2025 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot Deep Dive - Part I
An analysis of the 20 position players on this year's HOF ballot and how they stack up against those already in Cooperstown.
On January 21st, results of the 2025 Baseball Hall of Fame voting will be revealed. We will then find out who cleared the 75%-vote threshold needed to be enshrined into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in July. Among the 28 former players on this year’s ballot, 20 of them are position players/non-pitchers: Alex Rodriguez, Andruw Jones, Ben Zobrist, Bobby Abreu, Brian McCann, Carlos Beltrán, Carlos González, Chase Utley, Curtis Granderson, David Wright, Dustin Pedroia, Hanley Ramirez, Ian Kinsler, Ichiro Suzuki, Jimmy Rollins, Manny Ramirez, Omar Vizquel, Russell Martin, Torii Hunter, Troy Tulowitzki. Among the ten position players returning from (at least) last year’s list, Andruw Jones, now in his 8th year on the ballot, came the closest with 61.6% of the vote, with Carlos Beltrán the only other one clearing 50% at 57.1%.1 Who among these ten are actually worthy of Cooperstown?
Comparing to Current Inductees
I compared several key stats of these players to what an “average” (using the median) Hall of Famer attained. Most of the stats, such as BsR (FanGraph’s holistic baserunning stat and the baserunning component to WAR calculations), Def (FanGraph’s defensive value metric), WAR, WAR/162, and ‘+’ stats are league and era adjusted.2
It’s no shocker that Alex Rodriguez sits atop the list by a wide margin in terms of WAR. If it weren’t for his entanglement with PED’s, he would surely be a first ballot Hall of Famer. The story of Manny Ramirez is similar. While his stats are not quite as jaw-dropping as A-Rod’s, I would also expect he’d have been inducted already (this is his 9th year on the ballot) if not for his PED usage as well. One caveat that should be mentioned here is Ichiro. Ichiro played 9 seasons in the Japan Pacific League before coming to America at age 27 in 2001.3 Those 9 seasons at a prime age in Japan really took a chunk out of the stats he could have accumulated in MLB, we should view Ichiro’s stats under that context.
Rankings Among Current Inductees
Another way to look at this is from the viewpoint of how players rank in key stats among the 266 non-pitcher position players already in the Hall of Fame. Below is a fairly comprehensive table of the rankings of players on the ballot in key stats, which I chose based largely on the findings from my recent article predicting this year’s Hall of fame class.
Using these rankings, I developed a “Hall of Fame meter”, similar to Jay Jaffe’s JAWS, Bill James’s Hall of Fame Monitor and Standards. The calculation is:
This is the geometric mean of the rankings, minus the average geometric mean of rankings for a current Hall of Famer (85.1), subtracted again by 85.1 to generate a score relative to current Hall of Fame inductees. For context, 85 is considered by this metric to be a likely (i.e., average) Hall of Famer. The results for these players on the ballot are in the table below.
Based on this, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez (surprise, surprise), are clear Hall of Famers, along with Ichiro and Carlos Beltran. Andruw Jones, Bobby Abreu, and Chase Utley are on the fringe, while the candidacies of the others look fairly bleak.
Similarity Scores
Lastly, I love how Baseball Reference has similarity scores on all the player pages, but it is not super statistical as it just takes sums of differences in player stats. I calculated my own similarity scores, among all qualified players in MLB history, using a k-means clustering algorithm, with the twelve stats referenced in the rankings table above as the inputs. The degree of similarity, and thus their similarity score, is the Euclidean distance between them and the other players as determined by the k-means algorithm. A lower score/Euclidean distance means greater similarity. Here are the top-3 most similar players for each 2025 nominee, along with their position and similarity score (players in bold are hall of fame inductees):
Alex Rodriguez (3B/SS)
Frank Robinson (OF) 2.63
Hank Aaron (OF)3.21
Mel Ott (OF) 4.18
Andruw Jones (OF)
Brooks Robinson (3B) 3.26
Adrian Beltré (3B) 3.70
Cal Ripken Jr. (SS) 3.97
Ben Zobrist (2B/OF)
Lonny Frey (2B) 1.49
Sherm Lollar (C) 1.78
Alex Gordon (OF) 1.79
Bobby Abreu (OF)
Craig Biggio (2B) 2.20
Amos Otis (OF) 2.54
Hanley Ramirez (SS) 2.60
Brian McCann (C)
Yasmani Grandal (C) 2.67
Yadier Molina (C) 2.83
Russell Martin (C) 3.56
Carlos Beltran (OF)
Ian Kinsler (2B) 3.16
Chase Utley (2B) 3.21
Johnny Damon (OF) 3.46
Carlos Gonzalez (OF)
Trevor Story (SS) 6.52
Cody Bellinger (1B) 6.60
AJ Pollock (OF) 6.94
Chase Utley (2B)
Ian Kinsler (2B) 2.68
Brett Gardner (OF) 3.01
Mike Cameron (OF) 3.02
Curtis Granderson (OF)
Justin Upton (OF) 1.56
Jayson Werth (OF) 2.02
Alfonso Soriano (2B) 2.28
David Wright (3B)
Hanley Ramirez (SS) 1.73
Brian Giles (OF) 1.74
Jose Altuve (2B) 1.96
Dustin Pedroia (2B)
Joe Mauer (C) 1.49
Bill White (1B) 1.73
Mark Grace (1B) 1.81
Hanley Ramirez (SS)
David Wright (3B) 1.73
Andrew McCutchen (OF) 1.85
Ryan Braun (OF) 1.89
Ian Kinsler (2B)
Starling Marte (OF) 2.23
Shane Victorino (OF) 2.31
Barry Larkin (SS) 2.52
Ichiro Suzuki
Carl Crawford (OF) 2.77
Kenny Lofton (OF) 3.05
Willie Wilson (OF) 3.39
Jimmy Rollins (SS)
José Reyes (SS) 2.28
Johnny Damon (OF) 2.35
Elvis Andrus (SS) 2.79
Manny Ramirez (OF)
Frank Thomas (DH) 2.60
Mike Piazza (C) 3.46
Jim Thome (1B) 3.70
Omar Vizquel (SS)
Rabbit Maranville (SS) 2.04
Devon White (OF) 2.98
Roger Peckinpaugh (SS) 3.28
Russell Martin (C)
Robin Ventura (3B) 2.27
Yasmani Grandal (C) 2.54
Buddy Bell (3B) 2.56
Torii Hunter (OF)
Chili Davis (OF) 1.48
Dave Parker (OF)1.69
Paul O'Neill (OF) 1.70
Troy Tulowitzki (SS)
David Justice (OF) 1.53
Josh Donaldson (3B) 1.69
Bobby Doerr (2B) 1.71
A-Rod, Andruw Jones, and Manny Ramirez clearly have the most impressive lineup of similar players. One thing that I found interesting was the number of players who shared similarity with another player on the ballot. Abreu, Beltran, McCann, Utley, Wright, and Hanley Ramirez all had at least one other ballot-mate in their top-3.
Be sure to check back in next week for a deep dive into the pitchers on the 2025 Hall of Fame ballot!
For more info and explanation on stats, see the FanGraph’s Glossary