The season of Hall of Fame debates is almost over, as the results of this year’s Baseball Writers’ Association of America election are revealed Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET on MLB Network.
Both of us are BBWAA members, but we are not yet eligible to vote for the Hall of Fame. Still, that didn’t stop us from filling out our own hypothetical ballots.
First, here’s a quick refresher on how the Hall of Fame ballot works. BBWAA voting members can select up to 10 players on the ballot. Players must receive votes from 75% of the ballots cast to earn induction, and they must get at least 5% to remain eligible for the following year. They have a maximum of 10 years of eligibility on the writers’ ballot.
There’s a lot to cover with our ballots, so let’s get started. Emma is up first …
Emma Baccellieri, MLB Staff Writer
I find this ballot pretty tricky. There are plenty of guys with cases for inclusion, as I see it, but none who look like clear auto-bids. (There two who look like automatic inductees just by their statistics—Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramírez—but the fact that both were not only linked to PEDs but actually suspended for them makes it … complicated.)
If you’re a Small Hall believer, I think this is a year when it could easily make sense not to vote for anyone at all. If you’re more Big Hall, I think you can make a logically coherent full ballot of 10. Personally, I’m somewhere in the middle, and I settled on six.
Two of the most straightforward for me were those who finished above 50% last year: Scott Rolen and Todd Helton. Rolen is one of the best defensive third basemen of all time and meets qualifications on offense, too. (2,000 hits, 300 home runs and 500 doubles!) Helton was always close to the line for me, but now that Larry Walker is in, Helton definitely should be, too.
With Andruw Jones, I find the defensive peak compelling enough to merit inclusion, and with Billy Wagner, he’s in such a small, elite group of closers that I think he has to be in Cooperstown.
So it was the two remaining names here that proved trickiest for me: Carlos Beltrán and Jeff Kent. In the case of Beltrán, I’d thought when he retired that he was a Hall of Famer, and I didn’t imagine there was anything that would change that. … But, of course, you know what happened next. I struggled quite a bit with how to judge Beltrán’s role in the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. On the one hand, there is clear, unambiguous evidence of cheating that was reportedly orchestrated in large part by Beltrán, and I understand anyone who decides that disqualifies him. On the other … it’s all but impossible to suss out just how much he did, personally, and exactly how much it did (or didn’t) benefit each member of the team. Plus, there are already all sorts of ethical shades of gray included in Cooperstown. (There have been sign-stealing scandals aided by technology going back a time.) I think what Beltrán did was wrong. Given all the messy compromises already present in the Hall of Fame, I don’t think it was necessarily disqualifying.
That leaves Kent: no tough ethical questions here, for once, just a straightforward one of performance on the field. He’s one of the best offensive second basemen in history, if not best, as the home run leader at the position. He was also a famously poor defender. In years past, I hadn’t thought much of his case for Cooperstown. But with this year being his final one on the ballot, I focused on it a little more, and I was ultimately convinced by an argument from Matt Martell: The offense speaks for itself to the point where the defense didn’t really matter. His managers always found his bat so valuable that it was worth keeping him where he was instead of moving him off second. A clear-cut case for the Hall? Not quite, but in his last chance on the writers’ ballot, I think Kent is just over the line for me.
Emma Baccellieri’s Ballot
Carlos BeltránTodd HeltonAndruw JonesJeff KentScott RolenBilly Wagner