Brewers beat writer Adam McCalvy breaks down his 2026 HOF ballot

MILWAUKEE -- When you check boxes on a Hall of Fame ballot for the first time, when it’s not just curiosity or a mental exercise but a real, permanent, public vote, you realize it’s a lot harder than you thought.

I’m not complaining. I was honored to vote for the first time after my 25th season covering the Brewers for MLB.com. To earn eligibility, you have to cover baseball for 10 consecutive years as a member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and MLB.com writers were not admitted to the BBWAA until 2016. That’s why there is a wave of new voters for this cycle.

I hope it gets easier, because this was a year in which every candidate had imperfections. Voters can check up to 10 boxes on the ballot every year. I checked three:

Carlos Beltrán
Andruw Jones
Chase Utley

You have to establish some personal ground rules, and I came to them by reading everything I could from people who have done this before. Regarding PEDs, the standard that made the most sense to me was to exclude any player who was disciplined by MLB after the league instituted its system of testing. For years, this had been a gray area in the game. Now it’s not. So while I stared long and hard at the boxes next to Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, two surefire Hall of Famers on statistics alone, I didn’t check them. That group of players still has a path to the Hall of Fame via the various committees that consider candidates passed over by the writers.

I can hear you screaming into your screen about hypocrisy. Yes, I am one of those voters who excluded Rodriguez and Ramirez (and former Brewer Ryan Braun, for that matter) from consideration, but voted for Beltrán, who was disciplined for his role in the Astros' cheating scandal, and Jones, who pleaded guilty to domestic battery following a 2012 altercation with his wife. How does that make sense?

I thought about this for weeks before mailing my ballot, then thought about it more before writing this column. I’m comfortable with my vote for Beltrán, since everyone else involved in the 2017 Astros saga has been allowed to move on with their careers. I’m far less comfortable with Jones, but ultimately decided that PED charges are a difficult category of offense because they not only reflect character, but directly impact performance.

It’s not a particularly satisfying answer. But just like Beltrán during his playing career, Jones was the type of player you watched in his late 20s and thought, “That’s a future Hall of Famer.” I’m not the only voter leaning in this direction. Jones trailed only Rodriguez and Barry Bonds in wins above replacement (per Baseball Reference) while winning 10 consecutive Gold Gloves with Atlanta from 1998-2007, as my colleague Mark Bowman noted in his case for the outfielder. Jones has seen his percentages rise over the past three years, from 58.1, to 61.6, to 66.2 after receiving less than 8% of the vote during his first two years on the ballot. This is his ninth year.

Compared to the mental gymnastics needed to get to those votes, checking the box next to Utley was easy, not to mention a good primer for what is to come on future ballots. The days of simple statistical thresholds -- 3,000 hits or 500 home runs -- being what sends a player to Cooperstown are over. But over a six-season peak from 2005-10, as my colleague Thomas Harrigan wrote in his case for Utley, the Phillies standout posted a .911 OPS and a 133 OPS+ and produced 45.5 bWAR, second only to Albert Pujols (52.1) among MLB position players. Here’s where I turned to JAWS, the metric developed by FanGraphs senior writer Jay Jaffe. It strives to measure a player's Hall of Fame candidacy by averaging their career WAR with their seven-year peak WAR, allowing comparisons to other Hall of Famers at a position. Utley’s JAWS score (56.9) puts him just above the average Hall of Fame second baseman.

So it’s a close call in terms of history. Another Phillie, Bobby Abreu, has a similar case but falls just below the historical standard for right fielders. I know I’ll take a hard look at Abreu next year. Dustin Pedroia, too.

Which brings us to the pitchers. Unless Hall of Fame voters change their standards, we won’t have any more Hall of Fame pitchers once Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke and Max Scherer get in. Many voters have already decided where the new threshold should be, evidenced by the level of support for Félix Hernández, Cole Hamels, Andy Pettitte and Mark Buehrle.

I haven’t figured that out yet, though I badly wanted to check the box next to Hernández, whose peak was so brilliant. Then you look at the career numbers and see Hamels, Pettitte and Buehrle right there. On my first ballot, I could not justify voting for one but not the others. Some voters check boxes for players on the borderline in order to help keep them on the ballot for future consideration while we figure this out. I was confident that all four would make it through to next year, so I held off this time.

I suspect that is going to change when I get an opportunity to try again next year.

My ballot wasn’t perfect. Neither is my explanation. Maybe perfect isn’t an option in this case.