There won’t be any Phillies on the stage when the Hall of Fame inductions are held this summer. Of the six former Phillies on this year’s ballot, none received the requisite 75% of the votes necessary to be inducted. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t some news and notes to take from the balloting.

Chase Utley made the biggest noise of any of the former Phillies on the list. The former second baseman saw a 19.3% increase in the number of voters who voted for him, putting him at 59.1% in this year’s voting. He still has a ways to go, but another increase like that next year – which would be hard to accomplish – would put him over the threshold. If you go back to 2024, Utley received votes on 28.8% of the ballots, so another double digit jump may not be out of the question. Statistically though, the more ballots you are on, the tougher it is to gain a double digit jump, but we’ll see. To gain 30.3% in two years is nearly unheard of.

As Jayson Stark wrote in The Athletic: “Chase Utley is going to be a Hall of Famer. Have I ever missed on one of these predictions before? Please don’t answer that!”

Second largest jump by a former Phillie? Bobby Abreu. This one is a little tough to believe, but Abreu jumped from 19.5% to 30.8% (11.3 percentage points) in voting this year. It’s not that Abreu lacks some of the numbers to get there, but in his seventh season of eligibility, suddenly voters are taking a second look at Abreu’s stats.

One explanation is new voters. Generally, new voters are younger than the grizzled veterans and do often times do take a different perception of things with their fancy Sabermetrics and formulas. Of the 36 new voters who identified themselves this year, 20 of them (55.6%) marked Abreu on their ballot.

Cole Hamels was also helped by the newbies as he garnered support from 18 of the 36 new guys. It swings the other way too, because Jimmy Rollins only appeared on 5 of those fresh, new ballots (13.9%), which would seem to indicate he will have a more difficult time getting into the Hall of Fame. Utley was helped more than just two other players by new voters. Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones, who were the only two elected, appeared on 37 and 34 of the ballots, respectively. Utley picked up 30 votes (83.3%) from the folks who earned their way into voting for the first time.

The PED guys

Everyone always does a quick glimpse for those who were caught violating the MLB substance abuse (Performance Enhancing Drug) policy. Most of them have aged out of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) voting by not getting elected after 10 seasons on the ballot. Two remained this season with a small asterisk by a third. Manny Ramirez was in his final season of eligibility and received just 40% of the vote. He now belongs to the Era Committee (formerly known as the Veterans Committee.) Those folks are made up of “veteran” players, scribes, and team executives and have not looked kindly on the likes of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds.

On the other end of the process is Ryan Braun, who made his first –and late–appearance on the ballot. Braun, like Ramirez, was a two-time offender and received just 3.5% of the votes. If you fall short of the 5% plateau, you too are gone.

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The asterisk belongs to Andy Pettite, who was on the ballot for the eighth time and received 48.5% of the votes this year, which is notable because he received no higher than 13.5% of the votes in his first six years of eligibility before reaching 27.9% last year before he moved up 20.6% to this year’s total. Pettite was mentioned in the Mitchell Report, the sports in-depth investigation into PED abuse, and he later admitted that he had used HGH (Human Growth Hormone) to recover from an injury. Here’s the fun part; HGH and other substances were not illegal when he used it. He also fessed up to his use unlike many of the other amateur chemists.

The only remaining steroid figurehead–and possibly the biggest–is Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod was in the fifth year of eligibility and received 42.2% of the votes. 15 of the new voters checked his name for induction, so he isn’t garnering a lot of support from the younger core of voters.

One More Thing…

I find it interesting that the PED players have fared so poorly in voting, which I believe they should. I give Pettite a pass because at the time he used HGH, it was not banned. He also stood up and admitted it. The others, I don’t believe should go into the Hall of Fame. They knew it was banned and they did it anyway. If it were up to me the record books would have a huge asterisk by their name, or better yet, they would be listed in a footnote. Cheating is cheating.

Is it though? Carlos Beltran, he of the bang the garbage can slowly scandal, received a whopping 84.2% of the vote. The Astros won a World Series on the wings of that scandal, but he gets a shiny plaque in the Hall of Fame. I’m just sayin’.

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