2025 Hall of Fame Season Kicks Off as the Veterans Committee Inducts Dick Allen and Dave Parker!

The first half of 2025’s Hall of Fame election is done: on Sunday, the Veterans Committee announced that they would be sending two new members into Cooperstown’s next class, Dick Allen and Dave Parker. I’ve written quite a few pieces on this vote recently, between my two-part analysis of this year’s eight-player ballot and my breakdown of this election’s sixteen-member voting body. So before moving on to the upcoming Baseball Writers’ election (which will be announced towards the end of January; Ryan Thibodaux and his ballot tracking team is already hard at work compiling announced votes!), let’s take a minute to appreciate both the new Hall of Famers, and what we can learn from their election.

(Stats from Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs, with Veterans Committee voting results from Veterans Committee Data)

Built with Kit

Leading the official announcement was Dick Allen. The 1972 AL MVP was one of the game’s all-time great power hitters, hitting 320 doubles, 351 homers, and a .292/.378/.534 batting line. For a long time, he was overlooked by most audiences, partly because of his relatively short career brought about by injuries (his last 100-game season came at the age of 33, just two years after that MVP win). But another big component of that was that Allen had the misfortune to play in the biggest deadball era of the last century (and I mean that literally: if you look at the league-wide OPS by season for the last 100 years, the twelve lowest marks all fall into the windows of “Dick Allen’s career” or “World War II”, with another three of Allen’s seasons in the next five lowest spots after that).

Without the longevity to stick around and build up counting numbers (or at least make it into a better offensive era), Allen got a little lost in the shuffle. But over time, modern analysis and a few devotees helped show just how good of a hitter he was: that .912 OPS translated to a 156 career OPS+, twenty-fifth on the all-time leaderboard! Even with his short career, he stacks up well with plenty of Hall inductees, like Hank Greenberg or Ralph Kiner or Johnny Mize or Edgar Martinez (and most of those choices were elected by the Baseball Writers!). Other context-corrected stats (like his 58.7 bWAR, 61.3 fWAR, or 52.3 JAWS rating) continued to show him among the best in the game’s history.

Allen’s election comes after 15 BBWAA misses, plus another six Veterans Committee whiffs, making this attempt number 22 for him. Even more frustrating, his last two VC elections both saw him finishing merely one vote short of induction, spanning back nearly a decade: first in 2015, then again in 2022. And of course, he passed away in the seven years between those two votes, making this election posthumous.

Dave Parker, thankfully, is alive to celebrate his election. The longtime star came back from injuries after his first decade to build a long career and some solid career totals, including 339 homers and 2712 hits. He also piled on the accolades in that time, including the 1978 NL MVP, 7 All-Star selections, 2 World Series wins, a trio of Gold Gloves and Silver Sluggers, 2 batting titles, and even an All-Star Game MVP and Home Run Derby victory to boot.

Veterans Committee Voters Announced: What Does It Mean for This Weekend's Election?

Hopefully by now, with some downtime over Thanksgiving week, you’ve had time to read my major piece on the Hall of Fame’s upcoming Veterans Committee ballot. If not, you can catch up on Part 1 here (covering Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, and Steve Garvey), and Part 2 here (covering Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant). The actual voting will be occurring this weekend, and in the lead-up, we finally got the last piece of information in that puzzle: who the actual sixteen voters from the Veterans Committee will be.

This year’s voting body will consist of Hall of Famers Paul Molitor, Eddie Murray, Tony Pérez, Lee Smith, Ozzie Smith, and Joe Torre; MLB executives Sandy Alderson, Terry McGuirk, Dayton Moore, Arte Moreno, and Brian Sabean; and writers/historians Bob Elliott, Leslie Heaphy, Steve Hirdt, Dick Kaegel, and Larry Lester.

Built with Kit

So, why is this relevant? Well, as I mentioned in those preview pieces, a big problem facing the Veterans Committee these days is that the ballot is actually too crowded. The process was neglected for, really, the majority of the last three decades, which allowed for a bit of a backlog of candidates to build up. And on top of that, they keep a stricter limit on vote totals than even the main Baseball Writers ballot, only allowing VC voters to choose up to three of the eight candidates they bring up for each vote (despite the fact that they require every candidate to first be approved by a panel of baseball historians to even reach a vote in the first place).

I made an affirmative Hall case for seven of the eight players up for consideration on this year’s Veterans ballot, but if I were a real voter in the process, I wouldn’t be able to officially vote in the affirmative for even half of them. Because they’re all competing for those same handful of votes, the question moves from “is this player Hall-worthy” to “are they the most Hall-worthy on the ballot”, something that is much more nebulous. Is it better to vote for the best player available? The ones from underrepresented eras or positions or leagues? The ones actually still alive to enjoy the honor? Do players who passed away in recent memory garner more attention, since they’re at the front of voters’ minds? Is it better to focus on players with a chance to get in, even if there are strictly “better” options available? There really isn’t any guidance here, so it’s up to our specific voters to decide.