2025 Hall of Fame voting has technically already finished. For a BBWAA writer to have their vote counted in this year’s election, the vote had to be completed and returned by the final day of 2024. I’m not sure if that date is a “postmarked by” deadline, or if Cooperstown actually has every ballot in hand already, but the larger point is that everyone who has voted has already weighed in. We just don’t know it yet, and we won’t know the official final tally until the Hall’s announcement on January 21st.
However, the baseball writers who vote on the Hall are free to write about who they’re voting for basically at any point, and many of them have already been doing so. For over a decade now, Ryan Thibodaux and his team have been collecting and tallying those various articles and tweets into one big early vote-tracking spreadsheet (helpfully available every year at tracker.fyi!). It’s become an indispensable part of the Hall of Fame process, and one that even the voters themselves use.
Right now, for this year’s election, they’ve already tallied nearly 120 ballots, likely closing in on a third of the total votes we’ll get (we won’t know the exact final number until the Hall’s announcement, so we’re going off of past years’ totals). And we tend to see more ballot drops as we get closer to the deadline; by the time you see this article, we might even be well on the way to 40% of the vote total. One-third of the total vote of course means there’s a lot that we don’t know, but much like estimating the final vote totals, there’s a lot we can learn by looking at both the results from years’ BBWAA elections, and their early ballot tracking.
A basic overview of the Hall’s rules, for those who don’t know: players need careers of ten years or more to become eligible for the Hall, and can be added to the ballot five years after being retired for five seasons (meaning the newcomers this year retired after the 2019 season). This year’s ballot has 28 names on it (you can see this year’s names and their numbers here), and each writer can vote for up to ten names. Players need to hit 75% of the vote in an election to get inducted, and fall off after either ten years on the ballot or if they fall below 5% of the vote at any point.
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