profile

Hot Corner Harbor: Reviewing the Jam-Packed 2025 Veterans Committee Ballot, Part 2

Published about 1 year ago • 1 min read

Earlier this week, I began posting my thoughts on this year’s Veterans Committee Hall of Fame ballot, which includes Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant. Those first four were covered in Part 1 (along with a general overview of the election rules), which you can read here if you missed it. Part 2 picks up right where that one leaves off.​
​
​​
Vic Harris: In my blurb on John Donaldson, I mentioned that the pitcher finished fourth place on the 2022 Early Baseball Ballot, behind eventual inductees Buck O'Neil and Bud Fowler. However, you may have noticed that I conspicuously did not mention the third place finisher. Top runner-up status went to Vic Harris, who finished just two votes shy of induction.
​
That seems like the type of thing that would set him up for an easy path to induction this year, but I’m really not sure how combining the Early Baseball Ballot into one big “Everything Before 1980” Ballot will play out. After all, you may notice that Harris and Donaldson are the only candidates here who would have come from that Early Baseball set; everything post-1950 would have been classified as either “Golden Days” or “Modern Baseball”. That seems like an easy way to spread the votes even more thin than they already are, and I don’t know how that will play out.
​
​Read more »​

Read more from

It’s been a month since we got our last big piece of news on the 2026 Hall of Fame election, that the first member of this year’s class of inductees would be Veterans Committee choice Jeff Kent. In the time since, we’ve gone fullbore on the main question of Hall of Fame Season: who the Baseball Writers will induct off the main ballot. However, the actual ballots are technically all submitted (the deadline for that was the start of the new year), and there’s not really going to be any real...

3 days ago • 2 min read

On Sunday, we got our first official Hall of Fame announcement for the Class of 2026, with the Veterans Committee’s Contemporary Era panel revealing the results of their election. And somehow, the results were both very predictable and rather baffling. But first, we’ll start with the big headline: Jeff Kent will be joining the Hall of Fame in 2026.I wrote severalpieces previewingthis election (thank you to everyone who read them!), and if you read those, this is in some ways unsurprising. I...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Earlier this week, I reviewed the Veterans Committee ballot ahead of their upcoming December 7th announcement. Part 1 (which can be read here) covered the cases of Gary Sheffield, Carlos Delgado, Fernando Valenzuela, and most-likely inductee Jeff Kent; Part 2 (which can be read here) covered the new rules shenanigans that are likely to impact the candidacies of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy. Check both of those out if you haven’t already, I think I did a pretty...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read