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With the 2024 Postseason in the books, we can now officially move on to the off-season. And one of the first orders of business will be the Veterans Committee portion of 2025 Hall of Fame voting: this year’s eight-person ballot has officially been announced. Our candidates (for posterity’s sake in case of link decay, and so you have a quick reference to their stats on Baseball-Reference) are: Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, and Dave Parker.
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If you’d really like to parse the full details on the process, here’s the official post from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s website. But if you’d just like a quick summary of the important points, the main things are:
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-Results will be announced in under a month, December 8th.
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-This will almost immediately follow the 16-person Committee’s deliberation at the Winter Meetings
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-Any nominee will need to be selected by 12 of the 16 members to get in (we don’t know yet who will be voting, although that has occasionally been relevant in the past)
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​-Each voter will only get to vote for up to 3 players​
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I think that last point is the most relevant; the extreme constraints these ballot caps have on the elections have become a recurring problem not just on the BBWAA’s ballots, but on the VC’s process too. There just isn’t much margin for error when a player needs 12 votes for induction, but there are only 48 votes total to go around, which shifts the question from “Is this player deserving of Cooperstown?” to “Are they more deserving than everyone else who was nominated?”. The first question is already fairly nebulous, given that there really isn’t a hard-and-fast definition of “Hall of Famer”; trying to rank them on “deservedness” of that nebulous title on top of that just makes everything a confusing mess.
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