A 2025 Hall of Fame Ballot of Your Own – and a Schedule of Profiles
Hall of Fame season is underway, and after reviewing all eight candidates on the Classic Baseball Era Committtee ballot, I’ve gotten a start on the annual BBWAA ballot. With the latter, it’s time to launch what’s become a yearly tradition at FanGraphs. In the spirit of our annual free agent contract crowdsourcing, we’re inviting registered users to fill out their own virtual Hall of Fame ballots using a cool gizmo that our developer, Sean Dolinar, built a few years ago. I’m also going to use this page to lay out a tentative schedule for the remainder of the series, as well as links to the profiles that have been published.
To participate in the crowdsourcing, you must be signed in, and you may only vote once. While you don’t have to be a FanGraphs Member to do so, this is a perfect time to mention that buying a Membership does help to fund the development of cool tools like this — and it makes a great holiday gift! To replicate the actual voting process, you may vote for anywhere from zero to 10 players; ballots with more than 10 votes won’t be counted. You may change your ballot until the deadline, which is December 31, 2024, the same as that of the actual BBWAA voters, who have to schlep their paper ballot to the mailbox.
The ballot is here and contains all 28 candidates (and no, you still can’t write in Pete Rose or Barry Bonds). We’ve got tables of career stats for the ballot’s position players and pitchers, if that helps, as well as a checkbox on our leaderboards that allows you to see the stats of those already enshrined. As with last year, I’ll write up the crowdsourcing results sometime before the announcement of the official results on January 21.
As for the schedule, I’m still piecing it together, so what is sketched out below is incomplete and should be regarded as tentative. I do anticipate several first-year candidates with no shot at election — the one-and-dones — running sometime in early January, which allows me to focus on the stronger cases before the ballot deadline while continuing to pitch in with our coverage of free agent deals and other offseason news. This also lets me go a bit longer with the profiles of those one-and-done candidates, for whom just appearing on the ballot after an impressive career is its own reward. In order to free up space for contemporary coverage, I plan to group together brief summaries and updates of a few down-ballot candidates, such as those of pitchers Mark Buehrle and Andy Pettitte, or PED-linked sluggers Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, as relatively little has changed in their cases since last year.
Rest assured that I’ll be covering every candidate at length or in brief, in keeping with what I’ve done since the start of my JAWS-flavored coverage in 2004 (I celebrated the 20th anniversary back in January). I’m not about to miss any now. New profiles below are denoted with asterisks.
Nov. 18: Intro
Nov. 22: Billy Wagner
Nov. 25: Ichiro Suzuki*
Nov. 26: Carlos Beltrán
Nov. 27: Manny Ramirez/Alex Rodriguez
Dec. 2: Chase Utley
Dec. 3: Andruw Jones
Dec. 4: Andy Pettitte/Mark Buehrle
Dec. 5: CC Sabathia*
Dec. 6: Bobby Abreu
Dec. 9: Era Committee Results
Dec. 10: David Wright
Dec. 11: Torii Hunter/Jimmy Rollins
Dec. 13: Omar Vizquel/Francisco Rodríguez
Dec. 16: Félix Hernández*
Dec. 18: Russell Martin
Dec. 20: Brian McCann
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jay_jaffe... and BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
I am curious if others feel this way, but I would find it fascinating to see a history on JAWS for utility players like Ben Zobrist, and where he stacks relative to others. Perhaps you could classify Craig Biggio as a similar utility player, though in my view, it’s not apples to apples, as he was a catcher for 3.5 seasons, then a 2B for 11 seasons, then an outfielder for 2, and then back to 2B for the final 3 (so he is more like Mookie Betts in my view than Zobrist positionally, who played multiple positions per season once he became a starter).
While his career WAR isn’t quite up to the hall of fame standard, it feels like there is something to be said for how much flexibility he could provide his team day-to-day in a way existing WAR metrics do not fully state, and in a lot of ways, he was the poster-child of the sabermetric Joe Maddon Rays teams (not to mention, he won world series with both the Royals and Cubs too).
Zobrist is obviously not a HOF player by the numbers but he absolutely occupies a place in baseball history. Showed how a “superutilityman” can gain value, was at the forefront of the popular sabermetric revolution as you stated, and played a key role in ending the longest championship drought in the history of North American sports. Additionally, with the Rays’ relocation seemingly inevitable, he and Longoria will be remembered as the icons, really the sole icons, of that franchise. Is that worthy of a plaque? Probably not, but whether or not he gets one doesn’t change his role in the history of this game.
Similar to the unmeasured-by-WAR value that positional flexibility adds to a team…I often wonder how valuable reliability is from a team-building perspective. A guy who randomly has 2-WAR seasons interspersed with 7-WAR seasons, vs a guy who has a steady and predictable career arc. It’s hard to build a team as a GM when you go “all-in” and spend a lot of resources to sign or trade for a guy who then has a bad season. Then one or two years later, that guy goes back to having a great season, but the team is in a different part of their plan, or he’s on another team now. Whereas a guy who consistently delivers 4.5-WAR seasons is someone you can plan around.
Unfortunately, players are only truly consistent until they aren’t. They is really no way to know for sure whose those players are until looking back at the end of their career.
Tony Phillips is the player you’re looking for. 50.9 career BWAR while playing multiple positions in the same year. JAWS ranks him 26th at 2nd base but only about 1/3 of his career innings were at second.