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.
*I guess the one “positive” here is that it's a good reminder of just how desperately behind the times the Hall was even a decade ago. Even when looking at how confusing and nonsensical their processes can still be now, it was somehow markedly worse in recent memory, and it can be easy to forget that!
And as a result, we’re seeing a pretty unprecedented wave of new voters flooding into the tallies. Already, the Ballot Tracker has counted 30 new voters this year, and that total will surely continue to rise the rest of the way. It’s a challenge to say how unprecedented this is, since specific voters were generally not accounted for prior to the social media era of voting, and even the current Ballot Trackers can only keep these notes for writers who publicly make their situation known.
Just did a quick check on the total number of votes per ballot going back to 1980. Obvious we'd miss churn, but only 9 years saw a net growth larger than +15, and a couple of those came after years of mysterious drops in the total, making me think at least some were past voters coming back.
— Theo Gerome (@hotcornerharbor.com) December 30, 2025 at 3:43 PM
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But just looking at net changes in the electorate, there have only been net increases of double-digits fifteen times since 1980, and a lot of those came after years of large net decreases, which makes me think that were old voters returning rather than totally new voters. And you can count net changes of +30 or more on one hand. Maybe there was a similar wave of newcomers another year masked by a corresponding set of de-credentialings or departures. Our only “real” comparisons are likely from the early days of Cooperstown when rules were still being established in real time. All signs point to this being basically unprecedented in modern Hall voting, and we really have no idea where our final count of new voters will land, either.
The other major issue undergirding our understanding of the voting process is that this year’s ballot is actually a major anomaly, in a lot of ways. For years, we had been stuck in a never-ending cavalcade of ahistorically packed ballots. There had of course been crowded elections in the past, but starting in 2013 when the bulk of the big steroid era names started reaching eligibility, the problem reached new heights.
The modern Hall Voting process could accommodate a year or two of ten or more big names, but it could not really handle that combined with the stagnation of many of those names returning year-after-year AND a continuing influx of even more solid candidates. The artificial 10-vote limit on voters would often prove to be an issue for a few years, but for over half a decade, you could consistently fill two full ballots with quite reasonable Hall picks. And of course, adding to the problem was that the Hall itself didn’t seem particularly interested in solving that issue, for a variety of reasons…
But eventually, the problem did finally sort itself out, in a way. After about ten years, we started to see a lot of the big “hanging-around” names age off, but that still didn’t completely fix that issue. To use a metaphor, the pipe clog was gone, but the sink was still full of water and the tap was still running.* The Bonds-Clemens-etc. group may have aged off after 2022, but there were still a lot of solid candidates with a lot of momentum built up plus enough new blood coming in (including four first ballot picks and three more who debuted at 20% of the vote or higher) to make the 2023 to 2025 ballots pretty crowded by any pre-2013 context.
*And, given Jeff Kent and Carlos Delgado’s performance on the Veterans Committee ballot this year, it’s probably fair to say that we’ll still be feeling some reverberations of this period for a little longer, even if the immediate problem has been resolved.
In contrast, the 2026 Cooperstown ballot is the first one in ages that I think would actually qualify as “light on candidates”. I recognize that I tend to fall on the “Bigger Hall of Fame” side of arguments, but this is still the first time in ages where I don’t feel at all challenged to work around the ten-candidate limit. After the last fifteen years, it’s actually kind of a weird place to be; I remember there occasionally being ballots that looked like this back in the 2000s, but it’s been so long since we had actually one that it feels bizarre to be dealing with it in practice.
And of course, the electorate has changed so much in the intervening decade and a half (thanks to both natural turnover and the Hall’s own rule changes) that it’s difficult to even compare the two scenarios. Even the “relatively light” ballots of the late 2000s felt different because they were still packed with guys like Jeff Bagwell and Bert Blyleven and Tim Raines, all of whom felt weirdly stagnant at times despite their relatively staggering cases.
Really, the more I reflect on that era, the more alien it feels. For example, I think Chase Utley should be in Cooperstown, but it at least makes sense to me that he was not elected immediately given that his case has some traditional pitfalls like a relatively short career, underappreciated defense, a lack of milestones, and so on. You need time to sell some voters on guys like that (and thankfully, that appears to be happening now!).
But his slow build towards induction on the current ballots makes way more sense to me than 2000s BBWAA voters piddling around for fourteen years trying to figure out whether the pitcher who’s fifth all-time in strikeouts is good or not. That feels like it should just be intuitive; of course that sounds like Hall of Fame material! I tried to imagine a similar case to illustrate how obvious a miss that was and came up with “not immediately inducting the guy who’s fifth all-time in doubles”... except the BBWAA voters of that era also did that! It was truly a baffling time.
Anyway, all of that is basically to say that we’re seeing a lot of uncertainty, especially for the Ballot Tracker era! But in spite of that, I think we’re seeing some major changes shaping up in the voting already! So let’s go through the early returns, and maybe get a better idea of how things might go from there.
At the top of the list, we have the runner-up of the 2025 Election, Carlos Beltrán. Last year, in attempt #3 (of a potential 10), Beltrán landed at 70.3% of the vote, less than 5% (only 19 votes) short of what he needed for induction. It was a little disappointing, but again, it was kind of a crowded year (with three inductions already, between first ballot guys Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia and final chance guy Billy Wagner). There was no reason to believe that Beltrán wouldn’t make up that difference this year, with a much more open field.
And so far, the early returns back that up! Carlos is tracking at 88.8% through the first 152 ballots. That’s far enough above the 75% line that I feel pretty confident saying this is his year already. Maybe you could argue that his steep fall-off with late ballot revealers and private voters last year is reason for concern, but a) that’s not guaranteed to repeat this year (indeed, it’s likely that gap actually closes this time); and b) even with that, 2025 Beltrán still only dropped from 80.5% down to 70.3%.
He needs to be actively losing voters somewhere to be falling short this time, which seems to be the exact opposite of what’s happening so far. He’s gone 30-for-30 with new and returning voters so far (on top of 9 voters who have flipped from no to yes, giving him a net change of +8 so far). If you wanted to go see Carlos Beltrán on the stage in Cooperstown this summer, you’re probably safe to start booking your tickets already.
The more interesting edge case this time is the returning runner-up-to-the-runner-up, Andruw Jones. Last year, in his eighth showing on the ballot, Jones finished 35 votes shy of induction at 66.2%. Two more tries makes it very likely Jones goes in before aging off the BBWAA ballot, but the big question is “Will the big year be 2026, or does he need to do this one more time next year?”
Can Andruw pick up 8.8% in one year? He had a one-year swing that big in the past two elections, but he did pick up nearly 17 points going from 2022 to 2023. In theory, big jumps like that become more difficult as the easiest voters to swing get converted to your cause, which could explain the smaller gains for 2024 and 2025, but I think it’s also tied to how crowded the ballots were those years. Again, he was dealing with four first ballot guys and the homestretch pushes for both Todd Helton and Billy Wagner. That’s a lot of players who had priority, whereas this year it’s just Beltrán starting ahead of him.
Andruw’s early returns seem to be leaning towards the more favorable outcome at the moment, too. Through 152 ballots, he’s at 82.2%, which is about 10 points ahead of both where he was through 130 ballots last year and where he finished pre-announcement tracking. Even if he sees another ~6 point drop off to his final results, that’s still over the induction line with a little wiggle room.* And while we’re at it, Jones is a net +11 on flipping voters to his case, and 28 of 31 new-and-returning voters have checked his name. That 35 vote shortfall can be tricky to overcome, but right now, Jones looks like he’ll make it.
*While we’re on the subject, the highest pre-announcement tracking we’ve seen from a player who ultimately didn’t make it that year was 80.5%, from Carlos Beltrán last year. There’s always a chance we see something new, but that’s not a bad rough baseline to keep in mind for now.
Beltrán and Jones are really the only potential BBWAA inductees for 2026, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t also interesting things happening down the ballot behind them. In fact, given that Andruw has a little bit of a buffer at the moment, third place is probably more interesting to discuss than either of the top two spots right now. Chase Utley finished in sixth place on last year’s ballot, falling just shy of 40% of the vote in his second election. In that sense, it’s not a surprise that he’s tracking in third place so far.
The surprise is that he’s been doing really well so far. Right now, he’s hovering right around two-thirds of the vote at 66.4%, a total that’s historically guaranteed eventual induction. And he’s been consistently around that mark for a while now; he hasn’t dropped below 60% of the vote in over 100 ballots now, crossing that line around the 30 vote mark and never looking back. His net +13 flipped voters so far is impressive, as is his 27-for-31 rate with new and returning voters.
Obviously, he’s not going to make it to the stage this year since he’s still below the 75% rate needed for induction. And realistically, he’s definitely not finishing above 60% in the final result either. Jumping 26 points in one year would be absolutely historic, even better than what we saw Larry Walker pull off in his historic push to induction a few years ago. Utley pulling that off without any external factors pushing him along (like Walker being on the precipice of induction and about to age off the ballot) doesn’t make any sense.
But part of the issue here is that the voters who reveal their ballots (especially before the actual announcement) tend to be the leading edge of Hall voting. Walker was tracking even better than 26 points in those big years, and there’s actually a bit of a history of big jumps among early-revealing voters being followed by late-revealing and private voters seeing jumps in subsequent elections. Utley may fall off to something around 50-55% when the final numbers come in, but that in and of itself would be a big deal with a lot of future potential. We probably aren’t too far off from a Chase Utley Hall of Fame induction.
The size of Utley’s increase is impressive, but it’s not a huge surprise. He did jump 10 points last year on just his second ballot, after all. If you want to see movement that’s much more of a surprise, just look behind him: Félix Hernández is currently fourth on the ballot at 57.9%, while Andy Pettitte is right on his tail at 56.6%.
When he debuted on the ballot last year, I was a little concerned that King Félix might fail to reach 5% and fall off the ballot. He certainly wouldn’t be the first interesting candidate in recent years to go one-and-done before getting a fair hearing for his case (from recent catcher framing wizards Brian McCann and Russell Martin, to ballot crowding victims like Kenny Lofton and Lance Berkman, to Hernández’s spiritual predecessor Johan Santana), but in the end, he made it to just over 20% and held on.
Staying on the ballot doesn’t necessarily guarantee that voters will eventually flock to your case though, even when you reach 20%. But not only is King Félix swaying voters so far, he’s doing it at a pretty historic rate: so far, 31 different voters who voted “no” on him last year have come over to his cause, while only 1 has defected. A net change of +30 is already one of the single best performances in the ballot tracking era… except that we still have over 150 more voters left to reveal their ballots, with a third or more of them dropping before the official results.
Net gained/lost votes through 109 ballots (~25.5% of the vote): Félix +23 Pettitte +14 Pedroia +11 Utley +11 Abreu +10 Wright +8 Beltrán +7 Andruw +7 Rollins +7 Buehrle +6 A-Rod +5 K-Rod +5 Manny +3 Vizquel +1 Hunter +1 And in case you're wondering:
— Ryan Thibodaux (@notmrtibbs.com) December 31, 2025 at 1:51 PM
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Again, that new wave of voters makes things a little more complicated to predict where we’ll end up, but it’s pretty obvious that Hernández is looking at a historic ballot finish this year, even if he ends far away from induction this year. Also, speaking of new voters, they're going for Félix at a rate just better than 75%, another good sign that this is potentially the start of a run towards induction.
The Pettitte performance is shocking in its own way, despite some similar broad strokes to their cases. Obviously, both are starting pitchers who performed similarly in the 2025 voting (Pettitte landed at 27.9%, a career best for him) and look like they’ll finish pretty close once again this year. However, last year was Pettitte’s seventh time on the BBWAA ballot, which obviously has major implications on the long-term outlook for his case.
Like I said with Utley, there will almost certainly be a fall off for both of them in the final results. Even if they close out the pre-announcement reveals in the 55-to-60% range, post-announcement reveals and private voters are usually stingier with every candidate. And because momentum is a factor in swaying voters, their drops will probably be even steeper than the ones Utley will see, since those groups will probably be voting closer to last year’s 20-to-25% range. However, pre-announcement votes are still far and away the biggest part of the electorate at this point, so both players are probably looking at 10 or even 20 point improvements over their 2025 results.
A big ballot shift like that, let alone two of them, seems to indicate that something bigger is happening, so what’s going on here under the hood? I think I have a pretty full answer here actually, as I wrote an entire series a few years ago on Rethinking Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers. I’m still pretty proud of it, and think it will explain everything for anyone who wants the full history and numbers behind it. (And in an especially prescient move, I even highlighted Félix’s then-upcoming Hall case in the final part, and how it might serve as a bit of a turning point in the discussion!)
For anyone who doesn’t want all of the details, though, I’ll try to summarize the findings here: essentially, the Hall of Fame has been struggling to induct starting pitchers over the last three or so decades. It becomes really obvious when you look at the numbers; essentially, the Hall of Fame has historically inducted not just your legends of the game (for example, Walter Johnson or Bob Gibson or Tom Seaver), but also a healthy mix of second-tier aces (say, Carl Hubbell and Whitey Ford and Don Drysdale) and high-peak stars with short careers (like Dizzy Dean or Sandy Koufax or Catfish Hunter).
But starting in the 1990s or so, that changed. They could still induct the absolutely legendary starting pitchers like Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson or Pedro Martinez, when those guys fell into their lap. But those other starters were left out in the cold, even as they continued to induct the equivalents for position players and relievers. People have remarked about the Hall needing to adjust to understand modern day starting pitchers and how different the role has become recently, but pitching was changing long before the 2010s. Arguably, some voters were still trying to evaluate starters based on the days of four-man rotations and no bullpens or DHs well after those days were over, into the ‘90s and 2000s.
And it’s fitting that Hernández is the one at the forefront of these shifts, since his 2010 AL Cy Young win marked another major shift in pitcher evaluation. If you weren’t sold on my hypothesis that the BBWAA’s evaluations of pitching have been lagging behind for some time now, that seems like a useful contextualization to remember. That was only a decade and a half ago, and Hernández still missed a quarter of the first-place votes that year despite leading the league in ERA and innings and taking a close second in strikeouts and WHIP.* A lot of those voters who refused to move beyond Pitcher Wins back then are still around and voting for the Hall!
*Even funnier, the guys who beat him in those two stats finished fifth and seventh in the vote, respectively. The three guys immediately behind Félix in the vote did worse in every one of those stats, but did manage between 19 and 21 wins, compared to his 13-12 record.
What makes me think this is part of a wider reconsideration of starting pitching rather than a Félix-specific phenomenon is Andy Pettitte. Pettitte had been stagnating pretty hard in his first seven years on the ballot, debuting at 9.9% in 2019 and not crossing the 20% mark until last year’s election. But so far this winter, he’s kept pace with King Félix. Some of it is undoubtedly the emptier ballot, but I think it also makes sense as part of that belated updating of Hall standards. Compare Pettitte to aforementioned second-ballot pick Whitey Ford, for instance, and he fits right in. It makes sense that the higher-peak Hernández would be the one to lead the way in that push, but Pettitte also seems well-positioned to benefit from that updated understanding.
Of course, Pettitte also has a ton of caveats to his candidacy. As mentioned, this is already his eighth election; even if he manages to finish at 50%, that final 25% would be a huge lift for just two elections. Also, his ties to HGH mean that he’ll likely start running into the same 65% ceiling that stymied Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Gary Sheffield. But if he leads to more pitchers down the line getting a fair shake on the ballot, I would still count that as a win.
There’s some interesting things going on down the ballot below them, but most of it is just iterations on the themes we’ve already seen. Alex Rodridguez and Manny Ramirez are next in voting right now, at 47.4% and 42.8%. Again, some fall off is likely there, but neither player has ever reached 40% before, so this is still uncharted territory. This is Manny’s final time on the ballot before aging off*, so that will be another ballot spot cleared up for next year. Honestly, given the relatively open ballot, this actually seems like an underwhelming final push for him so far. A-Rod might continue to push above 50% from here, but it still feels like a long way from here to that 66% ceiling he’ll likely face.
*And of course, the Veterans Committee has been even less welcoming towards players with PED ties, so wherever he lands will likely remain his high point in voting for the foreseeable future.
Bobby Abreu is at 38.8% on what will be his seventh ballot. That actually is impressive, given that he still hasn’t reached 20% before. I don’t know that his chances at induction are great, given that he’ll still going to need to make up a lot of ground in his final three years. But I’ve made the case before that he actually has some interesting credentials, and he could start the next ballot as the clear best outfielder on the ballot if both Beltrán and Jones go in this year (and with Manny aging off a given). Next year is another light ballot too, meaning that he might even be able to string together two big elections back-to-back.
It’s still a long way to go, and with his last two ballots actually being a little packed again, he’s going to need a lot of luck the rest of the way. But even if he falls short with the BBWAA, some good final results here might also set him up for a favorable hearing from the Veterans voters; that Carlos Delgado performance on this year’s ballot makes me think that may be a viable lane for players like Abreu going forward. I’m actually very curious to see where he lands this time, there are a lot of interesting variables in play and I’m not sure what to expect going forward right now.
The last player trending above 30% right now is Cole Hamels, who is looking like he’ll be the only 2026 ballot debut to stick around for a second election. This is my third piece of evidence that we’re seeing a wider consideration of starting pitchers. I was worried last year that Félix Hernández might go one-and-done, but I figured his strong peak might get him a second look. And in that final part of my “Rethinking Hall of Fame Starters” Series, I proposed Cy Young Shares as a way to bridge the gap between eras; with a dominant Cy Young season and a pair of runner-up finishes to his name, that’s one method that serves King Félix quite well!
Hamels, in contrast, was always a little overlooked in Awards voting. There’s not really one amazing season where he should have won, though; it’s more to “he probably could have finished top-three once or twice, and gotten back-end votes a little more often”, which is kind of underwhelming as an argument. And yet… Hamels’ brand of consistent success added up over the years. Just compare his overall numbers to Hernández’s:
| Rk | Player | WAR | W | From | To | Age | W | L | Dec | ERA | G | GS | CG | SHO | SV | IP | H | R | ER | HR | BB | IBB | SO | HBP | BK | WP | BF | ERA+ | FIP | WHIP | H9 | HR9 | BB9 | SO9 | SO/BB | WAR | WAA | Pos | Team | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cole Hamels | 57.9 | 163 | 2006 | 2020 | 22-36 | 163 | 122 | .572 | 285 | 3.43 | 423 | 422 | 17 | 7 | 0 | 2698.0 | 2424 | 1103 | 1027 | 310 | 767 | 43 | 2560 | 100 | 14 | 57 | 11115 | 123 | 3.68 | 1.183 | 8.1 | 1.0 | 2.6 | 8.5 | 3.34 | 57.9 | 35.9 | 1/H | ATL,CHC,PHI,TEX |
| 2 | Félix Hernández | 49.9 | 169 | 2005 | 2019 | 19-33 | 169 | 136 | .554 | 305 | 3.42 | 419 | 418 | 25 | 11 | 0 | 2729.2 | 2487 | 1157 | 1037 | 264 | 805 | 16 | 2524 | 105 | 7 | 156 | 11284 | 117 | 3.52 | 1.206 | 8.2 | 0.9 | 2.7 | 8.3 | 3.14 | 49.9 | 24.5 | 1 | SEA |
I knew intuitively that their numbers wouldn’t be that far off, but it wasn’t until now that I realized just how close they actually are in most major categories. In that sense, it’s not really surprising that some Hernández voters looked at Hamels and said “well, why not him too?” I think any case for “Hernandez, but not Hamels” basically has to hinge on some combination of High Peak and Award Recognition, but the difference so far this year might also just come down to Félix’s one-year advantage on the ballot. It will be interesting to see if their year-to-year movement tracks each other, going forward.
As you might expect in a weaker ballot year, we also have a number of players hanging around in the 20-30% range, including Mark Burhle, Dustin Pedroia, Jimmy Rollins, and David Wright… but we’re also at the point where their numbers may still shift a lot from later voters, so we’ll hold off on reading into those results for now. Even at this stage, I think we can say that all of them will probably hit career highs on the ballot this year and return for the 2027 election.
That’s basically where we stand, ten days away from the announcement. It’s possible that we’ll see a lot more ballot reveals and movement in that time, but I’d still say that Carlos Beltrán’s place on the Cooperstown stage this summer is secure. Andruw Jones’s place beside him is more in question (it’s funny how that somehow seems to happen to one candidate every single year); I still think he makes it in this year more often than not, but I may need to revisit his case in more depth if it looks like it will come down to the private voters again.
But if Jones keeps a healthy lead above 75%, Chase Utley, Félix Hernández, and Cole Hamels might actually end up being the real cases to watch. Their movement so far this year is a little shocking in its magnitude, and it may set the stage for some future inductions before you know it. I’m also curious to see what the total effect of the new voters will be, both in how numerous they’ll be and if they’ll continue to be big-ballot guys when the numbers are finalized (right now, they’re averaging over 7.5 names per ballot). Even if Jones doesn’t need a final pre-announcement analysis, I’m sure we’ll find plenty to discuss in the downballot details once we know the official results.
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