The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

The 2026 Hall of Fame election is history, with a pair of center fielders who were born one day apart, fourth-year candidate Carlos Beltrán (born April 24, 1977) and ninth-year candidate Andruw Jones (born April 23, 1977), elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America. This is the fourth time two players from the same position besides pitcher were elected by the writers in the same year. Right fielders Harry Heilmann and Paul Waner were the first pair in 1952, followed by right fielders Henry Aaron and Frank Robinson in ’82, with left fielders Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice elected in 2009. That’s some impressive company!

Beltrán and Jones will be inducted into the Hall along with Contemporary Baseball honoree Jeff Kent on July 26, 2026, on the grounds of the Clark Sports Center in Cooperstown, New York. There’s no official word yet on which caps the players will be wearing on their plaques — the Hall has the final word — but odds are they’ll be the ones that you expect. Said Beltrán, who’s currently a special assistant for the Mets, “There’s no doubt that the Mets are a big part of my identity.” Kent has expressed his desire to wear a Giants cap, and Jones is almost certain to wear a Braves cap.

As usual, beyond the topline results, there’s plenty to digest from Tuesday’s returns. So as promised, here’s my candidate-by-candidate breakdown of the entire slate of 27 candidates, 13 of whom will return to the ballot next year. Note that references to percentages in Ryan Thibodaux’s indispensable Tracker may distinguish between what was logged at the time of the announcement at 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday (245 total ballots) and what’s in there as of Thursday at 9 a.m. ET (254 total ballots) Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

When it comes to center fielders and the Hall of Fame, BBWAA voters have been a particularly picky lot. It’s all too easy to say, “This guy was no Ty Cobb,” or “This guy was no Willie Mays.” Who can live up to standards like that? Until Tuesday, just nine center fielders had been elected by the writers, fewer than any other position, but when Josh Rawitch announced the results of the 2026 balloting, two more joined them: fourth-year candidate Carlos Beltrán and ninth-year candidate Andruw Jones.

Beltrán, a five-tool player with 2,725 career hits, 312 stolen bases and the no. 9 ranking among center fielders in JAWS, received 84.2% of the vote, up from 70.3% last year. He had to overcome some initial resistance to his candidacy owing to his involvement in the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing scandal at the end of his career while helping the Astros win the 2017 World Series. Commissioner Rob Manfred’s 2020 report placed him at the center of Houston’s scheme, and it cost him his job as Mets skipper before he could manage a single game. Despite his transgression, he received 46.5% of the vote in his 2023 ballot debut, and followed with three straight years of double-digit gains. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year was my 10th year as a member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, so while I’ve voted regularly in the end-of-year awards — nine times out of 10, in fact — this was my first opportunity to cast a ballot for a Hall of Fame election. I’m a huge believer in transparency when it comes to the voting for awards; every time I cast a ballot, I discuss my underlying reasoning at length. Because there is a lot of leeway and wiggle room in the official Hall of Fame election rules, votes come down to the interpretation and philosophy of the individual voters. For that reason, I wanted to take some space to discuss the philosophical decisions I made to determine who ended up with checkmarks on my submitted ballot. This isn’t really an analysis of the individual candidates; for that, you should consult Jay Jaffe’s extensive series, where he goes deep into each player’s career and legacy.

I’ve attached a picture of my ballot. Not the best one in the world since I cut off a few words of my obnoxious, meaningless “signing statement,” but since I sent my ballot off a month ago, there won’t be a better photo forthcoming! Unlike the year-end awards, which are conducted through Google forms, the Hall of Fame balloting process is old school. You physically open an envelope that contains a sheet of paper — made of these things called “trees” — and check boxes yourself before returning the whole thing through the good ol’ U.S. Mail. Thankfully, the whole exercise came with a pre-addressed, postage-paid envelope, as I don’t physically appear to be the owner of any envelopes or stamps. I will also note that I am aware that I have the penmanship of a seven-year-old. My handwriting has always been atrocious.

Anyway, you’ll notice that I voted for the maximum 10 players, and from the signing statement, you’ll see that I would have voted for 12 players if given the opportunity. In recent years, the BBWAA has issued proposals to the Hall of Fame to expand the number of players we’re allowed to vote for and to make all ballots public, but those requests have been turned down.

I’m not necessarily a Small Hall or Big Hall guy, but I do think it is important to keep the Hall consistent. What a Hall of Famer is is determined by who the Hall of Famers are. The obvious, inner circle players like Henry Aaron and Lefty Grove are a small minority of the Hall of Fame. What the Hall of Fame does have is a ton of guys like Ted Lyons and Waite Hoyt and Pee Wee Reese and Goose Goslin, those mid-range Hall of Famers who, if they were on today’s ballots, would be derided as Hall of Very Good Candidates by the extreme section of the Small Hall crowd. There’s this idea that modern inductees have watered down the Hall of Fame when, in fact, what the Hall is drowning in is endless inductees from baseball’s supposed Golden Age. Here’s my updated chart of the yearly percentage of position player plate appearances by future Hall of Famers:

Now, the final ruling hasn’t yet been handed down on those 1990s players, but just because the Veterans Committee exists to catch players who fall through the cracks doesn’t strike me as a good reason to let players fall through those cracks. I find the moral value of a great honor is diminished if the honoree has to wait an indefinite amount of time, or even worse, does not live long enough to receive it. It’s an absolute shame that Ron Santo and Dick Allen died without knowing that their careers would ultimately be recognized with baseball’s most prestigious honor. And with baseball’s increasingly illogically designed Eras Committees, it’s going to be harder to catch the BBWAA’s misses.

Even so, I don’t think that all of the players who are better than the worst Hall of Famers should be in the Hall. There are lots of pitchers better than Jack Morris and Rube Marquard who still would not get a Hall of Fame vote from me. If we voted in everyone better than Tommy McCarthy, who was essentially the 19th Century Juan Pierre, the Hall would have quite the influx of outfielders. But all 12 players I wanted to vote for in this election were players I felt were better than the bottom quartile of Hall of Fame inductees, meaning that if they were inducted, they would at least be part of the Hall’s large middle class.

One of the most convincing arguments Bill James ever made about the Hall of Fame came when he introduced the concepts of career value and peak value as different kinds of greatness. The Hall’s record of recognizing peak value is very spotty, and while Sandy Koufax, one of the best examples of peak value, was given his due, players like Johan Santana have frequently gotten the shaft. But when we talk about greatness, how good a player was at his best seems to be very important information. Miguel Cabrera would not have attained the 3,000-hit or 500-homer career milestones if he had retired after the 2016 season at age 33, but did anything that happened after 2016 really enhance his greatness on an abstract level? After 2016, he was mostly a DH who hit .262/.329/.381 and averaged nine home runs a year. Cabrera’s peak is what makes his career great, after all.

And that is why I checked the boxes for David Wright and Dustin Pedroia. Wright was healthy enough for about a decade to play full time, and over that period, he was perhaps the top third baseman in the majors.

Cabrera has the edge in WAR, and he had a better postseason record, but he also wasn’t a full-time a third baseman during this period. (He’s second among first basemen in the same years). It’s worth mentioning that Wright received more playing time during his 10-year peak than a lot of the competition, but he also had one of the highest WAR rates over that decade. He’s not the undisputed best third baseman during that span, but he certainly has a strong case for that title. That peak is enough for me. The case for Pedroia is similar.

Neither Wright or Pedroia is a slam-dunk candidate, but each is just over my foggy line.

I’m probably not going to get out of here without discussing how I consider performance-enhancing drug use or general rulebreaking/bending. Even more so than performance, there’s a lot of room for philosophical differences here, so let me emphasize that even though I personally feel that my stance is the best one — after all, why would I not go with what I think is best? — I certainly can’t objectively claim that it’s the right one. Let’s start with the text of the Hall’s so-called character clause, which is actually only just one sliver of a sentence:

Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

Based on my knowledge of baseball and the Hall of Fame’s history, both in practice and when the rules were being discussed, I function under the belief that we’re talking sportsmanship and character related to their baseball-related life, not so much as a person on a wider level. The rules of the game are pretty important, and so I consider breaking baseball’s rules to be a demerit on a player’s permanent record. In this case, I believe PED rulebreaking to be something I am dutybound to consider after the summer of 2004, when steroid testing was first implemented. I don’t have the same feeling about pre-2004 PED use. Some people cite former commissioner Fay Vincent’s early 1990s memo about steroids as a reason not to vote for PED users in the pre-testing era, but as Vincent himself noted in an interview with Bernie Miklasz, he issued the memo only to make a statement. He pointed out that he didn’t have the power to implement any such rules against PED use without MLBPA approval.

“I sent it out because I believed it was important to take the position that steroids were dangerous, as were other illegal drugs,” Vincent said. “As you know, the union would not bargain with us, would not discuss, would not agree to any form of a coherent drug plan. So my memo really applied to all the people who were not players.”

In other words, Fay Vincent banned Pat Gillick and Dan Duquette from using steroids.

So I consider Barry Bonds’ testing positive for amphetamines in 2006 as a black mark on his résumé, as I do with Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez for failing PED tests. But I also view each black mark as merely a factor to be weighed in a Hall of Fame case, not as a binary “they cheated, so they’re out” scenario. In my eyes, Bonds, A-Rod, and Manny are all worthy Hall of Famers, and a little bit of dirt in their story doesn’t tarnish the tale.

On the other hand, I would not have voted for Pedroia or Wright if they had been found to have broken those rules. I did not vote for Ryan Braun, because I think his performance was on the wrong side of the dividing line, but even if he had a slightly longer peak, I still would not have checked his box because of his situation. I don’t really care about the efficacy of the cheating when it comes to a player’s Hall of Fame case; it makes no difference to me if Carlos Beltrán and the other members of the 2017 Astros actually benefited from their electronic sign-stealing operation. Rather, what matters is that banging on a trash can to relay signs that were stolen in real time via a video camera is a blatant form of cheating. Yet, once again, when considering the totality of Beltrán’s career, he easily belongs in the Hall of Fame, even with the banging-scheme demerit.

Now, I wanted to vote for 12 players, but I could only vote for 10. So, I asked myself: What is the purpose of the checkmarks on a Hall of Fame ballot? I view it as getting deserving players into the Hall of Fame. There are three ways that a single voter can impact a player’s chances of making it to Cooperstown: 1) if a vote helps a player reach the 75% threshold required for induction, 2) if a vote allows a player to exceed the 5% mark necessary to remain eligible for future BBWAA elections, and 3) if a vote adds to the percentage of ballots cast in favor of a player from the previous year, thereby building that player’s momentum of support. The last one is kind of weird, but it does seem to be the case that a number of voters wait for the bandwagon to be rolling behind a player before they get on for the ride, so I have to take that into consideration, too.

Ultimately, my final decision came down to the following question: Which two votes of my desired 12 would be the least impactful at getting a deserving player in the Hall of Fame? I concluded those to be for Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez. There was no chance that my vote would get either of them over 75%, keep them over 5%, or build enough momentum for them to eventually get elected. Most baseball writers have already made up their minds about how they will vote for players who used or likely used PEDs, and there aren’t enough new voters in any given year to make a difference. A-Rod and Manny are not Hall of Famers right now because they used steroids, not because writers are unsure about their baseball merit.

So, that’s my ballot, right or wrong. It’s OK to disagree with me — this would be a boring job if everyone agreed with me — but as I said at the top, I feel it’s my responsibility to you, the readers, to explain why I vote the way I do.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

On Tuesday evening, the National Baseball Hall of Fame will announce the results of this year’s BBWAA balloting. In this age of ballot tracking, we have only a mild bit of suspense on our hands, something less than a true cliffhanger. Based on the published ballots in Ryan Thibodaux’s Tracker (which unfortunately has been experiencing outages due to traffic throttling), both Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones are likely to be elected, though there’s still a bit of uncertainty for the latter. If the FanGraphs readers who participated in this year’s crowdsource ballot had their way, Beltrán would be the only one who would make the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Early in his career, Nick Markakis appeared to be a star in the making. In his second and third seasons in the majors (2007 and ’08), the former first-round pick topped 40 doubles, 20 homers, and a .300 batting average while slugging nearly .500. He led the AL in WAR in 2008, his age-24 campaign — not that anyone was aware of it at the time, which helps to explain his omission from that year’s AL All-Star team.

It would take another decade before Markakis finally became an All-Star, and during that stretch, his performances leveled off. He became better known for his durability, his defense (he won three Gold Gloves), and above all, the example he set for younger players while enduring lean years both in Baltimore and Atlanta. He stuck around long enough to help both teams’ rebuilding efforts come to fruition with playoff appearances, racking up so many hits that he generated discussion regarding his potential Hall-worthiness if he persisted long enough to reach the magic 3,000-hit milestone.

Markakis’ retirement after his age-36 season rendered that question moot. He didn’t generate a Hall-caliber résumé or gaudy statistics during his 15-year career, but he received considerable praise for his impact on his teammates. From Braves manager Brian Snitker, who managed him from 2016–20:

“One of the most consistent, professional pros that I’ve ever been around. I’m glad I had the honor to manage him in his last years, because he’s a special player… How consistent he was, how professional he was, the way he played the game, how he grinded every at-bat. He never took a pitch off. And to see what he did late in his career, winning that Gold Glove, and the stabilizing force that he was for our club while I was here. You don’t appreciate a guy like Nick until you manage him. What a great career he had.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Daniel Murphy was not a home run hitter. Over the course of a 12-year major league career that was interrupted by knee injuries, he reached double digits in just seven seasons, topping 20 homers just twice. Like Howie Kendrick — another Jacksonville-born second baseman debuting on this Hall of Fame ballot, one who even played on the same team as Murphy in 2017–18 — the lefty-swinging, righty-throwing Murphy was known for his exceptional bat-to-ball ability. And like Kendrick, he went on a memorable, power-driven October run and won NLCS MVP honors. In 2015, he set a record by homering in six straight postseason games, carrying the Mets to their first pennant in 15 years. While it didn’t culminate in a championship, it earned him an indelible spot in postseason history; without that run, he probably wouldn’t even be on this ballot.

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Daniel Thomas Murphy was born on April 1, 1985 in Jacksonville, Florida, the oldest of three children of Tom and Sharon Murphy. Tom taught kindergarten while Sharon sold insurance (in one amusing anecdote, an 11-year-old Murphy declared he wanted to be “an insurance person” for his school yearbook). Younger brother Jonathan (b. 1990) was a 19th-round pick by the Twins in 2012 and spent three seasons as an outfielder in their minor league system. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

In their backyard baseball fantasies and daydreams, what kid hasn’t imagined hitting a late-inning home run to win a playoff game, or even Game 7 of the World Series? Howie Kendrick lived that dream not once but twice during the 2019 postseason, capped by a homer that sent the Washington Nationals on their way to their first championship in franchise history. What’s more, his October run (which also included NLCS MVP honors) topped off a storybook rise from humble beginnings that included a complicated family situation growing up and an amateur career that took place in almost complete obscurity.

“The more I learned about him, he starts telling me about how no schools wanted him, how it was really hard to stay confident,” former Angels teammate Torii Hunter, who mentored Kendrick upon joining the Angels in 2008, recalled in ’19. “I just kept thinking: This guy could have really fallen through the cracks.”

What put Kendrick on the map was his legendary bat-to-ball ability. Though he never won the major league batting title that was expected of him while hitting for a .358 average during his time in the minors, he carved out an impressive 14-year career, earning All-Star honors and helping his teams make the playoffs eight times.

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Howard Joseph Kendrick III was born on July 12, 1983 in Jacksonville, Florida. He never knew his father, and because his mother, Belinda Kendrick, was a staff sergeant serving overseas in the United States Army, he and his two sisters grew up in the care of his maternal grandmother, Ruth Woods, in Callahan, Florida, a two-stoplight town of less than 1,000 people near the Georgia border. All 12 of Woods’ children, and their children, lived in the area as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

The baseball industry loves its pitching prospects — and sometimes seems to love dreaming on them by using them as trade chips almost as much as it does actually letting them pitch. Considered to have one of the best curveballs in the game from the outset of his professional career, Gio Gonzalez was traded three times before he’d thrown a major league pitch, and five times during a career that ended just after he turned 35. Along the way, the undersized southpaw made two All-Star teams, received Cy Young votes twice, and helped his teams reach the playoffs five times. While he wasn’t always easy to watch given his high walk rates, his ability to miss bats was a testament to the quality of his stuff.

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Giovany Aramis Gonzalez was born on September 19, 1985 in Hialeah, Florida, a city in Miami-Dade County where roughly three-quarters of the population is of Cuban ancestry. He’s the oldest of six children of Max and Yolanda (Yoly) Gonzalez. Max, a first-generation Cuban-American, installed billboards and owned a scooter shop, while Yoly, an immigrant from Cuba, worked at various jobs to help the family make ends meet.

Gio was just four years old when his parents introduced him to baseball. Growing up, he played sandlot baseball with neighborhood kids in a narrow, rocky strip of land behind the family’s townhouse. “We broke so many windows that I found a guy who would replace them for 15 bucks apiece,” Yoly recalled in 2011.

“Max grew up tough, never got to play as much ball as he wanted and, when it rained on too-rare Sundays when he had a game as a child, he broke down in frustration and cried. But he never stopped studying the sport,” wrote the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell in 2012. When his eldest son showed an aptitude for the game, Max taught him the curveball that would become his signature. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

He was a first-round draft pick, and a rotation regular at age 20. By the time he turned 30, he had won both a Cy Young Award and a World Series ring while helping his teams reach the playoffs six times. On the heels of emerging as the best high school pitching prospect in the country, Rick Porcello packed all of that into a 14-season span, with 12 of those seasons spent in the majors with the Tigers, Red Sox, and Mets. He endured a fair share of growing pains and wild performance swings along the way, threw his last pitch at age 31, and didn’t put up numbers that will keep him on the Hall of Fame ballot. But within that comparatively short timespan, Porcello checked a few pretty impressive boxes.

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Frederick Alfred Porcello III was born on December 27, 1988 in Morristown, New Jersey, the second of three children of Fred and Patricia Porcello. Fred worked as a civil engineer, founding his own firm in 1994. Baseball was in Rick’s bloodlines, as Patricia’s father Sam Dente spent parts of nine seasons in the majors (1947–55) as an infielder with six American League teams; he had his best season (79 OPS+, 1.2 WAR) with Cleveland’s AL pennant-winning 1954 squad, and played in three games in that World Series. Rick’s older brother Zack pitched for Lehigh University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and later became an assistant coach at Seton Hall University, while his younger brother Jake was drafted by the Tigers out of high school in the 48th round in 2009, and pitched at NJIT as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

From being called out publicly by his general manager, manager, and third base coach during an historically wretched season one year, to being robbed of an MVP award after falling just short of a 40-homer, 40-steal campaign the next, Matt Kemp was an enigma. Because he focused more on basketball than baseball growing up, his instincts for the sport sometimes lagged behind his physical abilities, but at his best, he was a superstar, and a sight to behold thanks to his speed and power — a combination of traits that earned him the nickname “The Bison.” He made three All-Star teams and won two Gold Gloves (despite subpar metrics), but unfortunately, a series of injuries to his shoulders and legs compromised those abilities. The $160 million contract he signed after that near-MVP 2011 season became a millstone that sent him from team to team during its eight-year run. Read the rest of this entry »