.0 fWAR, That’s not an overwhelming case for Cooperstown, but it does make him one of the twenty or so best second basemen of all-time. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s about how many second basemen are in Cooperstown. I can see why writers might have been hesitant to go for him on the first set of ballots, but as a Veterans Committee choice? He’s perfectly reasonable, and fits right in.
Moreover, he feels like he was perfectly designed to appeal to the Veterans Committee voters. The group has generally lagged behind the BBWAA in how it handles players. Kent’s total package might have been underwhelming to more modern voters, but there was a lot for a more traditionally-minded set to appreciate. Big historic feats like those home run and RBI records play well with them, and being one-dimensional can easily be overlooked. It also helps that he has a real argument that the overcrowded BBWAA ballots of the 2010s killed his momentum, and the VC has so far been very sympathetic to those cases, maybe even more than any of us even realized (more on that in a second).
So yeah, it makes sense that Kent sailed in on his first time before the Veterans Committee. Candidates needed to get 12 of the possible 16 votes to get inducted, with voters each getting 3 spots on their ballot (giving us a total of 48 potential votes). Kent got 14, meaning he even had some room to spare. It was just like I predicted.
What was not just like I predicted was everything after Kent. Carlos Delgado was the first runner up with 9 votes, and Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy each got 6 votes. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela each finished below 5 votes, which means that, under the new rules that went into effect this year, they’re unable to appear on the next Contemporary Era ballot (currently scheduled for the 2029 elections), and if they fall under 5 votes the time after that, they’ll be considered permanently ineligible for further consideration. Yes, it’s a stupid rule, I already went into that in Part 2 of my preview if you'd like to hear even more.
Adding it all together, we have 35 votes publicly revealed. That’s roughly in line with what we’ve been seeing lately, just glancing at Adam Darowski’s site the compiles past VC votes. The reporting cutoffs make it impossible to confirm, but from what we can see, the new rule didn’t really seem to change the voters’ usual pattern. Maybe some individual voters changed how they voted, but it doesn’t show up in the aggregate.
This doesn’t seem terribly surprising, in a lot of ways. The rule pretty clearly seemed designed to get players with ties to performance-enhancing drugs out of the way, and sure enough, that’s three of the four below the line here. I’m a little surprised Fernando Valenzuela is down here, too, I thought he had a good number of things going for him (which I covered back in Part 1). I suppose that I did conclude that he could either finish second or at the bottom of the ballot, since there were so many unknowns, so the result is in line with that. I think that what’s confusing me is that he finished so low given what was happening at the top of the ballot.
Because let’s be honest, after “this ballot was designed to get steroid guys out of the way”, my second-biggest hunch was “this set was picked to get a second ‘80s star in the Hall of Fame”. Valenzuela had a lot going his way, while Mattingly and Murphy seemed to be showing momentum on their last VC ballot in 2023. Surely, with only one “obvious” pick, three PED players who seem to have been added specifically to be ignored, and another guy who was one-and-done in the BBWAA voting, where else would those potential votes go?
As it turns out, the answer was “actually, they’ll mostly go to Carlos Delgado”. I’m going to be honest, not in a thousand guesses would I have come up with that result. Delgado got the shortest write-up in my original preview article, because even after looking into it a little more, I still wasn’t sure what exactly his case for Cooperstown was.
Or, perhaps to put it a different way: I can imagine Carlos Delgado in Cooperstown. Like I originally concluded, he wouldn’t be the worst choice in there, probably not even the worst choice of our lifetimes. And he seems like a nice enough guy, I certainly don’t mind giving borderline guys extra credit for things like good character. But that aside, I do think he was easily the weakest choice on the eight-man ballot. So given the three votes per voter limits, I’m mostly confused that nine different voters liked Delgado enough to give him one of their three spots?
I’ve been thinking about it basically since the moment that it was announced, and I don’t feel like I’m much closer to figuring it out. Right now, I only have two theories. The first one is just based on Delgado’s home run total; Delgado had 473, which isn’t that far from 500. I mean, “a big home run total” was a large component of Kent’s induction. And I think it was part of why Fred McGriff was inducted by the VC a few years ago; he had 493, and when you factor in some time lost to the 1994-95 strike, you can see voters considering him as an “honorary 500 home run club” guy.
Delgado is not really that close, and the time he missed to the ‘94-95 strike was from before he was playing regularly; there probably weren’t 27 missing homers to take him the rest of the way. Maybe voters felt bad that his first ballot was so crowded (14 Hall of Famers and counting plus all of the steroid guys, as a starting point) that he couldn’t even reach 5% of the vote? That would explain a few votes, but not 9 out of 16. I guess the voters were more likely hinging on believing that he deserved a lot of extra credit for playing clean during the Steroid Era? It’s kind of jumbled, but I can see it, I guess. It’s pretty far from where my thinking for Hall of Fame cases goes, but that would be the norm for the Veterans Committee.
The only other theory that I’ve developed is that Delgado was particularly well-served by being lined up next to Mattingly and Murphy. During my preview, I implied that I thought the Hall was trying to set one or both of them up for induction this time. Both have been lingering in election limbo for twenty-odd vote cycles now, not particularly close to induction but not doing poorly enough to get dropped.
Since both are well-regarded and the ends of their BBWAA ballot runs lined up with the beginning of the wave of PED guys, a lot of anti-steroid voters loved to tout them as the ideal counter-picks. And sure enough, their best performances in voting yet came on the 2023 Contemporary Ballot, when they got lined up next to Bonds and Clemens on a small ballot. It’s not difficult to imagine the Hall of Fame thinking they could line that all up again this time and get a better result for them.
Their problem: you can sure as hell try to lead Hall voters to a conclusion, but they might just ignore your efforts, or even spite you for trying. I would have gone with Valenzuela as my non-PED spite vote in that case, but he’s a starting pitcher with a non-standard case, things that have proven to be challenges for all sorts of Hall voters lately (but especially VC voters).
And so, in a total shocker, we instead get Carlos Delgado, three votes shy of induction to the Hall of Fame. Take a look at this Fangraphs dashboard comparing the three of them. Delgado has more homers, doubles, RBI, runs, walks… And you know, if people keep arguing that Murphy and Mattingly are Hall of Famers, then why would the guy who was a much better hitter than either of them be a bad choice?
There are big problems with those comparisons, of course, hence the similar WAR totals. Delgado played in a much better offensive environment, so the gaps between their batting aren’t as big as the raw numbers might seem. The context-adjusted wRC+ has Delgado at 135, compared to 124 for Mattingly and 119 for Murphy; still better, but not as much as his 100-point lead in OPS might make you think.
Also, batting is only part of the game; Delgado played first base like a guy who was moved there off of catcher, and ran the bases like a catcher (probably because he was, in fact, converted off of catcher in the minors once it was clear he wouldn’t stick there). Mattingly, meanwhile, was a good fielder at first base, actually deserving of his Gold Gloves. And Murphy’s Gold Gloves might have been a little overstated… but he was still playing center field competently, which is still a big step up from first base!
Of course, for as many times as they’ve been on the ballot, Mattingly and Murphy’s Hall cases are still fairly weak. They usually hinged on being high-peak guys (bolstered by Mattingly’s MVP award and Murphy’s pair of MVPs) with a lot of extra credit for character. Delgado didn’t have as high of a peak, but also didn’t collapse as badly as those two, so the end result leaves you in a similar place. It probably wasn’t fair that they hung around for fifteen years on the BBWAA ballot while Delgado only got 3.8% of the vote and fell off on his first ballot (especially since it came at the peak of the ballot logjam), but that still doesn’t really make any of them great choices.
This seems like a real case of “the voters didn’t know where to throw their spare votes, since they didn’t want to vote for Bonds/Clemens/Sheffield and don’t get Valenzuela’s case”. Which brings me back to another point that I was making in Part 2 of my preview. Back in the 2020 VC election, Mattingly and Murphy failed to reach reporting level, falling behind Dwight Evans (8 votes) and Lou Whitaker (6 votes). Neither of them has appeared on the ballot since, key examples of a real problem that has plagued the Hall’s Veteran voters in recent years.
While the ballot continues to waste spots so they can continue to not come to a conclusion on Mattingly or Murphy*, or stamp their feet about steroid users, there are A TON of great, actually interesting and overlooked candidates that they’re passing over to have these tired debates yet again. It looks like this year’s ballot would have been a great opportunity for Whitaker or Evans to build off their momentum from last time. Or failing that, you could have finally given a second look to Kenny Lofton, or Jim Edmonds, or Johan Santana, or Bret Saberhagen, or David Cone, or Keith Hernandez, or… I could keep coming up with names for a while, especially if we get flexible with that 1980 cutoff.
*Just a tangent, but I can’t imagine it feels particularly great for either of them either.
Instead… we got this. It’s been obvious for a while that this election wasn’t going to fix everything wrong with the Hall or the Veterans Committee. That new rule was a pretty clear sign months ago, and even the announced ballot had a lot of issues. But even if I knew that I wasn’t happy with it, I figured that somebody would at least be getting what they wanted, whether it was fans of ‘80s baseball, or Yankees/Braves/Dodgers fans, or even the Hall itself.
Instead, we got a classic “nobody’s happy” compromise. I guess it’s kind of funny that, even when they held all of the cards, the Hall couldn’t even engineer the election that its leadership seemed to want. But that still causes a lot of problems; like I said during the preview, the pattern for the last two decades or so has been the Hall taking actions to try and force what it wants and getting nothing instead. They want the PED guys off the ballot, so they keep making it harder for them to get inducted but also hurt everyone else. They want to push certain candidates to make up for that issue, and can’t even do it right, and so nothing happens and no one benefits.
I don’t even know where we go from here. I guess Bonds, Clemens, and Sheffield won’t be around next time; will they try rotating in Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro? Are they just going to keep using those three slots to slowly cross every steroid-linked name off their list? Are they going to bring Murphy and Mattingly back yet again to hit 50% of the vote? Will Delgado come back, or will he go the way of Whitaker and Evans? Are we going to get even more stupid rule changes along the way?
Anyway, none of that really matters for a few more years. Next year’s election will focus on Contemporary Non-Players, so start brainstorming managers and executives you’d like to see, I guess (Dusty Baker? Bruce Bochy?). And even before that, we’ve got Jeff Kent’s induction and the entire Baseball Writers election for this year to look forward to! I’ll keep looking at the latter up until the announcement in January (as well as a whole bunch of other offseason topics), so feel free to subscribe to the mailing list below if you’d like to be notified when new writing goes live!
Great wrap up.
ReplyDeleteThe baseball hof is much too “political “. I believe Murphy and mattingly had their chance and they should NOT be on the next ballot. Give other players a chance!