This Hall of Fame ballot a reflection of how voting is changing

Voting for the National Baseball Hall of Fame will be revealed Tuesday. As the game changes, traditional Hall credentials might need to change, too.

Players with 3,000 hits and pitchers with 300 wins are shoo-ins to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and they always will be.

Adrian Beltre, voted into the Hall last year on his first time on the ballot, finished with 3,166 hits. Albert Pujols, who finished with 3,384 hits, will appear on the ballot for the first time in 2028.

Ichiro Suzuki reached 3,089 hits in the MLB portion of his career and will hear his name called Tuesday, when voting for the class of 2025 is revealed.

But 500 homers aren’t the layup they used to be, and 300 pitching victories might never be reached again with five-man rotation the norms and the idea of six-man rotations gaining traction.

Some in the media have started judging players’ careers differently, looking at the duration of their peak seasons and separating those from the rest. Call it the Sandy Koufax Effect, a player who was so historically good over a brief period of time that it outweighs the brevity of his career and the years before his dominance.

That thinking gives more credence to players who ordinarily wouldn’t have a chance at enshrinement. And that thinking has started carrying some weight with this Hall voter.

Take, for instance, Texas Rangers Hall of Famer Ian Kinsler. He didn’t get 2,000 hits, though he was as close as possible to the milestone at 1,999. Home runs? Only 257 of them.

But for his 10-year stretch from 2006 to 2017, he was one of the best second basemen in baseball. It’s true. And right-hander Felix Hernandez, who won a Cy Young Award for the Mariners in 2010, was the second-best pitcher in baseball over the same stretch.

The best was Clayton Kershaw, and he’s a Hall lock.

Kinsler and Hernandez, who won only 169 games, might not make it to the 5 percent threshold needed to stay on the ballot for another year, but they received my vote to, at minimum, keep them on the ballot as the definition for a Hall-caliber player evolves.

The rest of my ballot includes four 2024 holdovers: center fielder Andruw Jones, shortstop Jimmy Rollins and closers Billy Wagner and Francisco Rodriguez. New to the ballot are Suzuki, outfielder Bobby Abreu, second baseman Chase Utley, left-hander CC Sabathia.

Abreu gets my vote for the first time in the same vein as Kinsler and Hernandez, though he’s been on the ballot since 2019. He was never an elite player or even the best player on his teams, but some of his numbers after 18 seasons rank with Hall of Famers.

A reminder for those perusing one of my ballots for the first time: I do not vote for players who failed tests for performance-enhancing drugs, unlike T.R. Sullivan. So, no Alex Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez.

Carlos Beltran, Andy Pettitte and Dustin Pedroia just missed the cut, in part because they probably don’t need my vote to reach 5 percent.

We’ll see Tuesday how everything shakes out. Suzuki is a lock, maybe a unanimous choice, and it seems like Sabathia (251 wins) has ample support to also make the Hall in his first year on the ballot. Wagner is in his 10th and final year on the ballot and just missed a year ago.

Kinsler might be one-and-done. He falls short of the numbers that Hall of Fame position players have gathered.

But the thinking is changing, and those in his shoes are worthy of a deeper, different look.

Jeff Wilson, jwilson@alldlls.com