Alex Rodriguez has not garnered much momentum four years into his Hall of Fame eligibility.
The former Yankees slugger appeared on 37.1% of the 394 ballots submitted by the Baseball Writers’ Association (BBWAA) this year.
While that’s the highest percentage A-Rod has received, it’s a marginal increase from the 34.3% of votes he debuted with in 2022. He received 35.7% in 2023 and 34.8% in 2024.
Hanging over Rodriguez’s candidacy, of course, is his violation of MLB’s performance-enhancing drugs policy, which resulted in a season-long suspension in 2014 for his role in baseball’s Biogenesis scandal.
A candidate must receive 75% of votes in order to be elected to the Hall, and while Rodriguez has six years of eligibility remaining, he has considerable ground to make up.
The stagnancy of Rodriguez’s percentages suggest many voters have dug into their beliefs about his candidacy. But while the overall electorate leans decidedly against adding Rodriguez, the former infielder has received a small surge of support from newer voters.
Among the 16 first-time voters who made their 2025 ballots public, nine voted for A-Rod to get in, according to Ryan Thibodaux’s HOF vote tracker. That’s 56.3% — still well shy of 75%, but significantly higher than Rodriguez’s overall vote percentage.
Among those to vote for Rodriguez was Stephen Nesbitt, a senior MLB writer for The Athletic, who ultimately decided that keeping him, and other all-time greats with steroid ties, out of Cooperstown would be a disservice to the Hall.
“Where I landed is I need to be doing my best to judge these players on the stats, not on their character, whatever was reported or wasn’t,” Nesbitt, 33, told the Daily News.
“There’s so little we actually know about these people as people, and I felt that if banishment from Cooperstown was supposed to be tied together with having cheated and being punished for it, then that should be established by the league or by the Hall of Fame. I don’t believe you should place someone on the ballot who I’m not meant to vote for.”
Every Hall of Fame voter comes to their own conclusions on who to vote for and how to approach issues such as PEDs. But previous years featured a similar trend.
In 2022, eight of the 15 first-time voters with public ballots, or 53.3%, voted in favor of Rodriguez. In 2023, it was the exact same number.
The outlier came in 2024, when only six of the 17 first-time voters with public ballots — or 35.3% — voted for A-Rod.
“Part of this is I never shared a clubhouse with these guys,” Nesbitt said. “I was never in a huddle where they lied to me. I was never tracking a congressional hearing where they said something that wasn’t true. … The reader can decide for themselves: Is that good that I am now allowed an opportunity to vote when I was, during their playing career, watching them in a different context?”
Rodriguez’s stats alone are undeniably Hall-worthy. He ranks fourth in MLB history with 2,086 RBI and fifth with 696 home runs. He is one of 33 players in baseball’s illustrious 3,000-hit club.
But in 2009, Rodriguez admitted to using a banned substance earlier in his career as a member of the Texas Rangers. In 2014, he served what was then the longest PED suspension in MLB history. That came after he sued MLB and its players union to challenge the suspension, before ultimately dropping the lawsuit.
Similarly prolific players such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were not voted into the Hall due to steroid allegations. Neither served a suspension.
One first-time voter this year who did not vote for Rodriguez was JJ Cooper, the editor and chief of Baseball America, who considered multiple factors before making his decision.
He voted for first-time candidates he considered worthy — Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia — but opted against using one of his 10 votes on a player like Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez, whom he believed would not get elected nor fall off the ballot this year.
He also considered that Rodriguez and Ramirez served PED suspensions after MLB introduced league-wide drug testing in 2003.
“If you got suspended after that, that’s a different distinction than in the wild west days before, where there was a lot of steroid use, but it was almost an unlocked door kind of environment,” Cooper, 52, told The News.
“So that was the other part of it, which is I didn’t vote for A-Rod, I didn’t vote for Manny Ramirez, both of whom were suspended after PED use was being tested for and was now clearly something that led to very significant suspensions.”
Cooper reserved his right to change his mind on Rodriguez in future years, but he acknowledged A-Rod would have an easier path had Bonds made it before him.
Bonds, a seven-time MVP who hit an MLB-record 762 home runs, appeared on 66% of the ballots in his final year of eligibility in 2022. Clemens, who won 354 games and seven Cy Young Awards, received 65.2% of votes in 2022 before falling off the ballot as well.
Bill Madden, the longtime Daily News columnist and a recipient of the BBWAA Career Excellence Award, is staunchly against anyone with steroid ties getting into the Hall.
“They cheated the game,” said Madden, who cast his first Hall of Fame ballot in 1972. “A colleague of mine at the Daily News who always voted for steroid guys, particularly Bonds and Clemens and those guys, asked me why I don’t vote for them. I said, ‘I go to the Hall of Fame every year in July and I couldn’t look Hank Aaron in the face if I voted for Barry Bonds.’”
Suzuki, Sabathia and Billy Wagner were the three electees to be voted in by the BBWAA in 2025, marking the second year in a row in which three players appeared on at least 75% of the ballots.
Future years may offer a more interesting case study for Rodriguez. There are no slam-dunk additions joining the 2026 ballot, nor is there anyone like Wagner, who had gotten close to election before finally receiving enough votes in his final year of eligibility.
But Nesbitt, Cooper and Madden agree there is not a clear path for Rodriguez to gain entry.
“There’s no way he’s going in, even with more younger voters coming on every year,” Madden said. “It will never be enough.”
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