Opening Day 2026 is fast approaching, but before we get there, I have one more major offseason piece to publish: my annual Future Hall of Fame Series! It feels like the last few editions have all been special occasions that beget nostalgia, like anniversaries or major milestones, but this year in contrast looks rather quaint in comparison; this entry isn’t a round number, and while one of this year’s two BBWAA inductees was once again a former inclusion in this series, it was Carlos Beltran, who already had a pretty solid case and was nearing the end of his career by the time he was featured here. There are still a few more guys on the ballot who retired too early for me to cover them here, but that number continues to drop every year. I’ll cover that when we get there, though. For now, let’s dive right in!
(Note: Once again, this piece got rather long, so I’ll be splitting it up into multiple parts, with the second half to follow next week. Be sure to check back for that! And if you’d like to be notified when that piece and the eventual pitcher pieces go live, a reminder that I also have an email list for Hot Corner Harbor that you can sign up for below!)
The Methodology
Before we start going over the players, let me give a quick explanation for how my system works. It’s a bit of a multi-step process.
First, I find the Median Hall of Fame Pace, to help give an idea of what a sort of generalized Hall of Fame hitter’s career “could” look like. That’s easy enough, just going through Baseball-Reference’s Stathead search, looking at every Hall of Fame position player, going age by age, and looking for the exact midpoint to find the median Wins Above Replacement for that age-season.* So, to use fake numbers for an example: if there were 25 Hall of Famers, we’d be looking for the WAR total of the 13th one, right in the middle, at age 23, then 24, then 25, and so on. Simple enough. These are the Medians that we’ll be comparing active players too; if a modern player is above that total, they have more WAR than half of the Hall of Famers did at the same age.
*Side note: since part of this series is to be predictive, I limit my numbers to just AL and NL stats, since it’s the most similar to the game today. Also, I only look for the median of Hall members who were active through that age, so anyone who debuted at, say, 23 isn’t included in the age 22 pool.
Second, we find the rough Hall of Fame chances for players above that Median at every age. To do that, I look at how many players in history have attained that median WAR total by that age. Then, I just compare that to the number of Hall of Famers. So, going back to our fake numbers, if there are 12 Hall of Famers above the Age 23 median, and 8 unelected players in history were above that total too, then we have (12 Hall of Famers) divided by (12 Hall members plus 8 non-Hall, or 20 total), giving us a 60% chance of players ahead of the Hall of Fame pace at that age actually going on to Cooperstown.
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Friday, March 13, 2026
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones Headline a Historic 2026 Hall of Fame Class, Plus What It Means Going Forward
For the third year in a row (and tenth time in the last twelve elections), the Baseball Writers Association of America has inducted multiple players into the Hall of Fame. For 2026, centerfielders Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones will be joining Veterans Committee pick Jeff Kent on the stage in Cooperstown this July. And behind them, we saw a lot of interesting developments with downballot candidates that will end up shaping the next few Hall of Fame ballots.
But first, let’s start with the inductees. First, it’s actually a little bit of a shock to see the writers inducting a centerfielder, let alone a pair of them simultaneously like Beltrán and Jones. The BBWAA had only inducted eight* of them period prior to today, with no overlaps in their election years. As Jayson Stark noted on social media, the writers had only added two center fielders total to the Hall’s ranks over the last 45 years combined (between Ken Griffey Jr. in 2018 and Kirby Puckett in 2001; you have to go back to Duke Snider in 1980 to find a third). The Veterans process had done some things over the years to help correct this, but on the whole, the position was probably underrepresented in Cooperstown on the whole.
*There is some flexibility here, given positions can change. For example, Andre Dawson (inducted in 2010) played his early days in center, and that’s where he accumulated the majority of his value. But he did play more games in right field by the end of his career, and that’s notably where he was during his 1987 MVP season. I’m going by what MLB and the Hall itself have been using here (picture taken from the MLB Network broadcast).
And even setting all of that aside, this is certainly a solid pair of players to be inducting! We’ll start with Beltrán, who cleared the 75% line for induction with ease, landing at 84.2% on his fourth ballot. The advanced stats side of the community has historically been a big supporter of his candidacy, with career WAR totals (70.0 according to Baseball-Reference, 67.4 by Fangraphs’ version) that traditionally indicate a very likely Hall of Famer.
Which makes it funny to note that by most traditional metrics, Beltrán still had a very strong case! Over 20 seasons with the Royals, Astros, Mets, Giants, Cardinals, Yankees, and Rangers, Carlos amassed 2725 hits, 435 home runs, 565 doubles, and 312 steals, all of which are impressive totals even before you get into the deeper stuff that makes his career even more legendary.
He’s one of just five players with 400 homers and 300 steals, and the only one who was a switch hitter. Those steals came at an 86.4% success rate, the lowest caught stealing rate for any player with 300 swipes. He had a great batting eye, giving him a .350 OBP and a 119 adjusted OPS+, meaning he was basically a center fielder who could hit like a first baseman.
Full voting results per the BBWAA:
— Ryan Thibodaux (@notmrtibbs.com) January 20, 2026 at 3:23 PM
[image or embed]
But first, let’s start with the inductees. First, it’s actually a little bit of a shock to see the writers inducting a centerfielder, let alone a pair of them simultaneously like Beltrán and Jones. The BBWAA had only inducted eight* of them period prior to today, with no overlaps in their election years. As Jayson Stark noted on social media, the writers had only added two center fielders total to the Hall’s ranks over the last 45 years combined (between Ken Griffey Jr. in 2018 and Kirby Puckett in 2001; you have to go back to Duke Snider in 1980 to find a third). The Veterans process had done some things over the years to help correct this, but on the whole, the position was probably underrepresented in Cooperstown on the whole.
*There is some flexibility here, given positions can change. For example, Andre Dawson (inducted in 2010) played his early days in center, and that’s where he accumulated the majority of his value. But he did play more games in right field by the end of his career, and that’s notably where he was during his 1987 MVP season. I’m going by what MLB and the Hall itself have been using here (picture taken from the MLB Network broadcast).
And even setting all of that aside, this is certainly a solid pair of players to be inducting! We’ll start with Beltrán, who cleared the 75% line for induction with ease, landing at 84.2% on his fourth ballot. The advanced stats side of the community has historically been a big supporter of his candidacy, with career WAR totals (70.0 according to Baseball-Reference, 67.4 by Fangraphs’ version) that traditionally indicate a very likely Hall of Famer.
Which makes it funny to note that by most traditional metrics, Beltrán still had a very strong case! Over 20 seasons with the Royals, Astros, Mets, Giants, Cardinals, Yankees, and Rangers, Carlos amassed 2725 hits, 435 home runs, 565 doubles, and 312 steals, all of which are impressive totals even before you get into the deeper stuff that makes his career even more legendary.
He’s one of just five players with 400 homers and 300 steals, and the only one who was a switch hitter. Those steals came at an 86.4% success rate, the lowest caught stealing rate for any player with 300 swipes. He had a great batting eye, giving him a .350 OBP and a 119 adjusted OPS+, meaning he was basically a center fielder who could hit like a first baseman.
Saturday, January 10, 2026
The Big 2026 Hall of Fame Ballot Preview!
It’s been a month since we got our last big piece of news on the 2026 Hall of Fame election, that the first member of this year’s class of inductees would be Veterans Committee choice Jeff Kent. In the time since, we’ve gone fullbore on the main question of Hall of Fame Season: who the Baseball Writers will induct off the main ballot. However, the actual ballots are technically all submitted (the deadline for that was the start of the new year), and there’s not really going to be any real major updates to cover there until the actual announcement on January 20th.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren't other things to write about. As usual, the Ballot Tracker team is hard at work documenting and tallying up the results in real time as individual voters reveal their ballots. They were already at over 100 votes counted before the clock struck 2026, and have only continued to grow from there, currently sitting at 152 tracked ballots. That’s an impressive number, and if you’re a long-time follower of this type of news, you might know that there are already some things that we can intuit about where the final results might wind up, especially with so many votes being public knowledge.
(As a note, all stats in this piece are either from the Ballot Tracker, or Baseball-Reference. Ballot Tracker numbers are as of Friday evening.)
Except… there’s a lot more uncertainty on that front this year. Notably, we actually don’t know what percentage of the vote we already know. Last year’s election closed with 394 votes on record, which would put us at over 30% of the vote for this year. But the 2026 election is also a special case where we can’t just take last year’s total and slap a “give or take 10 votes” on it.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Hall of Fame’s voting rules, voters must have written for 10 years at an accredited outlet for the BBWAA to give them a say. Usually, we can count on a fairly stable churn, with some voters retiring or aging out each year, but getting offset by a steady trickle of new ten-year veterans. That’s not the case this year, though; the BBWAA was extremely slow to recognize online outlets, which you might have realized over the last few years as longtime veterans of major sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus only just began to get their ballots.
This year represents another major wave of ten-year “newcomers” from online sites, the biggest among them being MLB.com. Yeah, for some reason, it took the BBWAA until the middle of the 2010s to officially recognize sportswriters from the league’s site. I don’t get why it took so long either, nor do I understand why they didn’t retroactively award credit to those writers for their years working there prior to that decision.* But I guess what’s important is that it’s finally not a problem.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren't other things to write about. As usual, the Ballot Tracker team is hard at work documenting and tallying up the results in real time as individual voters reveal their ballots. They were already at over 100 votes counted before the clock struck 2026, and have only continued to grow from there, currently sitting at 152 tracked ballots. That’s an impressive number, and if you’re a long-time follower of this type of news, you might know that there are already some things that we can intuit about where the final results might wind up, especially with so many votes being public knowledge.
(As a note, all stats in this piece are either from the Ballot Tracker, or Baseball-Reference. Ballot Tracker numbers are as of Friday evening.)
Except… there’s a lot more uncertainty on that front this year. Notably, we actually don’t know what percentage of the vote we already know. Last year’s election closed with 394 votes on record, which would put us at over 30% of the vote for this year. But the 2026 election is also a special case where we can’t just take last year’s total and slap a “give or take 10 votes” on it.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Hall of Fame’s voting rules, voters must have written for 10 years at an accredited outlet for the BBWAA to give them a say. Usually, we can count on a fairly stable churn, with some voters retiring or aging out each year, but getting offset by a steady trickle of new ten-year veterans. That’s not the case this year, though; the BBWAA was extremely slow to recognize online outlets, which you might have realized over the last few years as longtime veterans of major sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus only just began to get their ballots.
This year represents another major wave of ten-year “newcomers” from online sites, the biggest among them being MLB.com. Yeah, for some reason, it took the BBWAA until the middle of the 2010s to officially recognize sportswriters from the league’s site. I don’t get why it took so long either, nor do I understand why they didn’t retroactively award credit to those writers for their years working there prior to that decision.* But I guess what’s important is that it’s finally not a problem.
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