Poll - 2025 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot

Issue #211

The results for the 2025 BBWAA Hall of Fame voting will be announced on Jan. 21, 2025. I’ve been reading various articles and considerations of this year’s ballot, and only one thing seems obvious: Ichiro Suzuki will be elected in his first year of eligibility. The questions most commonly discussed are:

• Will Ichiro become the second unanimous selection ever? (Mariano Rivera was the first.)

• Will pitcher CC Sabathia get the 75% of the vote required on his first year on the ballot, or will he come close and need a second year?

• Who else amongst the first-year eligibles will get get at least the 5% required to stay on for another year? Surely Felix Hernandez, and I bet a few others too.

• Will reliever Billy Wagner get the few additional votes needed in his final year on the ballot? He had 73.8% last year.

• Will outfielder Andruw Jones see a big increase in his 8th year on the ballot, going from 61.6% last year all the way to 75% this year? Or what about Carlos Beltran, in his third time around, who had 57.1% last year?

This year’s ballot has 14 returning candidates and 14 first-time candidates. The National Baseball Hall of Fame rules are available here, but importantly each BBWAA voter can only select up to 10 players, and write-in votes are not allowed.

If you’d like to review some key career stats for these 28 guys, check out Baseball-Reference.com’s handy page here.

The polling feature here on Substack appears to be rather limited—only five response options, not the 28 needed to replicate this year’s HOF ballot. So I thought I’d test out Pollmaker, one of the more popular services for doing quick (and free!) polls in blog and email posts like this. I created a simple poll that has all 28 players, and allowed readers of this post to vote!

Unfortunately, either I did something wrong, or Poll-Maker has an odd way of tabulating results for multiple response questions. After two days, I had several dozen responses—but for some reason it calculates the vote % based on the total number of players selected across all survey takers. So for instance, 45 people selected Ichiro Suzuki. Lets assume that is everyone who took the poll (it is surely close to everyone!). He should be 100% or close to it, but instead the Poll-Maker results said 14%. Why? it divided the 46 votes for Ichiro by the total number player votes, which was over 300. That is odd, and not what we care about at all!

So I’ve closed the poll and in the future will have to try a different polling service (or figure out what I did wrong with Poll-Maker.) For what its worth, here are the results from this short-lived poll, calculated on the assumption that 46 people voted—the number of votes that Ichiro got (players marked with * are first-time candidates):

• * Ichiro Suzuki - 46 votes, 100% - again, I’m assuming everyone voted for him

• Billy Wagner - 37 votes, 80% - does this bode well for him getting in this year?

• Andruw Jones - 33 votes, 72% - very close to the required 75%!

• * CC Sabathia - 31 votes, 67% - that would be a solid showing for his first year

• Carlos Beltran - 25 votes, 54%

• Manny Ramirez - 19 votes, 41%

• Alex Rodriguez - 19 votes, 41%

• Andy Pettitte - 16 votes, 35%

• Jimmy Rollins - 13 votes, 28%

• * Felix Hernandez - 12 votes, 26%

• * Dustin Pedroia - 12 votes, 26%

• Chase Utley - 12 votes, 26%

• David Wright - 12 votes, 26%

• Bobby Abreu - 11 votes, 24%

• Omar Vizquel - 9 votes, 20%

• Torii Hunter - 7 votes, 15%

• Mark Buehrle - 5 votes, 11%

• * Ian Kinsler - 3 votes, 7%

• Francisco Rodriguez - 3 votes, 7%

• * Curtis Granderson - 2 votes, 4%

• * Ben Zobrist - 2 votes, 4%

• * Brian McCann - 1 vote

• * Adam Jones - 1 vote

• * Russell Martin - 1 vote

• * Troy Tulowitski - 1 vote

• * Fernando Rodney - 0 votes

• * Carlos González - 0 votes

• * Hanley Ramirez - 0 votes