The Envelope Please: Our 2025 Hall of Fame Crowdsource Ballot Results and a Preview of Election Day

Based upon the early returns, BBWAA voters appear likely to hit another trifecta on Tuesday when the results of this year’s Hall of Fame election are announced at 6 p.m. Eastern — and there’s even an outside chance that a fourth candidate could crash the party. But if the FanGraphs readers who participated in this year’s crowdsource ballot had their way, only two players would make the cut. In this year’s edition of our annual polling, which for the second year in a row set a new record for turnout, first-year candidates Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia were the only ones who topped 75%. Billy Wagner fell short despite the strong likelihood of his getting the call from the Hall in his 10th and final year on the ballot, and Carlos Beltrán — who has polled above 80% on the ballots released publicly thus far — missed out as well.

I’ll take a closer read of the tea leaves based upon the writers’ ballots that have been revealed, but first, let’s consider the readers’ entries. Registered users who participated in our poll were each allowed to submit one ballot with up to 10 candidates by the end of the day on December 31, just like roughly 400 BBWAA voters did for this year’s actual election — only we ink-stained wretches had to get to a mailbox with a prepaid envelope, where our users voted electronically. After more than tripling our turnout from 2023 (an unusually low year) to ’24 to set a record, we added another 344 votes this time around, a 20.7% increase:

Our largest electorate actually matched the total for the smallest number of honorees in the seven cycles for which we’ve run this exercise. That’s not to say that these voters were ungenerous, as they averaged 7.91 names per ballot, down only slightly from last year’s 7.96; for the duration of this exercise, our readers have averaged at least 0.96 more names per ballot than the official electorate, though last year was the first time the margin slipped below 1.4. In terms of the extremes, 41.8% of our voters used all 10 slots, down slightly from last year’s 43% and the high of 59% in 2022, but well ahead of the 29.6% mark from ’23; in that department, our crowd has generally run about 15 or 20 points ahead of the actual electorate, including private ballots. Meanwhile, just 5.6% of our voters used three or fewer slots, compared to 7.9% last year and a high of 8.9% in 2022. Puzzlingly enough, last year’s crowd produced 14 blank ballots, up from one in 2023, but this year’s total was back down to three.

Here’s the full rundown, with comparisons to each candidate’s totals in the last two cycles — not just last year but also 2023:

Suzuki, who has been included on all 200 BBWAA ballots published via the Tracker thus far (an estimated 51% of the electorate), wasn’t unanimous with our crowd. Fifty-nine voters did not include him, including seven who voted for a single candidate, some of them longshots. (Kinsler and Martin each had one ballot to themselves.) Cherry-picking some of the oddities among the multi-candidate ballots that left Suzuki off, we had a González-Martin ballot, a Beltrán-Pettite-Wright one, a Beltrán-Pettitte-Vizquel one, a Tulowitzki-Utley-Wagner one, an Abreu-Beltrán-Wagner one, and an Abreu-Hunter-Pettitte-Zobrist one. I can’t read much logic into any of those combos, but since none of them even amounts to a rounding error in the percentages, it doesn’t really matter.

More strikingly, while last year every returning candidate except Hunter received a lower share of the vote from our crowd than in 2023, this year, everybody except Hunter received a higher share, though as you can see, Hunter’s share didn’t move by much in either year. In his final year on the ballot, Wagner’s crowd share grew by the second-largest amount behind only that of Pettitte, yet he still fell short. Dandy Andy was the only candidate whose share increased by double digits, whereas half a dozen candidates did so from 2022 to ’23.

While none of the seven candidates I included in the “one-and-done” portion of my ballot series (González, Granderson, Adam Jones, Hanley Ramirez, Rodney, Tulowitzki, and Zobrist) has received a vote on a published ballot yet, every candidate received at least 11 crowdsource votes, and a couple of first-year candidates, Martin and McCann, received shares above 5%, though they don’t appear likely to do so from among the actual electorate. On the other hand, Hunter and fellow holdover Vizquel both fell short of 5% here; the latter is already safe according to the ballots published by the Tracker, but the former is in danger of being eliminated from further consideration.

If there’s a trend to be spotted, it’s that our voters may be in the midst of expanding their understanding of what makes a Hall of Fame career. None of the four starting pitchers on the ballot have 300 wins or are above the JAWS standard — things that make for easy first-ballot election — but the strong debuts of Sabathia and Hernández and the gains of holdovers Pettitte and (to a lesser extent) Buehrle illustrate some rethinking of the yardsticks by which we measure these hurlers, not that anyone (myself included) has come up with easy answers. Likewise when it comes to the support of the aforementioned pair of catchers, whose pitch-framing data place their WARs and JAWS in the neighborhood of recently elected backstops Joe Mauer and Ivan Rodriguez, not to mention upcoming candidates Yadier Molina and Buster Posey.

In all, we received 1,274 different combinations of ballots, including 518 different 10-man combos; without looking, I’d guess both of those set records given the size of our electorate. The most common ballot, which was used 46 times (2.3% of the vote overall) was a 10-man slate that included Abreu, Beltrán, Hernández, Andruw Jones, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Sabathia, Suzuki, Utley, and Wagner. By comparison, the most common ballot last year appeared 4.4% of the time. The second-most popular ballot this year, appearing 27 times (1.3%), simply swapped Pettitte in for Hernández. Seven other voters from our crowd matched my choice of 10 (Abreu, Beltrán, Hernández, Andruw Jones, Martin, McCann, Sabathia, Suzuki, Utley, and Wagner), down from eight last year but still more than I expected given that nobody from among the 200 published ballots thus far has done so.

On that note, here’s the comparison between our crowdsource and what was in the Tracker at 9:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday morning, about nine hours before the scheduled announcement of the results:

Obviously, there’s a high correlation between the voting shares from the two sources; in fact, 15 of the 28 candidates are off by no more than four percentage points in one direction or the other. The largest gaps on the positive side show the writers — or at least the ones who have published their ballots — as being more strongly supportive of the top-polling candidates, which probably owes something to the transparency of the process; after all, nearly all of those voters have attached their names to their selections. Note that a couple of candidates whose credentials appeal more to old-school voters than new-school ones — Vizquel (ugh) and Rollins — have the fourth- and fifth-highest gaps between their actual and crowd shares. This tracks, given that the voters tend to be more mainstream than the average FanGraphs reader.

At the other end of the spectrum, the two candidates who served PED suspensions have two of the largest negative gaps between public ballots and our crowd. Four other candidates whose support among the actual votes is at least six points lower (Abreu, Martin, Utley, and McCann) all have some very specific stathead appeal, and they do reasonably well by JAWS (framing-inclusive JAWS for the catchers). Hernández, with the second-largest negative gap, may seem harder to classify — his S-JAWS is well below the standard, for one thing — but I think we can include him among the stathead favorites as well given the way his winning the 2010 AL Cy Young Award despite a 13-12 won-loss record shook up the industry.

As for what it all means for Tuesday, historically speaking, every candidate who has polled above 80% on the ballots published before the results announcement has been elected, which suggests that Suzuki, Sabathia, and Wagner are locks, and would seem to be good news for Beltrán. The caveat is that Beltrán is just barely above the line, and one or two dozen more ballots could be released between now and the announcement, bumping those pre-election percentages down while keeping the streak intact; last year, for example, 217 ballots were published prior to the official results. Tracker troupe leader Ryan Thibodaux pointed to a few notable close calls the other day:

Re: Beltrán, now @ 80.6%. We've never had a candidate >=80% in the Tracker at the results announcement fail to be elected. However:2024 Mauer – 83.4% to 76.1% (7.3% ?)2020 Walker – 83.2% to 76.6% (6.6% ?)2022 Ortiz – 83.4% to 77.9% (5.5% ?)And:2023 Helton – 78.6% to 72.2% (6.4% ?, not elected)

— Ryan Thibodaux (@notmrtibbs.com) 2025-01-20T00:31:25.349Z

Helton’s 78.6% pre-election share in 2023, the ballot before he was elected, is the highest of any candidate to miss, but as Anthony Calamis pointed out last week, candidates polling below 80% pre-announcement have been elected, namely Trevor Hoffman in ’18 (78.2%) and Ivan Rodriguez (79.5%) in ’17.

Turning to the forecasting work of Jason Sardell, it appears Beltrán has about a 1-in-6 chance of getting in this year. Sardell’s probabilistic model has been the most accurate predictive system in the industry for several years running; it groups voters based upon the number of candidates they include on their ballots (“small Hall” and “large Hall” voters) and their electoral stance on PED users. Here’s a look at his projections based upon 188 ballots:

Updated Hall of Fame projections with less than 24 hours to go and 188 ballots in @notmrtibbs.com's Tracker. Beltrán's likelihood of being elected has slipped in the past 24 hours but he could still join Ichiro, Sabathia, and Wagner in Cooperstown if he slightly overperforms current trends

— Jason Sardell (@sardell.bsky.social) 2025-01-21T00:53:31.679Z

While it could be a nailbiter regarding whether Beltrán is elected on Tuesday — which would make this for the fourth four-man election in the last 11 years, compared to just three in the Hall’s first 28 years, and none in the 1956–2014 span — the stakes are comparatively low. He’s only in his third year of eligibility, leaving him plenty of time to get to 75%, and what’s more, next year’s class of first-year candidates doesn’t have anyone likely to get in on the first ballot, with Cole Hamels and the PED-tinged Ryan Braun the top two candidates by WAR and JAWS. It would be a good year for Beltrán and possibly Jones (in his ninth year of eligibility) to gain entry.

After weeks of speculation regarding what might happen — possible unanimity for Ichiro, a likely 10th-year entry for Wagner, some fretting over whether King Félix would avoid the one-and-done oblivion into which Johan Santana was cast in 2018 — the suspense is almost over. I’ll be back later on Tuesday with my quick take on the results, followed by a candidate-by-candidate breakdown as soon as my fingers allow it.