Hot Corner Harbor: Can We Predict the Private Voters for the 2025 Hall of Fame Election?


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?

Read more »

Read more from

In honor of Opening Day tomorrow, I contributed my predictions for the 2025 Astros to The Crawfish Boxes’ Starting Nine! Go give it a look to see how everyone evaluated the team’s chances for this season. For posterity’s sake, I’ll re-post my blurb here, with a few extra thoughts:Read more »

We’re back with Part 2 of the Starting Pitchers section of the Future Hall of Fame Series. We’ll once again be picking up right where Part 1 left off; if you missed that one or need to refresh your memory on the methodology, you can find it here. And for that matter, if you missed the Position Players portion of this update, you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. I’m going to try and get one more piece (focusing on closers) finished for this year’s update, hopefully by the end of the week....

Editor’s Note: I will once again be splitting this longer piece up into two more manageable posts, with Part 2 coming early next week. Once again, you will also get an email once that goes live; thank you for subscribing to this list!!! With the two parts devoted to positionplayers taken care of, we can now move on to the next focus in the 2025 update to the Future Hall of Fame Series: the starting pitching. And this year’s entry is especially exciting, because it represents something of a...