After a decade of "ballot logjam," has voting for the National Baseball Hall of Fame finally returned to normal? We will know when results from the ballots cast by the qualified members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA, or "the writers") are announced on January 21, 2025, although based on voting trends over the last decade, the bulk of the results are predictable and, by now, unsurprising.

What does a "return to normal" mean? Of the 14 first-time candidates on the BBWAA 2025 ballot, only two, CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki, stand out as likely Hall of Famers, and neither are a lock for first-ballot induction. Of the 14 returning candidates, none of the "normal" candidates are automatic Hall of Famers, else they would have been elected already. Thus, there is no "ballot logjam," meaning that there are not more than ten sure-fire Hall of Famers who exceed the maximum of ten votes allowed per ballot.

Created in April 2022, the Classic Baseball Era Committee debuts to deliberate eight candidates for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. All eight candidates' careers began before 1980. Two are associated with the Negro Leagues, assimilated into Major League Baseball in December 2020, while the other six are some very familiar names indeed, and it is highly likely that at least one of them will be announced by the committee on December 8, 2024, for formal induction in July 2025.

The six non-Negro Leagues candidates are practically near-contemporaries whose playing careers span the 1950s through the 1980s: Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant. The two Negro Leagues candidates are John Donaldson and Vic Harris, with Donaldson, whose tenure in the officially-recognized Negro Leagues lasted for the first half of the 1920s, also considered a manager and a pioneer of sorts; by contrast, Harris's playing and managing career spanned virtually the entire Negro Leagues period from 1920 to 1948.

Willie Mays is my all-time favorite baseball player. He has been ever since I was a boy. Why I came to that conclusion at that young age, I don't know. I never even got to see the Say Hey Kid play in person. It was just a childhood intuition that can be rationalized only as an adult, the attempt to understand what instinct already knew to be true. And while I have long since shunned the idea of "hero worship" and "role models," if I ever embraced those ideas in the first place, as far as I was concerned, Willie Mays has always resided on another, higher plane of existence.

Six weeks after he turned 93, Willie Howard Mays died of heart failure in Palo Alto, California, on June 18. Now the Say Hey Kid does reside on another, higher plane of existence, whatever that may be, whether actual or imaginary, whether, to abuse the hoary cliché, it be "heaven's all-star squad" with all the baseball gods who ascended to the Great Diamond in the Sky before him.

Indeed, I won't reiterate the usual narratives and statistics that form the standard approach for obituaries. Mays's story has been told countless times, and it will continue to be told long after contemporary coverage begins to fade because his story is a part of history just as baseball is a part of history, and it isn't just American history as baseball has long been a prime American cultural export.

Quite honestly, I can't you tell how many times I've seen The Last Waltz, but I do know that the next time I do, it will be with sadness knowing that Robbie Robertson, alive forever in that landmark rock and roll concert movie, died on August 9 at the age of 80 after his battle with prostate cancer.

Given that The Last Waltz had been directed by Martin Scorsese and had featured a galaxy of classic-rock stars from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Van Morrison to Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, and Neil Young, it is somehow fitting that even casual rock fans—certainly those born after the movie's release date of 1978—who might have vaguely heard of the Band, whose farewell concert is the very purpose of the movie, might still ask, "Robbie who?"