For the second year in a row, a former Mets star came up just short of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Carlos Beltrán appeared on 70.3% of the 394 ballots submitted by voters from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, leaving him shy of the 75% required for election.
Beltrán, who played for the Mets from 2005-11 and for the Yankees from 2014-16, finished with 277 votes.
He needed 19 more votes to join the Class of 2025, which includes two former Yankees in CC Sabathia (who appeared on 86.8% of the ballots) and Ichiro Suzuki (99.7%), as well as former Mets closer Billy Wagner (82.5%).
The good news for Beltrán is that he has plenty of eligibility remaining. This year was his third on the ballot, meaning he has seven more years to be voted in by the BBWAA.
And it probably won’t take much longer.
Beltrán has made a steady jump in each of his three years on the ballot, going from 46.5% of the vote in 2023 to 57.1% in 2024 to 70.3% this year.
The 2026 class of newcomers does not boast anyone with the pedigree of Suzuki or Sabathia, who were both elected in their first year of eligibility. There is also no one returning to the ballot like Wagner, who was in his 10th and final year of eligibility and had finished only five votes short in 2024.
Headlining the first-time entries to the 2026 ballot is Cole Hamels, who went 163-122 with a 3.43 ERA over 15 seasons. He won a World Series with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008 but never finished better than fifth in Cy Young Award voting.
He’s expected to be joined on the ballot by Ryan Braun, who hit 352 home runs and won a National League MVP Award during 14 seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers but served a 65-game suspension for his ties to the performance-enhancing-drug-related Biogenesis scandal.
Other newly eligible potential entries include Alex Gordon, Edwin Encarnacion, Shin-Soo Choo and Hunter Pence.
That unspectacular cast of newcomers could bode well for Beltrán, who hit .279 with 435 home runs, 1,587 RBI and 312 stolen bases over 20 seasons with the Kansas City Royals, Houston Astros, Mets, San Francisco Giants, St. Louis Cardinals, Yankees and Texas Rangers from 1998-2017.
The switch-hitting Beltrán is one of five players in MLB history with at least 500 doubles, 400 home runs and 300 stolen bases. Two of the others, Willie Mays and Andre Dawson, are Hall of Famers. The others were Barry Bonds, who faced steroid allegations, and Alex Rodriguez, who served a 162-game suspension in the Biogenesis scandal.
Beltrán’s 86.4% success rate on stolen bases is the best of any player since 1920.
His 67.4 wins above replacement (WAR), according to FanGraphs, ranks 10th ever among center fielders.
Complicating Beltrán’s case, however, is his connection to the Astros’ 2017 sign-stealing scandal. Beltrán was the only player named in MLB’s investigation, which the league completed in January 2020. The Mets, who had just hired Beltrán as their manager, parted ways with him before he ever managed a game.
Terry Collins, who managed Beltrán with the Mets in 2011, believes the nine-time All-Star is being “overly penalized.”
“This Astros thing has gotten out of control now,” Collins said on SNY’s “Baseball Night in New York.” “The Hall of Fame is filled with guys who knew what pitches were coming at certain times, so I’m a little tired of hearing him being held accountable, to be the only guy who was a player at the time.”
Others returning to the ballot include Andruw Jones, who received 66.2% of the vote Tuesday in his eighth year of eligibility. The longtime Atlanta Braves center fielder hit 434 home runs and won 10 Gold Gloves during his 17 MLB seasons, the final two of which he spent with the Yankees.
Rodriguez, who ranks fourth in MLB history with 2,086 RBI and fifth with 696 home runs, appeared on 37.1% of the ballots Tuesday, up from 34.8% in 2024. Next year will be his fifth time on the ballot.
Andy Pettitte received 27.9% of the vote Tuesday, marking a 14.4% increase from 2024.
Pettitte won five World Series with the Yankees and finished his 18-year career with a 256-153 record, a 3.85 ERA and 2,448 strikeouts in 3316 innings. His 19 postseason wins are the most in MLB history.
The left-handed Pettitte admitted to using human growth hormone (HGH) in 2002 and 2004 in attempts to recover from injuries. MLB did not test for the substance at the time, nor was it banned.
Pettitte, who is entering his eighth year on the ballot, has received renewed support among Hall of Fame voters perhaps due to the similarities between his statistics and Sabathia’s. Sabathia finished with a 251-161 record, a 3.74 ERA and 3,093 strikeouts in 3,577.1 innings over 19 MLB seasons.
“Getting a chance to pitch alongside him, getting a chance to still talk to him pretty much all the time, I believe he’s a Hall of Famer,” Sabathia said Tuesday of Pettitte, whom he played with on the Yankees from 2009-10 and 2012-13.
“Hopefully [with] my getting in, people reconsider his candidacy and put him in. Anybody that wins 19 games in the playoffs, I think, deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.”