Predicting the Hall’s stingiest voters can be tricky, but maybe there’s a way to predict when they’ll coalesce around a candidate.
One thing that I thought about while writing my most recent update on Hall of Fame voting was to revisit an older topic with new information. Two years ago, I looked at Scott Rolen’s Hall of Fame chances in the run-up to the 2023 announcement. That wound up being the year that he was elected, coming up just ahead of the needed 75%, but prior to that moment, things were genuinely up in the air. Projections had him at more or less coin-flip odds of making it.
The biggest uncertainty at that point was “private voters”. For those who don’t follow Hall voting: whereas some voters will announce their ballot publicly before the election (and get picked up by Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker project), and another subset will reveal their ballot in someway after the official announcement, a chunk of voters never do; a rough current breakdown of these three groups right now is something like 55%/25%/20%, respectively. The last group had traditionally been the big damper on Rolen’s chances, but in 2023, they went from voting for him at a 34% clip to over 57% of the time. That was still his worst segment overall, but that big swing was enough to get him over the line.
I theorized that Rolen hitting 60% of the vote the year before was the indication that he would see a big leap in private voter support. That call may seem odd, but it’s actually pretty normal: a big part of Hall voting really is momentum, and seeing other voters come around on a player does in fact move another chunk of voters, like a domino effect. That ended up being more or less correct, but I was also going off of a pretty small set of examples, around ten or so players who had hung around the ballot since the Tracker started and who had definitive moments of crossing over the 50% and 60% lines.
In just the two years since then, we’ve had a few more players join their ranks, so I wanted to update my findings and see how we might be able to apply them to the 2025 Ballot. Is there a type of player more likely to see this effect? Are there cases who might not see this boost?
We of course have Rolen, as our first case. He reached the 50% Overall mark in 2021, and the next year, his percentage with Private voters barely moved, going from 32.4% to 34.2%. Of course, we also had indications that those stingier voters weren’t completely against his case; the year before that 32.4%, he had been at just 11.1%, a 20-point jump that helped get him to 50% overall in the first place. The year after he reached 60%, he saw an even bigger increase among Private voters, going all the way up to 57.4%. That’s more or less the platonic ideal of the case I laid out back in 2023.
Todd Helton was on Rolen’s heels the entire way. He reached 50% in 2022 and 60% the year after. However, unlike Rolen, Helton was seeing those big upward swings a year early, relatively speaking; he actually saw a big 22-point gain with Private voters (17.5% to 39.7%) the year before reaching 50% overall, and he’d post another 20-point gain with that same subset (41.1% to 61.8%) the year after reaching just 50%. He was only on the ballot for one year after that, his 2024 induction, and his gain among private voters was much more modest, just 6 points (61.8% to 68.1%).
That’s actually kind of interesting; a 6-point swing when you’re already over 60% with Private voters isn’t nothing, but it’s also not the 20-point jump he got the year before. Billy Wagner actually saw something similar to Helton: a big gain with Private the year before reaching 50% overall (23.8% to 39.7%), and a big jump the year after hitting 50% overall (39.7% to 52.9%). Unlike Helton, Wagner had a slight backslide in between, and his gains the year after hitting 60% overall were again even more modest than Helton’s (52.9% to just 55.1%).
Okay, so Wagner and Helton were hitting things a year off-set from Rolen. Before we draw any conclusions, it’s worth mentioning we actually had two more cases to look at here, although they’re both inconclusive in different ways. Andruw Jones finally crossed the 50% mark in 2023, thanks in part to a big pick-up with Private voters (26.0% to 42.6%). That’s like what we saw with Rolen, and in a similar scenario, Andruw’s results with Private voters in 2024 were comparably mediocre (a 3.5-point backslide). This upcoming election will be his first election after reaching 60% overall.
There’s also the case of Gary Sheffield, who I don’t know how to fully account for (players with PED connections are kind of their own separate thing). Like the others, Sheff saw a bigger swing among private voters in the 2023 race, but it was relatively muted, just 11.2 points (32.9% to 44.1%). That got him over 50% in his final total, but like Rolen and Jones (and unlike Helton and Wagner), Gary did not see big pick-ups with Private voters in 2024, his final year on the ballot, losing 2.1 points. And of course, since that was his last time on the ballot, we never got to see the aftermath of him reaching 60% of the total vote.
So, what do we make of all of this new information? It’s clear that hitting 60% overall isn’t a magic switch that wins over those private Late voters, but the candidates who saw the lowest gains after hitting 60% generally saw much bigger pick-ups after hitting 50% instead. What was the difference?
I think it’s interesting to note that Rolen and Jones are our two 60-percent flips, and both are candidates with more stat-head bonafides, relying on a comprehensive understanding of their bat, glove, and position. Big previous 60% swings that I identified were similar types of candidates, in Mike Mussina, Edgar Martínez, Jeff Bagwell, and Tim Raines.
Helton and Wagner, meanwhile, are archetypes who have generally been more comfortable to more traditional voters (the “slugging first baseman” and “closer” roles, generally speaking). Closers are one of the few types of players who, in the Vote Tracker, often run ahead of their final tally. Of course, as a counterpoint, was Helton that different from Bagwell as a candidate? Maybe there was something else separating them, though. For example, Bagwell appeared on even more crowded ballots than Helton did, or maybe the Private voters had heavy overlap with the ones that threw steroid suspicions at Bagwell? Things are still murky.
Maybe it’s better to think of hitting 60% as a sort of “last chance” to sway the stingy Later votes? Something like “Private voters are likely to flip en masse the year after a player’s overall vote total crosses 50%, but failing that, they’re even more likely to swing big at 60%?” This is, of course, barring other controversies: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens had very slow and stable climbs with Private voters, with nothing changing as they crossed the 50% and 60% milestones. But even there, not every “controversial candidate” is the same. As mentioned, Gary Sheffield snuck a big double-digit pick-up with Private voters in there, as did Curt Schilling.
Of course, there’s the other big elephant in the room: the overall state of the ballot. You know how those years of big, double-digit pickups among Private writers were off-set? Well, that’s because the candidates themselves were offset in their paths. If you set them up by year, it’s a perfect match; Rolen, Helton, and Wagner all had their big, 20-point gain with Late voters in 2021 (which coincided with the year Schilling gained nearly 15 points as well). All of them went flat in 2022, then those three (plus Jones and Sheffield) saw big jumps again in 2023. None of them replicated the feat in 2024.
What was happening on the rest of the ballot those years? Well, in 2021, we were coming off the election of two players (Derek Jeter and Larry Walker), and the biggest new candidates were Mark Buehrle and Torii Hunter. A lot of votes from the top of the last ballot were freed up, and there weren’t many new cases to take them up. 2022, in comparison, was the opposite; no one was cleared out from the year before, while David Ortiz picked up a lot of votes. It was also the last try for Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, and Sammy Sosa, which saw three of them hit their best vote totals (Schilling’s numbers declined, likely due to his request to be removed from the ballot).
Of course, that also meant a lot of freed up votes for 2023, which existing candidates mostly soaked up. The only major addition was Carlos Beltrán, who debuted with a vote percentage that would have placed eighth in 2022. 2024 was the exact opposite, with Adrian Beltré appearing on over 95% of ballots in his first year, fellow newcomer Joe Mauer also getting in, other fellow newcomer Chase Utley nearly hitting 30% of the vote, plus Todd Helton finally getting in and Billy Wagner just missing.
Ultimately, ballot space is definitely the biggest factor, but the “60%” issue does seem to matter on the edges. It might be a good X-factor to keep in mind, in the way that candidates appearing on their final ballot seem to get an extra boost? Players who hit the 50% mark will often pick up a big swing in secret Late voters as a consensus emerges, especially in emptier ballots; but “underrated” candidates or guys on crowded ballots might have to wait until they hit 60% to see the same benefit. It will be interesting to see how these examples develop.
And we might even have some test cases to watch for in the 2025 Hall election. We have another stacked ballot, but still slightly less full than last time: newcomers Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia will probably collectively take up more votes than Adrian Beltre and Joe Mauer did, and we even have a third candidate in Félix Hernández who isn’t too far off from where Chase Utley was last year. But there should still be more votes available than before; whatever gains Billy Wagner and the rest of the returners get probably will be offset somewhat by Todd Helton (79.7%) getting in and Gary Sheffield (63.9%) aging off. We might not see the 20-point gains players were seeing in 2023, but I wouldn’t be shocked to see some double-digit pick-ups.
However… those pick-ups probably won’t affect who gets in too much, mostly just the final tallies. This bit so far has mostly been me updating my findings from last time and giving an idea of what to look forward to down the road, but my final expectation is still what I said last time, “We get a 2025 Hall Class of Ichiro, CC, and Wagner, with Andruw and Beltrán at the front of the line for 2026”.
I ended up adding another 1000-ish words trying to game through the specific possibilities for the final totals, though. If that sounds interesting, by all means follow along! Otherwise, you can check back in after the announcements next Tuesday, when I write a full breakdown of the results.
Ichiro and CC are likely to go one-and-in, and won’t need to rely on a consensus slowly forming. Like Walker and Edgar, Wagner might get the combined boost here of a consensus coupled with it being his tenth and final ballot, but again, he only fell 5 votes shy last time, so it’s not like he needs to rely on that to get in like those two did (note: the ballot tracker already has him at +8 flipped voters, and a perfect 15-for-15 on new and returning numbers). I could easily see him increasing 10 points or more among Private voters; that group doesn’t seem to be anti-closer generally, so he doesn’t appear to be pushing up against an obvious ceiling (a 10-point jump wouldn’t even get him to the Private vote total that Trevor Hoffman got in his first ballot, let alone his successful third attempt).
Andruw Jones hitting 60% last time seems like a positive sign for a big leap with Late votes this year, but it probably won’t be enough to get him over the line, since he’s only trending at 73.0% right now. There’s zero chance his private vote raises his overall total above 75%. The best he can hope for this time is maybe finishing above 70%, but that would still be a great sign for induction next year.
I mentioned last time that Carlos Beltrán had leapfrogged Andruw in early voting, and that actually has held. Right now, he actually sits at 80.4% of the vote. We’ve seen leads of that size hold in the past, but it would require a big jump in his Private votes numbers to happen (smaller than what Scott Rolen saw from 2022 to 2023, but not by much). Again, he was at just 39.1% with that group last time, already a step down from the year before when he finished at 42.6%. But he also hit 50% last year, and as mentioned, some candidates did see the Private numbers jump at that point.
The other added factor here is that we know some number of voters are withholding votes for Beltrán for reasons relating to the sign stealing scandal, and we can’t really go one-by-one asking Secret voters whether their withheld vote is a limited-time punishment, something they intended to always follow, or completely irrelevant to their decision process. That last option sounds silly, but again, 16% of those Secret voters last year didn’t vote for Adrian Beltré! This can be a strange group, and we can’t rule that possibility out.
The limited history of the Ballot Tracker means we don’t have many other cases to compare with here, but I did pull out a few of them just to see: Bonds, Clemens, Sheffield, Schilling, even Andruw Jones (I don’t know that his 2012 domestic violence arrest has hurt his chances with voters more than his rapid decline in on-field performance, and we really can’t say for sure, so I may as well throw him in).
The answer was… there really just isn’t anything conclusive. Everyone but Bonds and Clemens saw at least a single one-year 10-point jump among Private voters, and even Bonds and Clemens ended over 20 points above where they started with Private voters (it was just more evenly distributed).
Technically, the single largest jump I saw with “Private” voters was Roberto Alomar, between the 2010 and 2011 elections. He saw a bump of nearly 20% there (to go along with his Overall jump from 73.7% to 90.0%). But I’m also hesitant to even compare that scenario to now since it was such a different time. There were 150 more voters in the total pool (the Hall has since trimmed many inactive writers from the electorate), and only about 20% of the voters published their ballot publicly at all (in fact, I don’t think the tracker was a thing yet, Ryan Thibodaux just asked another person who had been keeping track of votes for the data a few years later to get more complete data).
The other big complication with charting Beltrán’s future is that his Early votes right now are already in pretty rare territory. At the moment, just among published ballots, Carlos has flipped a full 21 former No voters to Yes while only losing 1 former Yes. That +20 net change is already one of the better results we’ve seen in Ballot Tracker history, and we still have several dozen more ballots coming up before the inductees are announced.
That’s extra shocking because Beltrán 1) is still pretty early in his candidacy (a lot of the totals ahead of him came from players seeing a bump from their last appearance on the ballot); and 2) a lot of the players ahead of him in net votes were not starting as high as he did. In theory, there should be fewer voters for him to flip, especially since he already put up a +31 net gain in Early votes last year.
It’s a little weird that Beltrán’s Private votes last year slipped slightly backwards while his Pre- and Post-Announcement votes jumped so much, but it’s also not unprecedented. Sometimes, the Private votes tick up after a good result, it just takes an extra ballot. If it stagnates again this year, it could be a sign that Private voters are harshing on his case in a way that would be pretty unique, and pretty disconnected from how the Public voters feel about him. But even in that case, he could still make his way into Cooperstown eventually, it would just shift the timeline of when we expect that to happen back a few years (and in which case, Carlos still has seven more tries after this year anyway).
I think my final call here is that he finishes in the high 60s and, like Jones, goes in next year. Even finishing in the low-60s wouldn’t necessarily rule him out. As I’ve mentioned before, 2026 will likely be losing three big names at the top of the ballot, and there just aren’t a lot big names coming down the pipeline to replace them. Cole Hamels could maybe sustain a case, based on how Félix Hernández is going, but I don’t feel confident enough in that prediction to bet on it. After him, your second-best option is… Ryan Braun or Alex Gordon or Nick Markakis, I guess?
It should be a big year for the backlog crew, much like 2023, and Chase Utley looks like he could be a big beneficiary. He’s currently hanging around 50%, but likely to fall below that once the final counts come in. And if you think he falls into the same “stathead fave” category as Rolen and wJones, Utley’s also well-positioned to make the same big push that they did, seeing a surge in Late votes to get them over 50%.
The rest of the backlog should also do well, and I’m curious to see how guys like Hernández and Mark Buehle and Bobby Abreu do in that case (not to mention pitch framing legends Russell Martin and Brian McCann; I’d like to see them hit the 5% mark this year and stick around, just to see where they can go from there). But all of them are far off from 50%, plus there’s the bunch of Álex Rodríguez, Manny Ramírez, and Andy Pettitte who appear to all be standing in between them and 50%.
In any case, I think seeing how Beltrán and Utley do these next few years will really help me round out this theory a little more. But first thing’s first: the 2025 Hall of Fame announcement will be happening next Tuesday, January 21st.