We’ve finally reached 2024, meaning that the deadline for this year’s Hall of Fame voting has passed; voters’ ballots must be postmarked by December 31, 2023 to qualify for this year’s election. Of course, there’s nothing stopping writers from revealing their votes earlier, which is why we’ve been seeing results over at Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker trickle in since around Thanksgiving or so.
In fact, we just hit 100 ballots (a little over a quarter of the total expected votes) before the calendar turned over, so why don’t we take a quick peek at where things stand.* Although the votes technically won’t be changing from here on, the results still won’t be revealed until January 23, which gives us just over three weeks for more ballots to come out and give us a fuller picture of where things stand (for reference, last year we ended at 198 pre-announcement ballots, so we’re about halfway there right now).
*And, depending on when this gets published/you’re reading it, here are the full results through 100 ballots, so you can see what I was pulling from. At least one more ballot came out between the end of writing and publishing, but I’ll leave the numbers as is for now and make notes where it’s warranted.
The first thing to note, for anyone who hasn’t looked at the ballot yet, is that we’re dealing with a more crowded ballot than last year. Scott Rolen was inducted in 2023 and future Veterans Committee selection Jeff Kent aged off the ballot following his tenth attempt, freeing up two spaces; however, this year’s freshman class includes standouts Adrián Beltré, Joe Mauer, and Chase Utley.
And it’s not just that there are three players replacing two on the ballot that will make votes tighter to come by. Beltré is polling about 20% higher than Rolen, which means he will soak up about 100 more votes than Rolen did last year. And even ignoring Utley (who’s matching Kent pretty well so far) and Mauer (who’s polling very competitively on top of them, but more on that in a minute), we’ve also got a few other names down-ballot who are picking up some nominal support (David Wright looks like he might cross 5%, plus Bartolo Colón and Matt Holliday have already gotten votes so far, and I wouldn’t be shocked if José Bautista, Adrián González, or José Reyes get a vote or two).
Of course, the Hall ballot is also pretty momentum-based, and every returning candidate who passed the 40% mark last year has also seen their vote percentages increase so far (more on the breakdown there shortly). We had a little bit of slack to work with, as the average players-per-ballot count in 2023 was on the lower end of our recent ballots. However, we are still working with a 10 player per ballot cap that’s going to aggressively limit how big that number can get, so in the short term, you might see some names at the bottom start to get squeezed out to make room for those other names.
We’ll work our way there eventually. For now, though, let’s take it from the top (non-2024 ballot stats will mostly be from Baseball-Reference). For a little bit there, it looked like Adrián Beltré might be threatening to become the Hall’s second unanimous selection (after Mariano Rivera’s 2019 election); however, that mark remains pretty difficult to match, and he’s now sitting at 98%. Not that it really matters much. With 3166 hits, 477 homers, and a bevy of field awards, Beltré is poised to easily sail past the 75% needed, and we’re basically looking at which specific hyper-elite group he lands in: the nineteen-name ring of 95% or higher, the fifteen players who topped 96%, the baker’s dozen of 97%+, the octet of 98%+, or the trio of 99%+. I don’t expect him to drop much below that, but I guess we also can’t rule it out.
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Monday, January 1, 2024
Monday, December 4, 2023
Jim Leyland Inducted to the Hall of Fame, Plus Breaking Down the Rest of the Veterans Committee Results!
We officially have our first Hall of Famer for the 2024 Election: manager Jim Leyland, who received 15 out of 16 votes from this year’s iteration of the Veterans Committee. Fellow manager Lou Piniella fell one vote shy of joining him, while executive candidate and general renaissance man Bill White missed by two votes.
Leyland is the first manager elected to Cooperstown in a decade, and he’s a very deserving choice. His 1769 wins are seventeenth all-time (most of those ahead of him are enshrined), he was the head of the Marlins when they won the World Series in 1997, his three total pennants ties him for twenty-fifth all-time (again, behind mostly other inductees, and tied with several more), he’s currently the only manager to win both a World Series and a World Baseball Classic (2017), and he even wound up winning three Manager of the Year awards. (All stats from Baseball-Reference, by the way.)
Really, the biggest knock against him was relatively low win rate for his career, but a lot of that could be chalked up to bad luck; getting stuck with the 1998 Marlins after their post-Championship firesale alone dropped his winning percentage from .514 to .508. If you want to go even further, you could also point out how long he stuck with the Pirates into the start of their firesale era, sticking around for four seasons after their 1992 NLCS upset even as the team shedded talent with no sign of replacing it (if you want to be extra-generous and chop off the last two of those Pittsburgh seasons, he reaches a .523 rate). Either way, when not being shoved into hopeless situations, it was clear that Leyland was talented as a manager, and sometimes he could even make some of the seemingly-hopeless situations work out (like the 2006 Tigers reaching the World Series, or those 1992 Pirates).
If you missed it, I put up a preview of this vote a few days ago, and I figured it would be a good time to revisit it while comparing the results.
Leyland is the first manager elected to Cooperstown in a decade, and he’s a very deserving choice. His 1769 wins are seventeenth all-time (most of those ahead of him are enshrined), he was the head of the Marlins when they won the World Series in 1997, his three total pennants ties him for twenty-fifth all-time (again, behind mostly other inductees, and tied with several more), he’s currently the only manager to win both a World Series and a World Baseball Classic (2017), and he even wound up winning three Manager of the Year awards. (All stats from Baseball-Reference, by the way.)
Really, the biggest knock against him was relatively low win rate for his career, but a lot of that could be chalked up to bad luck; getting stuck with the 1998 Marlins after their post-Championship firesale alone dropped his winning percentage from .514 to .508. If you want to go even further, you could also point out how long he stuck with the Pirates into the start of their firesale era, sticking around for four seasons after their 1992 NLCS upset even as the team shedded talent with no sign of replacing it (if you want to be extra-generous and chop off the last two of those Pittsburgh seasons, he reaches a .523 rate). Either way, when not being shoved into hopeless situations, it was clear that Leyland was talented as a manager, and sometimes he could even make some of the seemingly-hopeless situations work out (like the 2006 Tigers reaching the World Series, or those 1992 Pirates).
If you missed it, I put up a preview of this vote a few days ago, and I figured it would be a good time to revisit it while comparing the results.
Saturday, December 2, 2023
Hall of Fame Season Kicks Off This Weekend with the 2024 Veterans Committee Ballot!
This weekend, the Winter Meetings will take place, and with it will come the first big moment of Hall of Fame discussion season: the Veterans Committee vote. As per usual, the sixteen voters will come together, discuss the candidates, cast their ballots, and announce anyone who receives 75% of the vote as the first inductees of 2024.
And there will be something extra to this year’s process: back in April 2022, the Hall changed their rules on the Veterans Committee process once again (for reasons that were really never clarified, but whatever). The 2024 Ballot will mark the first instance of the big change from those announcements, the non-player ballot. Yes, that’s right, all eight of this year’s nominees are managers, umpires, or executives: we have Jim Leyland, Lou Piniella, Cito Gaston, and Davey Johnson from the first group; Joe West and Ed Montague from the second; and Bill White and Hank Peters from the third.
If you went back and read that piece I wrote at the time, I feel like I was kind of harsh on the rule change. I still think there’s a lot of dumb things about it, but I’ve softened a little on the idea of a special ballot for non-players. In all honesty, it’s probably been necessary for a little bit, and this might help to rectify that, not to mention that the original method of making these candidates compete directly against players for spots in the Hall was just really weird on a conceptual level. I do still think it’s dumb that they couldn’t do this ballot in the same year as a separate player ballot, but whatever, small steps are always necessary when discussing the Hall. We’ll take it for now.
With managers and especially umpires and executives, we don’t always have the most objective or statistical evidence, unlike how player stats have been quantified here and back again. Even still, I don’t think it’s unsupported to say that these categories have been a little too ignored by the Hall. At this moment, we have just 22 managers in the Hall, with the earliest one (Ned Hanlon) having started way back in 1889; so we have those 22 managers covering 134 seasons of baseball history. That feels maybe a little light?
And there will be something extra to this year’s process: back in April 2022, the Hall changed their rules on the Veterans Committee process once again (for reasons that were really never clarified, but whatever). The 2024 Ballot will mark the first instance of the big change from those announcements, the non-player ballot. Yes, that’s right, all eight of this year’s nominees are managers, umpires, or executives: we have Jim Leyland, Lou Piniella, Cito Gaston, and Davey Johnson from the first group; Joe West and Ed Montague from the second; and Bill White and Hank Peters from the third.
If you went back and read that piece I wrote at the time, I feel like I was kind of harsh on the rule change. I still think there’s a lot of dumb things about it, but I’ve softened a little on the idea of a special ballot for non-players. In all honesty, it’s probably been necessary for a little bit, and this might help to rectify that, not to mention that the original method of making these candidates compete directly against players for spots in the Hall was just really weird on a conceptual level. I do still think it’s dumb that they couldn’t do this ballot in the same year as a separate player ballot, but whatever, small steps are always necessary when discussing the Hall. We’ll take it for now.
With managers and especially umpires and executives, we don’t always have the most objective or statistical evidence, unlike how player stats have been quantified here and back again. Even still, I don’t think it’s unsupported to say that these categories have been a little too ignored by the Hall. At this moment, we have just 22 managers in the Hall, with the earliest one (Ned Hanlon) having started way back in 1889; so we have those 22 managers covering 134 seasons of baseball history. That feels maybe a little light?
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