Blue Jays get another leg up on Yankees after latest Hall of Fame voting

Just like the Toronto Blue Jays getting so very close to winning the World Series in 2025, one of the team's legendary figures also got agonizingly close to immortality on Sunday (Dec. 7). Carlos Delgado was just three votes shy of earning his way into the Hall of Fame.

The long-time Blue Jays' first baseman received 56.3% of the votes to fall just three votes shy of getting a plaque in Cooperstown, but he did better than a former New York Yankees star. Just as the Blue Jays embarrassed the Bronx Bombers in the 2025 ALDS, the Contemporary Baseball Era Players Committee also had an embarrassing night of voting, at the expense of Yankees icon Don Mattingly.

Blue Jays get another leg up on Yankees after latest Hall of Fame voting

It really hasn't been a good couple of months for the Yankees and their fans. First they lose the AL East division title to the Blue Jays, despite finishing the year with the exact same record. While the Yankees did make it past their arch nemesis in the Boston Red Sox in the Wild Card series, they couldn't advance past Toronto.

The Blue Jays came into that ALDS searching for their first playoff win in almost a decade. The last playoff game this franchise had won was back in the 2016 ALCS against the Cleveland Guardians. Since then, the Blue Jays had gone to the playoffs three times and went a combined 0-6 in those attempts, while the Yankees were in the World Series in 2024.

It didn't matter though, the Blue Jays finally broke through and demolished New York, ending their season in four games and clinching the series with a win in Yankee Stadium, followed by a celebration that tugged at the heartstrings of the Yankees faithful thanks to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and David Ortiz.

Then as the playoffs rolled on, veteran outfielder George Springer started to surpass some of the Yankees all-time greats on the leaderboards. Springer moved past Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams as he finished the 2025 postseason with 23 career playoff home runs, third most in MLB history. And as the two teams look to be contending for the same free agents this offseason, the Yankees as a franchise took another gut punch when the voting results came out.

Delgado received the second most votes on the ballot, by a committee that had a large representation of people who were involved in the game in the 1980's which was during Mattingly's peak. While Mattingly did receive enough support to stay on the ballot the next time his era comes up for a vote in three years time, it felt like a now-or-never situation considering is candidacy.

To see Mattingly, a former MVP who has just as many trips to the postseason as Delgado has (one each) not get the kind of support he needed is embarrassing for both the voting committee and to the Yankees as a franchise. This was a ballot with many deserving names, but several players who were like to PED use and the voters decided that those players should be nowhere near Hall of Fame entry.

But for Mattingly, a guy who played the game "the right way" for so many years, who epitomized Yankee's baseball in one of their darkest periods, to not get more votes than a Blue Jays slugger who was a one-and-done original ballot candidate, it's another sour note for a team that was once the model franchise of the sport.