This year yielded a bumper crop of five players inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, three elected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) and two by the Classic Baseball Era iteration of the veterans committee (VC). Don't expect that for next year.

Among the first-time eligibles, and for the first time in years, there are no clear Hall of Famers on the 2026 BBWAA ballot, performance-enhancing drug (PED) taint or not. Among the returnees, it is a mop-up operation as one, maybe two, may get the call to the Hall, one will fall off the ballot while a few may do so, a few will continue to build gradual support, and the rest will discover, or continue to realize, that they've been friendzoned by the voters: I like you but not in that way.

When the veterans committee (VC), officially convening as the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee for players, meets December 7 at the Winter Meetings in Orlando, Florida, the only burning question is whether it will elect Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, or both to the National Baseball Hall of Fame since this ballot repeats the VC's 2023 charade of gaming that ballot to ensure that Fred McGriff was elected to Cooperstown.

Joining this anointed pair are Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who had joined the M & M boys on the 2023 VC ballot, along with first-timers Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela. Kent and Sheffield recently exited the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) ballot after ten fruitless years, with Delgado a one-and-done in 2015 and Valenzuela, who died in 2024 at age 63, gone in 2004 after two marginal appearances.

After a decade of "ballot logjam," has voting for the National Baseball Hall of Fame finally returned to normal? We will know when results from the ballots cast by the qualified members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA, or "the writers") are announced on January 21, 2025, although based on voting trends over the last decade, the bulk of the results are predictable and, by now, unsurprising.

What does a "return to normal" mean? Of the 14 first-time candidates on the BBWAA 2025 ballot, only two, CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki, stand out as likely Hall of Famers, and neither are a lock for first-ballot induction. Of the 14 returning candidates, none of the "normal" candidates are automatic Hall of Famers, else they would have been elected already. Thus, there is no "ballot logjam," meaning that there are not more than ten sure-fire Hall of Famers who exceed the maximum of ten votes allowed per ballot.

Created in April 2022, the Classic Baseball Era Committee debuts to deliberate eight candidates for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. All eight candidates' careers began before 1980. Two are associated with the Negro Leagues, assimilated into Major League Baseball in December 2020, while the other six are some very familiar names indeed, and it is highly likely that at least one of them will be announced by the committee on December 8, 2024, for formal induction in July 2025.

The six non-Negro Leagues candidates are practically near-contemporaries whose playing careers span the 1950s through the 1980s: Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant. The two Negro Leagues candidates are John Donaldson and Vic Harris, with Donaldson, whose tenure in the officially-recognized Negro Leagues lasted for the first half of the 1920s, also considered a manager and a pioneer of sorts; by contrast, Harris's playing and managing career spanned virtually the entire Negro Leagues period from 1920 to 1948.