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)
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.
He’s… sort of the opposite of Allen, in that more modern stats haven’t really built up his case much further beyond that. But it’s not hard to see how he fits into the Hall; Black Ink and Hall of Fame Monitor (two early Bill James stats to track players’ Hall of Fame chances) have him in line with the Hall average or higher, his 3.19 career MVP shares places him 38th all-time, and he was an all-around great player at his peak who seems to be beloved around the game. He might not be the best player in Cooperstown, but he also doesn’t stand out as an especially bad choice, either (especially not by the VC’s standards).
Also, since I’ve spent a lot of time in the past covering Retired Numbers, I’ll take this time to note that Parker’s #39 has not been retired by the Pirates yet, and I fully expect some sort of celebration to that effect happening in 2025 (the Phillies, meanwhile, retired Allen’s #15 back in 2020 while he was still alive to enjoy the ceremony, demonstrating a little more forethought than the Hall).
So, outside of the election of Allen and Parker, what else can we see from this year’s election? Well, let’s start by looking at what those full results were. The VC only publishes vote tallies for candidates who finish above a certain threshold, meaning that we only got three hard vote totals this time. Out of a total possible 16 votes, with 12 being the demarcation line for induction, Parker led the way with 14 votes, Allen was right after him with 13, and Tommy John served as the first runner up with 7. The other five candidates (Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, and Luis Tiant) all finished below five votes.
My first thought was that those results seemed very rough; I initially wrote that I thought a full seven players here seemed worthy, so to see only two get in while the first runner up was just barely over halfway to induction… that seemed a little disheartening. After all, the last time Allen was on the ballot back in 2022, a full four players were inducted in addition to Allen missing by a single vote.
Except the Hall has clamped down on voting since then; voters that year had four votes each to use on ten candidates, while this year they only got three. Yeah, they also cut two candidates, but that still leads to a net reduction in votes, since 4/10 is greater than 3/8. Or another way, there were 64 total votes then (16 voters x 4 votes), so spread out ideally, you could elect five players and still have 4 votes remaining (64 votes/12 votes to induct); this time, there are only 48 votes, so even if you coordinated ahead of time, you could only reach four inductees if everyone coordinated perfectly, meaning every extra vote for a player over the minimum for induction immediately rules out one potential slot and continues downward from there. It’s the problem I talk about every time a Hall election (and especially a Veterans Committee election) comes up, the ballots are too small.
Let’s just count the votes that we know: Parker’s 14 plus Allen’s 13 plus John’s 7, against the 16 voters’ three slots to use. That gives us 34 votes accounted for, and just 48 total potential votes, giving us up to 14 missing votes to spread across our five remaining players. Even if you assume the voters used their full ballot (which I certainly hope they did!), they’d still need to basically agree on their top three choices just to get all of them over the line.
John did well coming in third, but it’s also the first time in five VC elections that he’s done well enough for his vote totals to get reported. It’s not hard for me to imagine that some other voters might have passed him over because they decided to throw their vote to someone like Luis Tiant (who passed away back in October and might have had sympathy in his corner), or Vic Harris (who finished 2 votes shy in his last ballot appearance back in 2022). These are just the kind of problems that crop up on ballots with this many worthy candidates and a low vote cap.
Let’s revisit some of the predictions and storylines I laid out in my previews. My final guess was that the Veterans Committee would select Allen, Parker, and Luis Tiant. Allen was an easy likely choice, after two straight runner-up finishes. Parker was a little more of a long-shot call, having topped out at only 7 votes back in 2020, but voters have recently shown an increased willingness to honor players who are still alive (see Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat’s induction in 2022, or John’s performance this year). The somewhat-favorable voting body might have mattered, but he also showed strong signs on his last ballot back in 2020 (where his vote totals were reported for the first time in three appearances), which is why I leaned into the call even before we knew the specific voters.
The Tiant prediction was a whiff, though. I really thought his recent death would sway voters to his cause, as has often happened in Hall voting (see: Allen, Ron Santo, Buck O’Neill, Minnie Miñoso, Marvin Miller…), but he still didn’t even come close. I wonder if Tiant’s harsh words on the idea of posthumous elections dissuaded voters from electing him so quickly? But it’s also worth keeping in mind that those other names I listed had also come close to induction before their deaths, at least on their prior VC appearances. All of them had finished above 50% of the vote or better prior to their induction, while Tiant himself has never topped 25% (which came two decades and several format changes ago). Between this and Parker, it might be worth keeping momentum in mind before making a prediction like this in the future. Seven votes is closer to twelve than it may seem, certainly much closer than (unreported), in any case.
The biggest counter argument against momentum is Vic Harris, who dropped hard from missing by a mere two votes back in 2022 (with John Donaldson, who missed by just four in the same time frame, suffering a similar fate). As I said back during the preview pieces, though, combining the Early Baseball and Gold Days ballots of 2022 into one big “Pre-1980” Ballot was going to cost someone, and the older players seemed like the obvious losers there.
It’s good that the Hall has worked older eras into their regular rotation, to avoid issues like that seven-year gap that Allen faced between votes (or the appalling ten-year gap that it looked like Harris and Donaldson would be facing immediately after their last election, before the Hall stepped in and restructured their rules again). There are plenty of older overlooked candidates in history worthy of consideration, especially with the growing research and focus into Negro League stars.
However, if they’re going to give these players consideration, it might be worth keeping the players within living memory and the even more historical stars separated, especially if the vote cap is going to be kept so low. Maybe separate “1950 and Earlier” back out into its own ballot, and run it as a second election concurrently with the Non-Player Ballot that comes up every third year?
What does our forecast look like down the line, given what we’ve seen in this election? Most directly, I expect that the next time Tommy John comes up on a ballot, he’ll be a strong favorite to make it in. Right now, that’s scheduled to be 2028, although there’s always a possibility the Hall’s Board changes the rules again. He’ll be nearly 85 then, so hopefully he lives long enough to celebrate; I hate how morbid that sounds, but it seems to be relevant for every one of these elections, so it’s difficult not to think about.
I’ll probably also continue digging into the voter announcements going forward. As I said above, I don’t think it was a decisive factor for Parker this year, but it did make me feel more confident in my pick, and it also seemed to be an early indicator for Dwight Evans finishing as a runner-up in his Veterans debut back in 2020 (plus maybe Ted Simmons’s election that year, but he was already on the brink of election anyway). I’m also not sure that it matters as much on the Modern or Non-Player ballots, which will be our next two elections, but two straight overperformance indicators for the Classic Era VC Ballots is certainly an interesting quirk that I want to keep my eye on.
But all of that is years down the line. For now, congrats again to the Hall of Fame’s newest members, Dave Parker and Dick Allen! Now, we can officially turn our focus to the BBWAA ballot, and which two to four other players will be joining them on the stage in July. And as always, if you'd like updates and analysis on that process as it unfolds, feel free to subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list!
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Good article. Tommy John deserves to be in for two reasons; his stats over his career are better than many HOFers, AND is ground breaking surgery that saved many, many pitchers and players careers.
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