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.
With that out of the way, let’s take it from the top: as is so often the case in these elections, the most interesting player (with apologies to the rest of the candidates) represents perhaps the least interesting Hall of Fame candidacy. Ichiro Suzuki will be on the Cooperstown stage next July, the only question is what his vote percentage will be. Right now, he sits at 100% of the vote through 123 ballots, meaning there’s a chance that he becomes the second unanimous inductee ever following Mariano Rivera in 2019. But even then, it ultimately wouldn’t affect his election too much and I still wouldn’t pin my hopes on every single BBWAA voter being able to get their act together (after all, one voter reacted to Rivera’s unanimity by not voting for Jeter next year, so it still isn’t a regular occurrence).
Second place in early vote tracking is another newcomer to the ballot, CC Sabathia at 91.1%. That leaves him with plenty of wiggle room to stay above the 75% threshold needed for induction. First ballot guys can be a little harder to predict than returning candidates, since each player’s case is fairly unique and the single best predictor for each one tends to be “how they did last year”.
But that does make predicting a little harder. So if you want an idea of where CC needs to be for now, Joe Mauer last year might make for a useful boundary: the 2024 inductee ended pre-vote tracking at 83.4%, and ended up just scraping over the finish line at 76.1% (thanks largely to Private voters including him on their ballot just under 60% of the time). That’s probably a good worst-case scenario; Mauer’s career totals were a little light for the stingiest voters, while Sabathia is a 250-win, 3000-strikeout guy, so I imagine those private voters like him a little more. But Hall voters have also been kind of weird about starting pitchers for decades now (I wrote a full series about that last year, if you’re interested), so if nothing else, we might as well keep that worst case in mind and be pleasantly surprised later.
Billy Wagner’s case starts to ramp up the intrigue a little more. Wagner, in his tenth and final attempt before aging off the BBWAA’s ballot, currently sits at 85.4% of the vote. That “last try” warning seems grim, but really, the closer is in a good position; in each of his last six elections, he’s seen his final percentage of the vote rise by between 5 and 17 points, a trend that is unlikely to change here, and candidates in their last election usually see an extra jump on top of that.
But if that doesn’t assure you, there are plenty of other encouraging signs. Wagner missed by just 5 votes last time, and thanks to the highly detailed data that Thibodaux and his team have collected, we can already point to 8 specific voters who have flipped their decision on him from “No” in 2024 to “Yes” this year. And that’s in addition to going a perfect 10-for-10 with first-time and returning voters who have revealed their ballots. All things considered, I’m sure Wagner would rather be in Cooperstown already, but if nothing else, he seems much better positioned heading into his final ballot than anyone else in recent memory, even some eventual inductees.
After Wagner is where things start to get really uncertain. Currently in fourth place, and just over the induction line at 76.4%, we have another former Astro, Carlos Beltrán. And that’s actually a bit of a surprise; in last year’s election, Beltrán finished behind another returning candidate, Andruw Jones, who currently sits at 72.4%.
Granted, the gap between them last year was just 4.5 points (Jones was at 61.6%, to Beltrán’s 57.1%), not exactly an insurmountable deficit, but clearly, Beltrán’s early balloting is going much better than Jones’s. A big part of that is that Carlos is converting a lot more former-nos than Andruw is, with a full 18 flipped to yes (against only 1 loss) to just 11 (with 2 losses). Either way, it’s clearly not just the votes being revealed in a better order than last year for Beltrán, he’s definitely converting voters at a good clip.
Some of that is probably voters who have held the sign stealing against him coming around; Beltrán maybe could have been a first-ballot pick back in 2023 (or at least a near-miss) if that hadn’t been the most recent headline in a lot of voters’ mind, so instead he came in at just under 50%. But he posted big gains last year in his second ballot, and it seems like more voters each year are viewing that as a sufficient punishment. That may seem odd, but if nothing else, there’s certainly precedent for BBWAA voters behaving this way: from the delayed elections for players like Juan Marichal, Fergie Jenkins, and Gaylord Perry (all of whom made it in on their third ballot, for what it’s worth), all the way up to the second-year election of Roberto Alomar.
Jones, in contrast, has had to grind out converting votes every step of the way, after debuting at just 7.5% back in 2018. He’s come a long way in the six votes since then, but Beltrán still picked up more votes than him from 2023 to 2024. That trend seems to be holding this year. It probably also helps that Beltrán’s seventh-place finish was a rough place to be on a ballot that’s locked to ten spots; not close enough to induction to get focus, and thus an easier drop for anyone pushing up against the ten-player limit and looking to spread around their votes to where they’re most needed. The election of three names above him last year (Adrian Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer), plus the aging-out of another (Gary Sheffield), has moved him into a higher-priority spot, even with Ichiro and CC joining the ballot this year. Andruw, in contrast, reached that point back in the 2023 Hall election.
While he is narrowly above the 75% line, though, it will probably not be enough to actually get Beltrán over the line this year. Virtually every player sees their vote percentage drop from early tracking to final total; voters who don’t reveal their ballots are historically the stingiest of voters. And on top of that, he has basically no margin of error this time. However, even if he does fall short, it does leave him in a good place for the 2026 election, where the biggest newcomers will be Cole Hamels and Ryan Braun. Historically, weak classes of new candidates have meant bigger gains for returning players.
If “finishing the early votes just above 75%” isn’t a guarantee of election, then “finishing just below 75%” means that Andruw Jones will almost certainly not be going in this year. However, he’s also not in a bad spot for an eventual election afterwards, although I think “Class of 2026” or “Class of 2027” is more of an open question in his case (and one that might not even become clear even after this year’s results). Some subset of voters may hesitate to check both him and Beltrán in the same year, in part because they have some surface similarities to their case (both were Gold Glove-winning center fielders from the same era who even finished 1 career home run apart, and Beltrán handedly wins the head-to-head comparison between the two of them), but it may not even matter if Jones finishes close enough to 75% this time. And again, next year’s class is looking wide open, so that may give him the extra bump he’ll need.
Chase Utley is probably an even bigger beneficiary of those conditions, though. After debuting at 28.8% last year, the longtime Phillies second baseman is just over 50% of the vote so far, at 53.7%. Again, that probably won’t hold until the final results, since Utley is definitely going to be more of a “stathead favorite” candidate and it sometimes takes a little longer for those types to sway over holdouts. But I also think a 10- or even 15-point pick-up after it’s all said and done this year isn’t out of the question, and like I said with Beltran, getting out of that 7th-to-10th place limbo can have big implications for a player’s chances. Since he’s definitely out of 2025’s election picture, I’ll hold off on further speculation until we have the final results, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he ends up more or less here, ahead of the PED crew (most of whom finished above Utley in 2024).
Speaking of that set, Álex Rodríguez, Manny Ramírez, and Andy Pettitte are all immediately after Utley in the 30%-50% range right now, although there’s still a pretty large gap from A-Rod and Manny (43.1% and 39.8%) to Pettitte (30.9%). These totals also seem to be large jumps from where they ended last voting (34.8%, 32.5%, and 13.5%, respectively), but I’d like to see how much of it holds up before drawing conclusions; having links to PEDs historically seems to mean that later reveals and private voters are a little harsher.. It also doesn’t help that they’re all still well below the mid-60s ceiling that we’ve seen from past candidates. Don’t get your hopes up for an election any time soon.
Tenth-place right now is also pretty far off from induction, but it’s still the last interesting candidate I’d like to discuss for now: first-year candidate Félix Hernández. Sitting at 25.2% of the vote so far, he’s pretty far from induction, but he does seem to have passed the 5% mark that he needs to secure a place on the 2026 ballot.
During the final part of my Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers series from over the summer, I identified Hernández as something of an interesting test case for the coming years. There are a lot of complex and sometimes even contradictory factors that have contributed to the severe decline of starting pitchers in Cooperstown, but one thread can more or less be boiled down to “even as starting pitching continues to go through massive changes, a subset of Hall voters still expect pitchers to post the career totals that you would get from being part of a four-man rotation in the 1950s”, and King Félix simply isn’t going to match up to those totals.
There is a precedent for short-career/high-peak pitchers making it into the Hall of Fame, and I think you could make a real case for him under those grounds. But that argument does need to acknowledge that pitchers in the 2010s simply do not throw as many innings (and therefore, do not rack up the same career counting numbers) as they did several decades ago. Getting the electorate to change on this is at least going to take multiple years. There are some signs things are starting, though, such as the first-ballot election of Roy Hallday and (presumably) CC Sabathia, plus Mark Buehlre managing to stick on the ballot for five years and counting.
The other challenge is that there are other pitchers who have similar or better cases than Hernández, but who have been totally overlooked by voters. Guys like Bret Saberhagen, David Cone, Dwight Gooden, and Johan Santana all went one-and-done when they hit the BBWAA ballot, and I don’t know that Félix has a better Hall of Fame case than any of them. However, I also think that it’s fairly ridiculous that those pitchers couldn’t reach a second ballot in the first place, let alone potentially work their way to an eventual election, so that’s not really a reason to deny it to Hernández as well.
And more to the point, there’s not really anything we can do to rectify their cases now; once they fell off the BBWAA ballot, their cases completely entered into the complicated and arcane territory of the Veterans Committee, and even getting nominated to that ballot (let alone reaching the necessary 75% there) is a mystery to me. If we think that the Hall of Fame needs to elect more starting pitchers (something that they should at least strongly consider; starting pitchers have fallen to less than 20% of Hall inductees over the last few decades, and right now, that rate only looks to drop further in the near future) they need to work with what they have.
I think King Félix deserves to have his case examined more, especially as the starting pitcher role continues to go through changes and we get more perspective on his era, so I’m glad that he’s getting support. If anything, it might even get those older pitchers that I mentioned a second look, since I really don’t have any better ideas for how to get the VC to reconsider other players that they haven’t already discussed.
There’s a lot more going on further down the ballot, like underrated favorites Bobby Abreu (22.0%) and Mark Buehrle (13.0%) looking like they might pick up several points, or first-year candidates Brian McCann (4.1%) and Russell Martin (4.9%) also fighting upwards towards that 5% mark on the strength of their incredibly strong pitch framing credentials. But since they’re so far from potential induction or even major shifts in momentum, there’s not much more to add there at the moment other than to note that they’re happening; we’ll know more of where they go from here once we have the final results.
Until that announcement on the 21st, if you’re interested in staying abreast of where results are trending, we should see another 100 or so ballots revealed. The tracker team has trended at over 50% of the vote being revealed before the official announcement the last few years, and that seems like it should hold for 2025. Whatever happens, it’s looking to be a bit of a crowd joining 2025 Veterans Committee inductees Dick Allen and Dave Parker in Cooperstown this July.
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