Election Season: Bonds and Clemens Lead the Contemporary Baseball Ballot

The champagne and tears have barely dried in the wake of this year’s instant-classic World Series, but election season is already upon us. On Monday, the National Baseball Hall of Fame officially unveiled the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot, an eight-man slate covering players who made their greatest impact on the game from 1980 to the present and whose eligibility on the BBWAA ballot has lapsed. For the second year in a row, the Hall stole its own thunder, as an article in the Winter 2025 volume of its bimonthly Memories and Dreams magazine revealed the identities of the eight candidates prior to the official announcement. The mix includes some — but not all — of the controversial characters who have slipped off the writers’ ballot in recent years, including Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, as well as a couple surprises. This cycle also marks the first application of a new rule that could shape future elections.

Assembled by the Historical Overview Committee, an 11-person group of senior BBWAA members, the ballot includes Bonds, Clemens, and fellow holdovers Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy, as well as newcomers Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela. As with any Hall election, this one requires 75% from the voters to gain entry. In this case, the panel — whose members won’t be revealed until much closer to election time — will consist of Hall of Famers, executives, and media members/historians, each of whom may tab up to three candidates when they meet on Sunday, December 7, at the Winter Meetings in Orlando. Anyone elected will be inducted alongside those elected by the BBWAA (whose own ballot will be released on November 17) on July 26, 2026 in Cooperstown. In the weeks before that, I’ll cover each candidate’s case in depth here at FanGraphs.

This is the fourth 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 current 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 in December 2023). Non-players from the Classic timeframe are lumped in with players, which doesn’t guarantee representation on the final ballot.

The 2022 reconfiguration also trimmed the number of candidates per cycle from 10 to eight, making every Era Committee ballot that much more notable for its omissions as well as its inclusions. Particularly with this year’s rule change, this will be something for Hall monitors to get used to. Under the new rule, starting with this cycle, candidates who don’t receive at least five out of 16 possible votes will be ineligible to appear on the next ballot three years later, when that pool of candidates is considered again. Those who don’t receive at least five of 16 votes on multiple Era Committee ballots will no longer be eligible for future consideration, period.

As I noted in March, the first part of that change is a reasonable response to a massive backlog of candidates who generally come from three pools: those who got short shrift in the years before voters began incorporating advanced statistics such as OPS+, ERA+, WAR, and JAWS into their deliberations; those who were linked to performance-enhancing drug usage and lingered on the ballot despite statistics and accomplishments that would have guaranteed them swift elections without that baggage; and those who were overshadowed on the ballot by PED-linked candidates, sometimes to the point of falling off after a single appearance due to the Five Percent Rule.

In theory, the rule change could allow for a larger group of candidates to get a shot at election. However, the second part of that change — permanent ineligibility — is unnecessarily heavy-handed, and not only because it can punish a candidate merely for landing on a ballot at the wrong time. As first documented by Bill James in The Politics of Glory (1994) and then explored in my own book, The Cooperstown Casebook (2017) and my subsequent coverage, the makeup of a committee’s membership can skew the voting results and give off the appearance of favoritism or cronyism. Particularly in recent years, the Hall has amply demonstrated its influence on outcomes. Sometimes it stocks a committee with multiple former teammates, managers and executives likely to support a favored candidate (the recent elections of Harold Baines and Dave Parker come to mind), and sometimes it stacks the deck with familiar antagonists. Former players union chief Marvin Miller was stymied for decades by committees chockfull of executives who were on the management side during the Reserve Clause era or during baseball’s late-1980s collusion scandal; he wasn’t elected until the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot — against his own wishes — about seven years after his death.

Three years ago, the Hall selected Jack Morris, Ryne Sandberg, and Frank Thomas — three of the era’s most outspoken players on the subject of PEDs — for the committee. It was impossible not to read their participation as a purpose pitch designed to knock the candidacies of Bonds and Clemens down, and that’s exactly what happened. The pair received fewer than four votes apiece (as did two other candidates, Albert Belle and the PED-linked Rafael Palmeiro); by custom, the actual totals below a certain threshold aren’t publicly revealed. The prospect of a similarly engineered committee that could punt Bonds and Clemens into oblivion after a similar result this time around looms large. That would be an outrage given that each received over 50% of the vote from the writers six times and over 60% of the vote three times, as there’s simply no precedent for permanently excluding such widely supported and otherwise eligible candidates from consideration.

Below is a sortable table of 28 candidates that includes every player actually on this ballot; every player from the 2017–23 Era Committee ballots who is still eligible for this period; a handful of starting pitchers from the Contemporary period with reasonably solid cases based on S-JAWS, particularly given the dearth of starting pitchers elected from the past 50 years; and a handful of other candidates with a JAWS of at least 50. The default sorting used for the table is the Hall of Fame Monitor score, where 100 indicates “a good possibility” and 130 “a virtual cinch.”

Based on their HOFM scores, this ballot includes only seven of the top 12 candidates from the pool, where three years ago, eight out of the top 11 made the cut. The new slate is even weaker by JAWS — or rather J+, the margin between a player’s JAWS and the standard at his position – as just three out of the top 21 from this pool made the ballot, compared to four of the top 20 last time. Sort the table by either JAWS or J+ and you can see how few opportunities for election those below Bonds and Clemens have received from the Era Committee process. That’s not progress, to say the least.

Bonds, the all-time home run leader and a seven-time MVP, and Clemens, a 300-game winner and seven-time Cy Young winner, are by far the most statistically qualified candidates by any of the aforementioned measures, as well as the two who came closest to election by the writers. Their PED connections date to the era before Major League Baseball and the players’ union put a testing-and-penalty program in place, but while they began trending toward election after former commissioner Bud Selig — who oversaw the game’s belated response to the influx of steroids — was elected in 2017, Hall vice chairman Joe Morgan openly lobbied voters not to elect any PED-linked candidates, thwarting their progress.

Mattingly and Murphy are a pair of former MVPs (the latter a two-time MVP) and multiple Gold Glove winners whose careers were curtailed by injuries. Both project the kind of wholesome, scandal-free image that the Hall would love to harness. Along with the perception of their traditional accomplishments (as summarized by the HOFM scores), that helps to explain why they keep getting chances despite meager support from voters prior to 2023, not to mention their flimsy cases on the advanced statistical front.

Among the first-timers, Kent and Sheffield aged off the BBWAA ballot since the last time around. Kent played with Bonds on the Giants from 1997–2002, and won an MVP in 2000, but the clubhouse was hardly big enough for the two of them. Though he set the record for most home runs by a second baseman (351 out of 377 for his career), modest on-base percentages and subpar defensive metrics yielded a case that remains unremarkable from an advanced stat POV. Between that, the ever-present crowd on the ballot, and prickly behavior toward the media — which, to be fair, often wanted him to talk about Bonds — he didn’t reach 20% until 2020, his seventh year on the ballot, but rallied to 46.5% in his 10th year. Given his PED-free reputation, he might be this ballot’s best bet for election.

Sheffield, who clubbed 509 career home runs, was one of the heaviest hitters and most misunderstood players of his time, dating back to the way he was mishandled by the Brewers at the outset of his career. Controversies — many of which involved his contract situation — followed wherever he went. Most notably, he was linked to the BALCO scandal due to his connection to Bonds, with whom he briefly trained, but by all accounts their relationship crumbled before Sheffield could wind up in deeper water. Even with defensive metrics so dreadful they seem hyperbolic, his advanced statistical case is stronger than Kent’s, and he fared better among the writers. While he didn’t break 15% during his first five years on the ballot, his 10th-year share (63.9%) is higher than any other PED-linked player besides Bonds and Clemens.

Of the two other newcomers, Valenzuela and Delgado, neither lasted long on the writers’ ballot, so their presence here could be read as a positive sign… if there weren’t already stronger candidates in a similar position. After a brief cup of coffee as a 19-year-old in 1980, Valenzuela burst upon the scene in the strike-shortened ’81 season, winning the NL Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards while helping the Dodgers to their first championship in 16 years. More than that, he became a cultural phenomenon, as Fernandomania transformed baseball’s landscape by drawing droves of Latin American fans to the game, which particularly resonated in a Los Angeles still healing from the wounds caused by the eviction of nearly 2,000 Mexican American families to construct Dodger Stadium. While he had a few other great seasons for the Dodgers after 1981, his arm was overtaxed; the last decade of his career was largely a grind due to injuries, and he slipped off the BBWAA ballot after just two tries. After his career, he moved up to the Dodgers’ Spanish-language broadcast booth, and was still working in that capacity until he died in October 2024, just shy of his 64th birthday. I’m on record as believing that Valenzuela’s hybrid career as a player, broadcaster, and global ambassador is better recognized in the context of the Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award, which was created in 2008. For as iconic as he is — to say nothing of the fact that he’s a personal favorite — he feels out of place here.

Delgado made just two All-Star teams during his career but clubbed 473 homers, the third-highest total of any non-PED-linked player outside the Hall behind Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, neither of whom is yet eligible for election. Delgado was the conscientious slugger. In an age when most athletes shirk political stances for fear of narrowing their appeal, he was unafraid to protest against the war in Iraq, publicly opposed the United States Navy using part of his native Puerto Rico for bombing practice, and refused to go through the motions during the post-9/11 ritual of “God Bless America” at Yankee Stadium and elsewhere. He was lost in the shuffle on the 2015 ballot, receiving less than 5%, but wasn’t eligible for this process until his 10-year window would have run out. He’s probably got zero shot at election, but his story deserves to be retold.

On the subject of players who went one-and done, Johan Santana won’t be eligible until the 2029 Contemporary ballot, barring another reconfiguration of the process. Even given the appeal of those candidates — particularly on the advanced statistical front – nobody should be holding their breaths, because the history of one-and-dones who landed on Era Committee ballots is a short one. Ted Simmons made three such ballots before finally being elected on the 2020 Modern Baseball ballot, but Whitaker, who received 37.5% that same year, has yet to return. Carter and Clark, in a similar boat to Delgado, both sank without a trace on BBWAA ballots but got a couple of looks on Today’s Game ballots due to a shallower pool of candidates. In that light, the glass-half-full view of Delgado’s inclusion is that it bodes well for similarly ignored candidates in the future. The glass-half-empty view is that there are stronger Contemporary candidates from the one-and-done pool who have never gotten another look, though some such as Brown (who wound up in the Mitchell Report) and Lofton (who allegedly sent sexually explicit photos of his body to a female employee) have issues that may dim the enthusiasm of the Hall (and the HOC) to put them up for election.

To these eyes, it would have been better to see Whitaker, whose JAWS case is stronger than any of the other one-and-dones, get another shot before Delgado or any of the aforementioned. Likewise when it comes to Evans, who lasted just three years on the ballot but fared even better than Whitaker in 2020 (50%) and looks much stronger in JAWS than candidates who lingered on the ballot for 15 years, such as Mattingly and Murphy.

It’s not hard to understand why McGwire, Palmeiro, and Sosa aren’t here, while the omission of Schilling — who repeatedly sabotaged his candidacy in unprecedented fashion (I kept all the receipts) and even tried to get himself dropped from the 2022 BBWAA ballot after several voters publicly indicated a desire to rescind their ’21 votes based on his support for the January 6 insurrection attempt by supporters of Donald Trump — is a welcome respite. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice, though Schilling’s solid showing on the 2023 ballot suggests he could be included next time if other candidates fall victim to the new threshold rule.

A guy could write a book about the omissions. Even so, the eight candidates we do have, along with the upcoming candidates on the writers’ ballot, will command enough attention over the next several weeks to keep us plenty busy. Stay tuned.