Reviewing the 2026 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 1: The Less Complicated Half

It is once again the time of the baseball calendar where Hall of Fame talk takes over! The Baseball Writers Association of America has released their 2026 Ballot (and some writers have already even released their official votes for it), while the Veterans Committee’s Contemporary Baseball Era panel will be announcing the results of their election on December 7th.

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

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— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (@baseballhall.org) November 3, 2025 at 8:05 AM

In case the embedded link has stopped working, this year’s slate of candidates consists of eight names: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela. And for further housekeeping, the panel consists of sixteen voters, who will meet in-person at the Winter Meetings to discuss their options before casting their vote. Candidates need twelve votes for induction, and while I couldn’t find anything confirming it would still be the case this year, in recent years each voter has been limited to three choices.

There’s actually another big rule change in this year’s VC process, but I want to hold off on discussing it for now. Once again, my write-up got kind of long, so I decided to split it up into two parts for posting. And as it turned out, the easiest splitting point wound up being “the half of the ballot that will be deeply affected by this rule, but doesn’t really need their individual cases discussed” and “the half of the ballot that could stand to have their cases discussed a little more, but which probably isn’t going to be affected by the new rule all that much”. The former is a little more complicated, so we’ll be focusing today on the latter to ease us in.

(Stats are from Baseball-Refernce and Fangraphs unless otherwise noted.)

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And within that latter half, let’s start with the candidate that I think is the most straightforward one to cover: 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. This is actually something that I’ve been saying at least since he fell off the BBWAA ballot back in 2023 too (if not earlier). His reasoning reminds me of Fred McGriff’s in a lot of ways too, and that was another case where I predicted a Vet Ballot debut would sail in; in the end, the voters wound up doing exactly what I predicted, electing him unanimously on his first go-around in the process.

2025 World Series Trivia Wrap-Up + Best Players Without a World Series

With the final game of the 2025 Season in the books, I can follow up on my initial column with another trivia tradition here at Hot Corner Harbor: the Annual Best Active Players Without a World Series Sporcle Quiz! I’ll include a little more writing here before we get to the break (to give the spoilers within some breathing room), but I’ll also add that if you’d like more World Series fun facts, you can take a walk down memory lane through a full Sporcle playlist collecting past years’ editions of this quiz (I think it’s actually kind of neat to watch the list of names change slowly over time), as well as an entire second playlist of various other playoff quizzes that I’ve made.

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The Big 2025 MLB Postseason Trivia Roundup!

I don’t know that I have much specific to say about this year’s entry in my annual Playoff Trivia Series. Especially not after last year’s version, where I had to fit writing the entire thing in after that last-day double header. This is so much nicer of an experience (especially coming right on the heels of the huge Playlist article that I just published over at Out of Left Field).

Anyway, as a refresher, for those of you looking for a team to bandwagon for this postseason, perhaps this column will be of some use! That’s how it started, as a way for me to compile a whole bunch of interesting factoids about each year’s set of playoff teams and maybe give neutral observers some direction on fun storylines like long droughts or deserving players searching for a win, and it’s been a fun routine for me to preview October every year. So after a brief interruption for the Hot Corner Harbor email list sign-up form, let’s get right into it!

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DROUGHTS

You may not have realized it if you haven’t sat and thought about it yet, but this is actually a fairly cursed set of playoff teams. Our dozen teams includes all four of the longest active World Series droughts. There’s of course Cleveland at the top (last win in 1948), they’re well into that upper-echelon of dry spells. You know, that point where almost every span above them got a fancy title “The Curse of”? I’m not sure if Cleveland fans have settled on a cause of their misfortunes yet, but this might be the point where they should start looking for one.

After them, it’s a bunch of expansion teams who have never won a title. Those usually don’t seem to get “Curse of” titles, for whatever reason; I guess because expansion teams are just expected to be bad? Now that the first wave of new teams from 1961 and ‘62 are all taken care of, the Padres and Brewers (established in 1969) share the runner up title, while 1977 additions the Mariners are our fourth-place team.

It’s not often you get the entire top four in October like this. By my count, the only other time it happened was 2015, which was thanks to the Cubs, Guardians, Rangers, and Astros all showing up. That kind of gets to an interesting point, which is that in the first quarter of the 21st century, we’ve actually lost a lot of our Mega-Droughts. Obviously you have the big three of the Cubs, Red Sox, and White Sox. But the Giants, Astros, Nationals, and Rangers were all also at the fifty-year mark as well, and even the Angels took over four decades to make it to the top when they made it back in 2002. That’s a lot of heavy hitters that just aren’t around any more, making it more shocking that we still see years like this one.