The 2025 Classic Baseball Ballot Is Long on Familiarity, Short on Imagination

On Monday, the National Baseball Hall of Fame officially revealed the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, an eight-man slate covering players, managers, executives, and umpires who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980. In a rare lapse, the Hall somehow managed to steal its own thunder, as an article in the Winter 2024 volume of its bimonthly Memories and Dreams magazine revealed the identities of the eight candidates in the days ahead of the announcement. Not that it had any real effect, as the slate won’t be voted upon until the 16-member committee meets on Sunday, December 8, at the Winter Meetings in Dallas.

This is the third ballot since the Hall of Fame reconfigured its Era Committee system into a triennial format in April 2022, after a bumper crop of six honorees was elected by the Early Baseball and Golden Days Era Committees the previous December. The new format splits the pool of potential candidates into two timeframes: those who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980 (Classic Baseball Era), including Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black players, and those who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present day (Contemporary Baseball Era). The Contemporary group is further split into two ballots, one for players whose eligibility on BBWAA ballots has lapsed (Fred McGriff was elected in December 2022), and one for managers, executives, and umpires (Jim Leyland was elected last December). Non-players from the Classic timeframe are lumped in with players, which doesn’t guarantee representation on the final ballot.

As with any Hall election, this one requires 75% from the voters to gain entry. In this case, the as-yet-unannounced panel will consist of Hall of Famers, executives, and media members/historians, each of whom may tab up to three candidates. Anyone elected will be inducted alongside those elected by the BBWAA (whose own ballot will be released on November 18) on July 27, 2025 in Cooperstown.

Like other Era Committee ballots, this one offers candidates to get excited about and ones whose presence may induce head-scratching as we bemoan the absences of those we perceive as more worthy of consideration. Particularly with the ballot size having been reduced from 10 candidates to eight since these players were last eligible, this one feels long on familiarity and short on imagination:

While the timespan covered by this ballot could conceivably encompass 1871 (the start of the National Association, the first professional league) to 1979, the two Negro Leagues candidates, Donaldson and Harris, are the only ones who debuted before 1955. Setting their presences aside for a moment, among the notable absences are a couple of strong 19th-century shortstops, Bill Dahlen and Jack Glasscock, who respectively rank 11th and 18th in JAWS at the position. Both have been recognized by the Society for American Baseball Research as Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legends via an annual vote by members; to date, two such winners, Deacon White and Bud Fowler, have been elected, the latter via the 2022 Early Baseball ballot. Glasscock has never appeared on an Era Committee ballot, and according to the research of Graham Womack, he was last considered by the Veterans Committee in 1995. Dahlen is more familiar, as he received three or fewer votes on the 2022 Early Baseball ballot after getting more substantial support on the 2013 and 2016 Pre-Integration Era Committee ballots (62.5% and 50%, respectively).

I’m far less bothered by their omissions than I am that of an additional SABR Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legend, Daniel “Doc” Adams, whom Major League Baseball official historian John Thorn has called “first among the Fathers of Baseball” and “the most significant figure in the early history of baseball.” Adams’ contribution actually predates that 1871 date. Via his 1857 rulebook, “The Laws of Base Ball”, he bears the true responsibility for setting the bases 90 feet apart; for creating the shortstop position; for proposing the standardization of nine-man lineups and nine-inning games; and for helping to standardize the construction of balls and bats, innovations that helped to make baseball a national game. Some of his contributions have been inaccurately credited to Alexander Cartwright on his Hall of Fame plaque, and while you’d think the institution would desire to set the record straight, it’s worth remembering that the Hall’s very presence in Cooperstown is based upon the myth of General Abner Doubleday drawing up the rules in a cow pasture there in 1839 — but I digress. What really chafes is that Adams led all candidates on the 2016 Pre-Integration ballot with 62.5% of the vote — nobody was elected from that slate — but hasn’t gotten another shot.

Speaking of predating integration, Harris (62.5%) and Donaldson (50%) were the top two near-misses from the 2022 Early Baseball ballot, which itself marked the first time that Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball candidates were considered since 17 were elected via the 2006 Special Committee on the Negro Leagues. Since that earlier date, there’s been an explosion of research and scholarship with regards to Black baseball. Seven professional leagues from the 1920–1948 period have been recognized as major leagues, and their statistical data — which has been painstakingly reconstructed, box score by box score, by diligent researchers — is now on Baseball Reference and FanGraphs.

As with Harris and Donaldson, a few other candidates from the 2022 Early Baseball ballot, Dick “Cannonball” Redding, George “Tubby” Scales, and Grant “Home Run” Johnson, are considered by experts to be among the top ones outside the Hall. They’re hardly alone, with names such as John Beckwith, Rap Dixon, Dick Lundy, Charles “Chino” Smith, owner Gus Greenlee and more often cited by those same experts. I have suggested before that the backlog among Negro Leagues candidates merits a separate Era Committee ballot to be evaluated by a panel of expert historians, as the average Hall committee member may not be well-versed enough to compare their merits to those of, say, a contemporary who played against them in the 1970s.

Given the high levels of representation for AL/NL players from the 1920s through the ’50s, nobody should be too broken up about this ballot’s lack of candidates from that stretch, but from the period after that, more variety would be welcome. Consider how often some of the six non-Negro Leagues candidates have come up for election over the past decade and a half, most without ever making waves:

Customarily, the Hall lumps together all of the players who drew relatively little support as “receiving fewer than x” votes or something along those lines to avoid embarrassing a candidate (or his descendants) with the news that he was shut out. Of the 19 appearances from the six players above, only four were above that threshold, with Allen accounting for two; he missed election by one vote each time.

When I spoke to Hall president Josh Rawich about the committee format change in 2022, he suggested the new process would created more turnover than we had been witnessing. “There was definitely a feeling [among the Hall’s board members] that we wanted to make sure that we’re not looking at a lot of the same players every single time,” he said at the time. “Once somebody’s had a chance to be reviewed a number of times, it’s time to let somebody else get looked at.”

Yet here we are, again debating the merits of Garvey, Parker et al, guys who were no doubt famous and popular in their day but whose career resumés had notable flaws even then (to say nothing of their off-field misadventures) and who don’t look particularly great using the yardsticks by which we’ve measured candidates more recently, including WAR and JAWS. In the first table, note those ranks, and the gaps between their numbers and the standards.

While these candidates have gotten several chances, some of their impressive contemporaries have not. Catcher Bill Freehan, who played for the Tigers from 1961–1976, made 11 All-Star teams and ranks 16th in JAWS at an underrepresented position. Since getting less than 5% in his lone BBWAA ballot appearance in 1982, he has yet to appear on a committee ballot. Second baseman Bobby Grich, who played for the Orioles and Angels from 1970-1986, made six All-Star teams and ranks eighth in JAWS at the position, is in the same boat. Third baseman Graig Nettles, who lasted four years on the writers ballot, made six All-Star teams and ranks 12th in JAWS, but he’s never been on a committee ballot. Catcher Thurman Munson, a former MVP who made seven All-Star teams before dying in a plane crash at age 32, ranks 12th in JAWS but has made just one committee ballot.

(Note that some other players whose absences I’ve questioned in the past, such as Lou Whitaker, Dwight Evans, and Keith Hernandez, have been classified as belonging to the Contemporary Baseball field. I suspect I’ll be kvetching about some of their omissions next year.)

Another notable absence is that of Curt Flood. A center fielder who won seven Gold Gloves and made three All-Star teams, he played a key role on the Cardinals’ three pennant winners and two champions in the 1960s. He hit .300 or better six times, no small feat in a pitcher-friendly era, but didn’t have much power, and so he produced just a 100 OPS+, with a good chunk of his 41.9 WAR owing to his defense. Because his career effectively ended at age 31, he doesn’t have Hall-caliber numbers, but it’s a mistake to treat his candidacy only on the merits of his play. After being traded from the Cardinals to the Phillies (in a blockbuster involving Allen), the 31-year-old Flood challenged the reserve clause binding a player to a team in perpetuity, and in doing so effectively sacrificed his career. His fight galvanized players to continue pushing to end the policy, opening the door to free agency and a whole new ballgame in terms of player mobility and salaries.

Flood peaked at 15.1% via the writers, and at 17.1% via the expanded Veterans Committee. He has yet to place on an Era Committee ballot, and I suspect it’s because the players — particularly the Hall of Famers who would be voting on his candidacy — haven’t been vocal enough. MLBPA executive director Tony Clark has spoken up on Flood’s behalf, as have politicians. David Cone and Tom Glavine — then the AL and NL player representatives — expressed their gratitude for Flood when he died in 1997, and Gerrit Cole made a point of citing him when he signed his $324 million contract in 2019. But have you ever seen the likes of Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey Jr., Greg Maddux or any other high-profile Hall of Famer use their bully pulpit to suggest Flood get elected? I haven’t.

Hell, the players who benefitted from the union’s increased power couldn’t get it right with former executive director Marvin Miller in his lifetime. (Reggie Jackson, one of the earliest beneficiaries of free agency, never struck out in more embarrassing fashion than when he told reporters in 2003, when Miller was a candidate, “I looked at those ballots, and there was no one to put in.”) Particularly now that virtually every living Hall of Famer likely to turn up on a committee was greatly enriched by Flood’s sacrifice, there shouldn’t be any holdouts, as there were when it came to old-timers and Miller. If the players want him considered, they’ll need to take the fight public, in a unified fashion that works outside of the traditional, secretive way that the ballot is constructed.

Speaking of which, the ballot was built by a 10-member BBWAA-appointed Historical Overview Committee of veteran writers: Adrian Burgos (University of Illinois), Bob Elliott (Canadian Baseball Network); Jim Henneman (formerly Baltimore Sun); Steve Hirdt (Stats Perform); David O’Brien (The Athletic); Jack O’Connell (BBWAA); Jim Reeves (formerly Fort Worth Star-Telegram); Glenn Schwarz (formerly San Francisco Chronicle); Susan Slusser (San Francisco Chronicle); and Mark Whicker (Southern California News Group). While they may have all sat on Era Committees before, they’re not voters in this election. Last year’s panel consisted of seven Hall of Famers (including executives Bud Selig and Joe Torre), six non-Hall executives, and three media members/historians. Lamentably, one can usually find connections between the voters and candidates that tend to telegraph certain outcomes; when Harold Baines was elected on the 2019 Modern Baseball ballot, the panel included a former manager (Tony LaRussa), general manager (Pat Gillick), and owner (Jerry Reinsdorf) with significant links to his career. Chipper Jones and Maddux, McGriff’s teammates, were on the 2023 Contemporary committee; with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens both candidates, one couldn’t help notice the presence of Frank Thomas and Ryne Sandberg, each known for their public criticism regarding performance-enhancing drug users.

Each voter can list up to three candidates on their ballot, down from four votes apiece for slates of 10 candidates from the previous system. As Dan Szymborski and I showed in 2022 with the help of some Monte Carlo simulations, this increases the possibility of a shutout and decreases the likelihood of electing multiple candidates.

Omissions aside, what are we to make of this ballot? The glass half-full view, I think, is that some of those familiar faces are electoral ballast. I don’t mean to besmirch their careers or their character in saying that. Everybody on this ballot was a great player at some point; the debates center around whether they were great enough for long enough. As Dan and I tried to illustrate, the lesser candidacies create some of the polarization necessary to avoid a shutout. If you have eight candidates, none of them locks, with a wide spread in terms of the likelihood that an individual voter chooses them, you’ll produce a much higher yield (more candidates elected) and a lower chance of a shutout than if the candidates are more closely clustered together in terms of their appeal. Here’s a summary of three scenarios that we ran:

In the first one, we tried to approximate a situation where the eight candidates are all clearly separated, with a favorite, a second-favorite, and so on all the way down to the longest longshot; the Odds are the chances that a given candidate randomly lands on a ballot in that simulation. In the second and third scenarios, we reduced the spread; the second one has a few different tiers, the third one just two tiers. Since there’s a maximum of 48 votes each time, the higher the odds of the lesser candidates landing on the ballot, the lower the yield and the greater the chance of a shutout, as you can see from the summaries in gray.

All of which is to say that this might be the best chance for Allen and the two Negro Leagues candidates to be elected, not that all three getting to 75% is likely. Then again, a group of voters rethinking, say, how much credit to award Tommy John for the surgery that bears his name could alter the electoral landscape, as could the October 8 death of Luis Tiant. On the latter note, I’ve written before about the collision between baseball immortality and human mortality; in fact, Ron Santo’s plight — after several near misses in his lifetime, he was elected about a year after dying — spawned the foundational chapter of The Cooperstown Casebook. Allen died on December 7, 2020, one day after his candidacy was originally scheduled to be considered, though by that point, the COVID-19 pandemic had postponed the Golden Days Era Committee election for a year; he fell one vote short while four other candidates were unanimously elected.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll delve into such specifics as I update and republish my profile of each candidate. I’ll have coverage of the election results from Dallas as well. Stay tuned!