It is once again the time of the baseball calendar where Hall of Fame talk takes over! The Baseball Writers Association of America has released their 2026 Ballot (and some writers have already even released their official votes for it), while the Veterans Committee’s Contemporary Baseball Era panel will be announcing the results of their election on December 7th.
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In case the embedded link has stopped working, this year’s slate of candidates consists of eight names: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela. And for further housekeeping, the panel consists of sixteen voters, who will meet in-person at the Winter Meetings to discuss their options before casting their vote. Candidates need twelve votes for induction, and while I couldn’t find anything confirming it would still be the case this year, in recent years each voter has been limited to three choices.
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There’s actually another big rule change in this year’s VC process, but I want to hold off on discussing it for now. Once again, my write-up got kind of long, so I decided to split it up into two parts for posting. And as it turned out, the easiest splitting point wound up being “the half of the ballot that will be deeply affected by this rule, but doesn’t really need their individual cases discussed” and “the half of the ballot that could stand to have their cases discussed a little more, but which probably isn’t going to be affected by the new rule all that much”. The former is a little more complicated, so we’ll be focusing today on the latter to ease us in.
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(Stats are from Baseball-Refernce and Fangraphs unless otherwise noted.)
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And within that latter half, let’s start with the candidate that I think is the most straightforward one to cover: I believe that Jeff Kent is the most likely Veterans Committee inductee this voting cycle, and probably the only one I would place above 50/50 odds. This is actually something that I’ve been saying at least since he fell off the BBWAA ballot back in 2023 too (if not earlier). His reasoning reminds me of Fred McGriff’s in a lot of ways too, and that was another case where I predicted a Vet Ballot debut would sail in; in the end, the voters wound up doing exactly what I predicted, electing him unanimously on his first go-around in the process.
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