Reviewing the Jam-Packed 2025 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 1

This piece wound up running a little long, so it will be posted in two parts. If you’d like to be notified when the second part goes up and you haven’t already signed up for Hot Corner Harbor’s mailing list, maybe consider signing up now!

Built with Kit

With the 2024 Postseason in the books, we can now officially move on to the off-season. And one of the first orders of business will be the Veterans Committee portion of 2025 Hall of Fame voting: this year’s eight-person ballot has officially been announced. Our candidates (for posterity’s sake in case of link decay, and so you have a quick reference to their stats on Baseball-Reference) are: Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant .

Who ya got? Results will be announced at 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 8 on MLB network.

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— Bruce McClure ⚾ (@brucemcclurenh.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 11:54 AM

If you’d really like to parse the full details on the process, here’s the official post from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s website. But if you’d just like a quick summary of the important points, the main things are:


-Results will be announced in under a month, December 8th.

-This will almost immediately follow the 16-person Committee’s deliberation at the Winter Meetings

-Any nominee will need to be selected by 12 of the 16 members to get in (we don’t know yet who will be voting, although that has occasionally been relevant in the past)

-Each voter will only get to vote for up to 3 players


I think that last point is the most relevant; the extreme constraints these ballot caps have on the elections have become a recurring problem not just on the BBWAA’s ballots, but on the VC’s process too. There just isn’t much margin for error when a player needs 12 votes for induction, but there are only 48 votes total to go around, which shifts the question from “Is this player deserving of Cooperstown?” to “Are they more deserving than everyone else who was nominated?”. The first question is already fairly nebulous, given that there really isn’t a hard-and-fast definition of “Hall of Famer”; trying to rank them on “deservedness” of that nebulous title on top of that just makes everything a confusing mess.

2024 Triva Wrap-Up: Best Players Without a World Series Quiz, and Other Tidbits

The 2024 season has come to a close; congratulations to the 2024 Dodgers on their World Series win! As usual, I’m here with my trivia wrap-up, including the new entry in my yearly Sporcle Quiz series, Best Active Players Without a World Series, 2024 Edition. If you’d like to go in completely unspoiled, maybe give it a try now; I’ll touch on some of the specifics later in the column. I’ve also updated my other playlist of World Series quizzes to account for 2024, if you haven’t tried those before.

Built with Kit

(I was not expecting to have to do this write-up tonight after the first four innings; good thing I’m flexible!)

The Dodgers’ win doesn’t provide us with as many remarkable stats to rattle off as the Rangers’ win last year did. Their title drought comes to an end at just 3 years (nearly six decades shy of the Rangers’ drought last year), and there wasn’t any historic turnaround involved in this one. This was the twelfth time the Dodgers had met the Yankees in the World Series (a distant record compared to any other match-up), and fully half of the team’s eight titles have now come at New York’s expense. A lot of their team this year was around for their 2020 championship.

2024 Postseason Trivia Column: The Last-Minute Return!

Thanks to the doubleheader today between the Mets and Braves to decide the last two Wild Card slots, I don’t have a lot of turn-around time between the end of the season and the start of the postseason, so apologies if parts of this get a little hasty or could have used some more editing. I tried to pre-write parts of it, but some bits still had to wait until I knew the results, plus I had some other things to get done on Monday, and it all made this a little more rushed than usual.

Built with Kit

Thankfully, I could pre-write this intro! So I’ll just take the time to say that their plan to move the two Braves games to the off-day between the regular season and the postseason was really dumb. I’m sure whichever team goes to the postseason (possibly both, if they split the series) will be thrilled with having to go all-out, losing an off-day, and traveling back-to-back-to-back like this. And if the Diamondbacks make it, even though they at least got to keep their off-day free, I’m sure they won’t be thrilled with having to wait so long and cut it so close to find out if they’re playing in October, let alone who their match-up will be against.

And this was such an obvious conflict. It was clear that the games would be disrupted due to weather, and rather than preemptively rescheduling them or moving them to a neutral site, my understanding is that Commissioner Manfred caved to the Braves management over concerns about missing out on ticket sales from the home games, letting them put off searching for alternatives until it was far too late to do anything.

Maybe it’s just my familiarity with the Astros, but I remember a time when the league would have stepped in and said “I’m sorry, but we need to move these to keep everything running smoothly”. In fact, I remember multiple times that happened! And neither of those scenarios were as pressing as these Mets-Braves games (both times came earlier in the season and had less bearing on postseason outcomes). And sure, I wasn’t happy about either of those at the moment, but I at least understood why they happened, and this present mess is offering a clear example of why the league needed to do something about the problem.

The big difference between then and now is, of course, the league’s commissioner. Bud Selig was greedy and rarely stood in the owners’ way, but he did seem interested in keeping the league functioning properly and improving the product on the field, even if that did occasionally lead to him overruling the owners. In contrast, Rob Manfred doesn’t seem to have that “but”; he’ll just let the owners keep pursuing whatever harebrained schemes they think will make them money now, even if it hurts them or the game in the long-run. Perhaps there are other scenarios where this pattern reappears.

Anyway, let’s move on to when future-me has the results of those last two games…



DROUGHTS