The 2027 Hall of Fame Classic Era Ballot
A SABR member opens a series examining potential Negro League players who could be part of the next Classic Era ballot
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . The Hall of Fame opened its doors to Negro League players after Ted Williams’ HOF speech in 1966. His comments regarding Black players begin at roughly 2:05:
Leading Off
The 2027 Hall of Fame Classic Era Ballot
By W.H. Johnson
Between 1971 (Satchel Paige) and 2005 (Hilton Smith), eighteen former Negro League players were enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Coopestown. The list of 18 does not include Hall of Famers who began their careers in the Negro Leagues but who played the preponderance of their time in the desegregated major leagues after 1947. Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks, and Hank Aaron, to name but four, were all rightly elected based on their contributions to the game after Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and the rest broke through baseball’s color barrier.
Of course, the Negro Leagues, in all their iterations, existed well before 1947, with the first version instantiated by Rube Foster and C.I. Taylor in 1920. Even before that, there were tremendously talented Black players across the country. In short, the eighteen initial selectees represented a tiny percentage of a subset of great, unrecognized baseball players from earlier times.
In 2006, the Hall approved a ‘bulk enshrinement’ of seventeen more players, each very deserving of the honor. Still, the mere thirty-five plaques in Cooperstown negatively and disproportionately limited the perceptions about the achievement and excellence of all those Negro Leaguers who were beginning to slip into the collective memory hole of the national pastime. In 2022, though, the Hall eliminated the old Veterans’ committee and established several special selection committees to find and elect some of the great players of the past who had fallen through the figurative cracks of the process. Among those committees is the Classic Era committee, covering the time before 1980 and including the Negro Leagues [and pre-Negro League} stars.
The elections are not held annually. In 2024, there were two Negro League alums on the ballot of eight, Vic Harris and John Donaldson [fear not: they will both be covered in future essays]. There is no doubt that Dick Allen and Dave Parker, the 2024 choices, absolutely deserve admission to the Hall. As a side note, Parker is one of my two all-time favorite players, and I was delighted to see him elected. But the sixteen-member committee requires 12 ‘yea’ votes (75%) to select a player, and neither Harris nor Donaldson reached that mark.
Is it fair to group Negro Leaguers [technically pre-1920 and seven Negro major leagues] in with other richly deserving, and more contemporary, star players? The names of a few of the great Negro players are known to many serious baseball students, but many others are a mystery. And while the names may be known, how many [outside a coterie of Negro League scholars] know much about the accomplishments of some of those incredible athletes?
The next Classic Era ballot will be published in late 2026 for a 2027 summer election. That means the actual ballot will be largely approved by early Autumn 2026. Within that timetable, over the next 12 months this essay series will highlight at least one specific Negro League superstar per month. The intent is to create awareness of these tremendous players among the self-selected audience of baseball afficionados that forms the readership of Here’s The Pitch. A few who read this may have access to some of the mechanisms inside the Hall of Fame and might be convinced to advocate for one or more of the men to be discussed. All who read this are very likely interested in the Hall’s selections, and knowledge of who was [or was not] elected can be quite useful in thinking about how the process might adapt in the future.
This is not to question or criticize the Hall’s establishment of a process for considering and electing former Negro League stars. No other conduit is available. This is the only avenue at this time. Now, there is an argument to be made that another special election might be appropriate, especially given the recent explosion of research and the collective expansion of awareness of just how well those largely-anonymous Negro Leaguers played on the field in the time before television and desegregation, but that is a different story altogether.
Barnstorming Black players of that era [e.g. all of them] went through periods in which they might play three games a day, then hop in an old bus or a few cars, and either try to find rooms for the night (or stake out a good spot on the bus or propped up outside against a tire outside) or simply drive on until morning, until the next 10 a.m. game against the local nine of a small town. The uniforms had to be washed once in a while, and finding restaurants or grocers that would serve them often provided a challenge all unto itself. The point is, those players found that baseball not only offered a decent living for the time, but the aggregated effort to simply get to games, and then to play well, remains an astounding testament to their shared love of the game. Paired with the on-field excellence of so many, it is easy to make the respective cases for Cooperstown for some.
The 2026 ballot/2027 election will be limited to eight candidates. This is a chance, maybe the only chance, for some very deserving players to be elected to the Hall of Fame. I hope you will enjoy meeting them as much as I have.
Bill Johnson has contributed nearly 50 essays to SABR’s Biography Project, and presented papers at the 2011 Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, the 2017 and 2023 Jerry Malloy Negro League Conferences, and the inaugural Southern Negro League Conference. He has published a biography of Hal Trosky (McFarland and Co., 2017) and an article about Negro American League All-Star Art “Superman” Pennington in the journal Black Ball. He is on ‘X’: @menckensmemory.
Extra Innings
Today is Greg Maddux’s 59th birthday. While many lament today’s game of high-octane pitching that seems to ruin arms as quickly as it makes them temporary stars, Maddux was a unique pitcher even in the late-‘80s and early '90s, winning four consecutive Cy Young Awards despite spending most of his time pitching sub-90 MPH.
Maddux, a notorious prankster during his MLB career, has kept his pranking active in his post-career time, posting an all-time prank against former MVP Kris Bryant: