Unpacking the 2024 Baseball Hall of Fame Results
Five takeaways from this year's Cooperstown inductees and voting trends
The results are in, and the Baseball Writers Association of America has elected three new members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Third baseman Adrian Beltré, catcher Joe Mauer, and first baseman Todd Helton all cleared the 75 percent threshold for selection, and will join manager Jim Leyland (who was chosen by a separate Era Committee last month) to be inducted in Cooperstown this summer.
In the wake of today’s announcement, here are five takeaways on a historic day for Major League Baseball about the present and future of the Hall of Fame selection process:
The new inductees
There were 17 players on the 2024 Hall of Fame ballot whom I thought were worthy of immortality. I know that my vision of what Cooperstown should be is not universal, and thus that even getting multiple inductees in one go is a win in itself. (Twice in the last 12 years, the voters failed to elect anyone.) This time the BBWAA saw fit to add three players to the hallowed Plaque Gallery, each of whom is incredibly deserving of the honor.
Beltré enters the Hall as one of the clearest-consensus candidates in history. His 95 percent of the vote on his first ballot among the highest ever. He will be remembered for reaching 3,000 hits, being arguably the second-best defensive third baseman of all time, and for being one of the most fun players of his generation.
Beltré was not the only first-ballot selection. Joining him is Mauer, who had one of the best peak-years stretch of any catcher in Major League history, but who prematurely declined and moved out from behind the plate due to injuries. I was not alone in fearing his legacy would be defined by his unfulfilled promise more than his actualized (if abbreviated) greatness. Yet while the voters are notoriously stingy with catchers, they rightly let Mauer in on his first try.
Rounding out the group is Helton, for whom it six tries to complete what should have an easy waltz into Cooperstown. Like his longtime teammate Larry Walker, voters were skeptical of Helton’s accomplishments because he played his home games in the thin air of Coors Field. It didn’t help that he put up merely great (not historic) power numbers in an age when the single-season home run record fell twice in four years. Still, he was one of the great pure hitters of his day, and he deservedly closed the 11-vote gap by which he had fallen short a year ago.
The new heirs apparent
A strange quirk of the Cooperstown selection process is that candidates often gain significant support many years after they retire. Baseball fans take it for granted as part of the process, but there’s no actual reason why a group of veteran sportswriters should see a player as significantly better eight years after he stopped playing than they did five years after he hung up his cleats. The flipside silver lining is that the incredibly deserving Billy Wagner, who finished five measly votes shy of immortality, should be a lock to gain entrance in 2025, his final year of eligibility.
Wagner is not the only candidate who gained some consolatory momentum for the future. Chase Utley picked a tough year to debut on the ballot, playing third banana to Beltré and Mauer in a strong rookie class. (The voters have selected three or more first-time candidates only thrice since the first election in 1936.) Even the specific argument for Utley, a peak-over-longevity candidate with questionable counting stats whose skills were not fully appreciated in his heyday, put him in the same broad lane behind Mauer. Fortunately his candidacy is just beginning, and the only non-controversy-hampered player who reached the 29 percent support Utley got in his first try and ultimately failed to reach the Hall is Steve Garvey.
The most-interesting candidate to watch going forward is Carlos Beltrán. Beltrán had a slam-dunk Cooperstown-worthy career in my eyes, but deserving center fielders without obvious round-number milestones don’t always interest the electorate — ask Kenny Lofton and Jim Edmonds. The other twist is Beltrán’s role as the alleged ringleader of the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal, through which he has done more to besmirch the integrity of the game than any individual steroid user of my lifetime. After a surprisingly robust 47 percent showing in his debut last year, many Cooperstown watchers wondered if a decisive bloc of voters would be willing to countenance his unsportsmanlike contact after a punitive initial rejection, a strange form of process-story justice that the writers famously meted out to Roberto Alomar, a shoo-in Hall of Famer who was denied first-ballot selection in retribution for spitting on an umpire in 1996.
Indeed Beltrán saw the biggest vote bump of any candidate, earning 57 percent support in 2024. Ordinarily this would make him a virtual lock for induction soon: no player who earned majority support on their second try has ever failed to reach the Hall. However, his future prospects could hinge on why the remaining voters left him off their ballots. If the main question is his on-field worthiness, that’s surmountable — just ask Scott Rolen, who gained an average of 13 percent per year between his underwhelming 2018 ballot debut and his election in 2023. On the other hand, if voters think his cheating is disqualifying for Cooperstown, I’d say that mindset is ahistorical, but the writers typically don’t change their minds about that en masse. It’s no guarantee that the eight years of eligibility he has left would be enough to close what would otherwise be a trivial gap.
An end of an era
In 2006, BBWAA members opened their mailboxes to find Mark McGwire’s name on their Hall of Fame ballots. This, I would argue, was the start of the Reckoning-with-the-Steroid-Era Era. For nearly two decades since, voters have considered a stream of candidates who (were suspected to have) used performance-enhancing drugs, but who could not have been called unambiguous cheaters. Some stars doped before the league had a collectively bargained PED policy. Others (allegedly) tested positive only on (supposedly) anonymous non-punitive survey sampling, or not at all. When McGwire was reported to be using androstenedione in 1998, then-Commissioner Bud Selig dismissed it as a non-issue. Nevertheless, the BBWAA exacted their own brand of belated justice, and one of the greatest sluggers of all time topped out at a mere 24 percent of the vote. The electorate’s stance has softened over the years, with players like David Ortiz and Mike Piazza getting in and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens eventually reaching majority support, but even candidates who were never suspended for doping have had to contend with the writers’ capricious retroactive judgments.
The issue is not going away anytime soon — Álex Rodriguez and Manny Ramírez will presumably remain on the ballot through 2030, to be joined in the coming years by names like Nelson Cruz and Robinson Canó. The difference is that these players cheated after PEDs were unambiguously illegal, and were suspended for their actions. But with apologies to Andy Pettitte (whose failure to surpass 17 percent of the vote has more to do with shifting standards for starting pitchers than his use of human growth hormone), Gary Sheffield was the last remaining serious candidate to be held back by doping allegations that were not punished contemporaneously. His 509 home runs and singularly violent bat speed would otherwise (and should still) have earned him induction on his first ballot. Instead, he fell short with 64 percent support in his 10th and final year of eligibility.
The dissonance on partner violence continues
Content warning: domestic violence
Earlier this month, right-handed pitcher Trevor Bauer went on Fox News to announce his intention to return to the Majors. Bauer was suspended in 2021 amidst allegations of assault; by the time the Los Angeles Dodgers released him 18 months later, he still hadn’t thrown a pitch since, and two more women had accused him of sexual violence. Now Bauer, who spent last season with the Yokohama DeNA BayStars of the Nippon Professional Baseball league, has offered some unconvincing pablum about taking responsibility for his actions, and claims that some American teams are interested in giving him a second fourth chance. Many writers and fans have been disgusted by this attempted redemption arc for a man who has long been petulantly unrepentant about his offensive actions, even before these specific allegations surfaced.
There is a strange overlap between those who (rightly) insist that there should be no place for Bauer in baseball and those who stumped, or even voted, for Andruw Jones.
Jones, who was arrested for and pled guilty to brutally assaulting his wife in 2012, saw his vote share increase to 62 percent this time around. Fans probably do not reflexively associate his name with domestic violence as they might for Bauer — 12 years may not seem that long ago, but the sport had not yet started taking such incidents seriously — but it’s something that the veteran sportswriters of electorate are surely aware of, and that Cooperstown buffs who research the candidates must have come across. I believe that some things are more important than baseball, and that the line between celebrating an athlete’s on-field achievements and venerating their character is too blurry to be worth honoring anyone who commits such acts. Reasonable people can disagree about where to set this boundary, but to me there is a clear connection between Jones’ candidacy gaining momentum and Bauer seeing an opening to attempt a comeback.
Rarer but even grosser are the voters who supported Omar Vizquel. The former fan-favorite shortstop has been in hot water since he retired, committing both domestic violence and recurring sexual and ableist harassment as a coach. These allegations are recent, disturbing, and widely known. Still, not only did Vizquel get 18 percent of the vote, but at least eight writers decided to vote for him in 2024 after not supporting him previously. That’s not the direction in which our social mores should be shifting.
What’s more, many writers who have patted themselves on the pack for snubbing Vizquel have conspicuously continued (or even since begun!) to vote for Jones. Between the individual ballots that have been published and the final BBWAA tallies, we know that at least 43 percent of the electorate checked Jones’ name but not Vizquel’s. Vizquel was polling as high as 53 percent before the allegations against him came out, so the gap between him and Jones is not merely a question of talent. We can thus infer that a substantial bloc of voters are disappointingly selective in their willingness to take such moral stands against domestic violence. (Note the parallels to modern American politics, as many partisans care about the respective sexual assault allegations against one of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but not the other.)
One silver lining is that some voters are taking these issues more seriously. For what as far as I’m aware is the first time, at least two writers (including Friend of The Lewsletter Sam Miller, whose own Substack I cannot recommend highly enough) stated that they left the otherwise-deserving Manny Ramírez off their ballots not because of his PED use but because of his largely memory-holed 2011 domestic violence charge.
Secret ballots strike again
For more than a decade, the corrosive impact of secret ballots on the Hall of Fame selection process has been my hobbyhorse. Voting for Cooperstown is not a right but a privilege, reserved for a specifically selected cohort of journalists with extensive experience in both analyzing baseball and communicating their knowledge to the masses. In other words, every voting member of the BBWAA should be more than capable of explaining their choices. So after my recently longitudinal study of more than a decade of Hall of Fame elections plainly showed that those who choose not to unveil their ballots vote not just differently but worse, it’s fair to posit that anonymity allows some writers to shirk the seriousness of their responsibilities and make capricious choices without suffering reputational harm.
This trend has continued in 2024.
You can see this anecdotally, in how the BBWAA’s final tallies compare to the Ryan Thibodaux and his team’s famous BBHOF Tracker, from whence I pulled the tallies of the 204 named ballots that had been published as of 15 minutes before today’s announcement. With the caveat that a large bloc of voters will unveil their ballots belatedly in two weeks, the conspicuous discrepancies between transparent and anonymous ballots include:
Adrian Beltré got 99 percent of the vote from public-facing ballots, but just 91 percent from the rest. In other words, writers were nearly 10 times as likely to snub this year’s top candidate if they didn’t have to explain themselves.
Billy Wagner, who earned 79 percent support from named ballots (easily clearing the 75 percent bar for induction), got barely two thirds (68 percent) of the vote from secret ballots.
Joe Mauer fell from a seemingly secure 83 percent public support to a not-so-nice 69 percent on secret ballots, dragging his total share down to a cutting-it-close 76 percent.
Carlos Beltrán, Andruw Jones, and Gary Sheffield appeared to be knocking on the door of the Plaque Gallery, garnering between 67 and 75 percent of support from published ballots, but each lost between 16 and 23 points from private voters, where their respective support ranged from just 46 to 53 percent.
Chase Utley received more than double the support from those who named their ballots (39 percent) as he did from anonymous writers (17 percent).
And finally, voters were more than twice as likely to vote for the most-odious man on the ballot, Omar Vizquel, if their names were not attached to their picks (25 percent to 11 percent).
These observations also align with the established large-scale trend from past elections: The better the candidate, the more his support drops off on anonymous ballots. Here are this year’s results superimposed on my previously presented data showing the relationship between private-public vote differential and career Wins Above Replacement (as calculated by Baseball-Reference, from whence much of this post’s data comes):
Or, if you prefer a more-nuanced player-quality metric than straight WAR, we see a nearly identical trend using Jay Jaffe’s JAWS:
Most damningly, look how the differentials compare to the vote totals — i.e., the measure of how qualified the electorate itself thinks each candidate is:
Anonymous voters simply do not seem to be putting the same level of thought into their selections as their more-transparent peers. This year, it may have cost Billy Wagner a place in Cooperstown.
Great breakdown, spot on.