A Breakdown of the Contemporary Era Hall of Fame Ballot

Next week at the Winter Meetings, the Baseball Hall of Fame will announce whether or not there will be any new inductees via the process known as the “Eras Committees,” the current form of what has traditionally been called the Veterans Committee.

A quick historical review: The function of the Veterans Committee has changed somewhat over time, but its purpose has always been the same: to ask a group of ex-players and prominent baseball figures to choose new inductees for the Hall of Fame who have been passed over, for whatever reason, by the Baseball Writers of America Association, the voting body that does the “typical” Hall of Fame elections.

The history of the Veterans Committee is kind of a bizarre, twisting tale. For every good induction—such as Larry Doby, Johnny Mize, Arky Vaughan, Ron Santo, or Dick Allen, who was chosen last year—there have been long stretches plagued by cronyism and dubious choices. Many of the Hall’s most questionable inclusions, guys like Freddie Lindstrom, Rube Marquard, Jesse Haines, and Harold Baines, were inducted by Veterans Committees which were headed up by influential former teammates or managers. (If you’re a baseball history die-hard and want to find the source of many of the Hall’s worst inclusions, look up Frankie Frisch’s reign of terror at the head of the committee; Lindstrom, Marquard, and Haines were all former teammates of his.)

The current version of the Veterans Committee, known as the Eras Committees, started in 2021 after a similar but slightly different iteration in the five years before that. As it currently exists, there is a three-year rotation: Contemporary Era players (players whose major contributions came after 1980), Contemporary Era non-players (managers, executives, and umpires since 1980), and the Classic Baseball Era, which covers all players and non-players whose greatest contributions came before 1980. For a player to get inducted, they must get 12 of the 16 available votes from the members of the committee, which is made up of players currently in the Hall of Fame as well as executives, media members, and historians.

This year, we’ve come back around to the Contemporary Players ballot, which in 2023 inducted Fred McGriff (who received all 16 votes). That ballot also gave eight votes to Don Mattingly, seven to Curt Schilling, and six to Dale Murphy, and fewer than four (they do not reveal vote totals that are less than four) for Albert Belle, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Rafael Palmeiro. This year, Mattingly, Murphy, Clemens, and Bonds return to the ballot, and are joined by Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela.

A breakdown of each member on this interesting ballot, starting with the returners:

Returning Players

Don Mattingly figures to have the best shot at induction after he got 50% of the vote last time around. Mattingly is a rare breed in baseball history: he played his entire 14-year career with the Yankees and very nearly never made the postseason, only in his last season in 1995. Mattingly was an All-Star each year from 1984-89 and won the 1985 MVP in a year in which he led the league in doubles, total bases, and RBI while hitting .324. Mattingly also won a batting title in 1984 and finished as the MVP runner-up in 1986 when he hit .352/.394/.573 and led the league in hits, doubles, slugging, total bases, and OPS. He was known as an excellent fielder, as well, and won nine Gold Gloves to go with three Silver Sluggers.

Mattingly’s case is not exactly helped by advanced stats, though. He was a first baseman, so even with a good defensive record it doesn’t hold a ton of value. He was not a player that walked much, and had just a .358 career OBP despite a .307 career batting average. And his career wasn’t long: he didn’t establish himself as a big leaguer until 1984, and his last season that I’d classify as “good” came just six years later, in 1989. He was a useful player for a few years after that, but hardly a star, and he retired when he was only 34. In his 14 years, Mattingly earned only 42.4 career WAR, which it should be said probably matters very, very little to most of the members of the committee.

The other player who had a strong showing in 2023’s voting is Dale Murphy, the outfielder whose best years came with Atlanta. Murphy was a superstar of the 1980s, and won back-to-back MVP awards in 1982 and 1983. But Murphy, like Mattingly, had a short peak—and unlike Mattingly, Murphy had virtually no production outside of his peak. From 1980-88, Murphy had 45.5 WAR. In parts of nine seasons that encompassed 797 games outside of that, Murphy had 1 (one) WAR. Murphy was a Hall-of-Fame level player for most of the 1980s, but his time outside of that was so rough that his career WAR comes in at just 46.5, which is less than, to grab a few carefully chosen names, Mike Cameron, Josh Donaldson, Ryan Braun, Devon White, and Curtis Granderson.

The other two returning players are cases that we don’t need to spend much time on. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are two of the best players in the history of baseball. They’re also known (if not admitted) steroid users who’ve shown no remorse and are known to be difficult personalities. Bonds and Clemens reached about 66% in BBWAA voting by their last year on that ballot, but they got no support whatsoever from the Veterans Committee in 2023 and will almost certainly get no support from that committee for the foreseeable future, perhaps ever. It’s difficult to see how these players would ever get elected during their lifetimes without a special “Steroid Era” committee, which no one seems to have the appetite for at the moment.

To the four newcomers.

New Players

Fernando Valenzuela probably does not deserve Hall of Fame induction purely on the merit of his play. He exploded onto the scene with the Dodgers in 1981, when as a 20-year-old rookie he led the league in strikeouts and shutouts and won Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young Award in the strike-shortened 1981 “Fernandomania” season. Over the next five years, he made the All-Star Game every year, won a Silver Slugger, and had three further top-five Cy Young finishes, including second place in 1986. All of this was done before he turned 26. But while he was an occasionally solid pitcher after that, Valenzuela struggled with health for the first time in his career, he spent a year back in his native Mexico, and he never made the All-Star Game or received a Cy Young vote again. He finished his 17-year career with 173 wins, 41.4 WAR (buoyed by his prowess as a hitter), and 2,074 strikeouts.

But Valenzuela’s story is not merely as a pitcher. As a Mexican pitching in a city full of Mexican-Americans, the Spanish-language Dodgers broadcaster Jaime Jarrín has said that he believes Valenzuela brought as many new fans to the game as anyone else in its history. Valenzuela has more WAR than any other Mexican player, according to Baseball Reference, and his number was retired in the entire Mexican Baseball League, even though he spent only a couple of years pitching there before moving to the States (he also pitched in Mexico in 1992, when his MLB career was flailing a bit, and again after he’d retired from MLB).

Between his good career and importance to the game, Valenzuela, who passed away last year,  feels like a no-brainer to me. But it’s not clear that the committee will think it’s within their purview to consider a player’s impact beyond the playing field or not.

The other players are more traditional. Gary Sheffield hit 509 home runs (21 of them for the Milwaukee Brewers!) and was one of the most feared hitters of an era filled with monsters. But he was also linked to steroid use, although not quite as strongly as Bonds and Clemens, and he was such an atrocious fielder that there’s actually an argument that, despite being one of the best hitters of all time, he would have a merely borderline case even if you ignored the steroid use.

Jeff Kent’s case seems like one that this type of committee tends to like. Kent holds the record for most home runs ever hit by a second baseman (354 of his 377 career dingers came while he was playing second), which is exactly the sort of easy-to-digest morsel that this committee has traditionally loved. Kent finished his career with 2,461 hits, 560 doubles, over 1,500 RBI, and a 123 OPS+ to go along with those 377 homers, which are all very solid offensive numbers. He also won the NL MVP in 2000, a frankly strange decision (his teammate, Bonds, was clearly better, and Colorado’s Todd Helton put up video game numbers that season).

But he also wasn’t a particularly good second baseman on the defensive side of the ball, and he holds a career WAR total of 55.4, making him a borderline case. Personally, I’m not sure if I’d vote for Kent or not—he’s right on the line for me—but the thought of him getting inducted on a ballot that also includes Bonds, who he played with for six years, would be insulting, given that Kent was a vastly inferior player.

The last newcomer is Carlos Delgado, who happened to be one of the author’s favorite players when he was a kid. Delgado, I think, gets overlooked—he was a terrifying slugger in the late 1990s and early 2000s and was never linked to steroids. Delgado hit at least 24 homers in every season between 1996 and 2008 (and averaged 35 during that 13-year span), led the league in total bases in 2000, and led in RBI, OPS, and OPS+ in 2003. He finished his career with a ridiculous .280/.383/.546 batting line, 483 doubles, 473 homers, 1,512 RBI, and a 138 OPS+, which is roughly the same as Reggie Jackson and Alex Rodriguez.

But Delgado was an offense-only, big, slow slugger in an era that was filled with even-more-giant sluggers, and even if he wasn’t a steroid user (which there’s no indication that he was), the crazy numbers going up all over the place around him sort of diminished his impact. Delgado had only 44.4 career WAR, and while he did have a second-place MVP finish, he never won that award, and he seems like the odd man out on this ballot. He was a wonder to behold, though, and I sort of think back on him like I think about Giancarlo Stanton now—maybe he wasn’t the league’s best player, but he was darn good, and no one hit the ball harder.

Prediction

These committees are notoriously difficult to predict, given the small voting body that often has “political” reasons for their actions. As far as I can tell, the members of that committee have not been announced, but there are almost always connections between the players and/or managers on the committee and those on the ballot.

But: it feels like Mattingly’s moment. He’s been a beloved baseball figure for 40 years, he’s served time as a prominent manager, and he was back in the spotlight this fall as the bench coach for the AL champion Blue Jays. Mattingly was a very good player whose fame maybe outweighed the actual value of his playing career—even in lean times, it’s a good gig to be the best player on the Yankees—which is why he was never inducted by the BBWAA (he never got more than the 28.2% he got on his first ballot in 2001). But the Veterans Committees tend to elect famous players like Mattingly who perhaps have analytic arguments that made them tough for the typical voting body, as they did with Dave Parker last year.

Keep an eye on Murphy, too. His profile as a player is very similar to Mattingly’s, and he’s a beloved figure off the field. I would not be surprised if both players managed induction.

As for the others, I see no situation where Bonds, Clemens, or Sheffield get any support due to their ties with steroids. Kent feels like the right kind of guy for this ballot, but I suspect he’ll have to wait in line a little bit. Delgado feels like the extra guy, like Albert Belle the last time this ballot came around—a great player, but not quite great or famous enough. Valenzuela is the wildcard: I feel strongly that he’s deserving of a spot in Cooperstown, and I’m sure others agree, but the nature of his case is not straightforward. Traditionally, this committee doesn’t do nuance very well, so I don’t expect to see a ton of support for him, but I’ve been wrong before.

We’ll find out on Sunday night, when the results of the ballot are announced at the Winter Meetings.