Manny Ramírez's Hall of Fame candidacy couldn't escape his multiple positive tests for performance-enhancing drugs.
If Manny Ramírez ever makes the National Baseball Hall of Fame, it won't be the traditional way.
The former Boston Red Sox slugger fell short of induction for the 10th straight ballot, the Hall of Fame announced on Tuesday. Needing 75% of the votes from the Baseball Writers' Association of America, Ramírez received just 38.8%.
Because it was his 10th time on the ballot, Ramírez will no longer be up for consideration in future BBWAA ballots. The only way he can now make it to the Hall is through its Contemporary Baseball Era committee, which next convenes in Dec. 2028.
Meanwhile, Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones both broke 75% and will join Jeff Kent, elected via the Contemporary Era committee last month, in Cooperstown this summer.
Ramírez was first eligible in 2017, receiving 23.8% of the vote at the time. While many players have risen from a lower number into induction, Ramírez's numbers were stagnant and had topped out at 34.3% last year. He did better this cycle, but not nearly well enough.
It's fairly obvious why that happened.
Manny Ramírez never escaped the steroid scandal
Under normal circumstances, any player with Ramírez's résumé would be a shoo-in for first-ballot Hall of Fame induction.
Ramírezwas a 12-time All-Star, a nine-time Silver Slugger, a batting champion and a two-time World Series champion. One of those rings was the curse-breaking 2004 Red Sox, for whom he won World Series MVP. He retired with 2,574 hits and 555 home runs. He remains the all-time leader in postseason homers. Going off the respected JAWS metric that evaluates Hall of Fame cases, he is the 10th-best left fielder of all time.
Of course, Ramírez's case is far from ordinary. Or rather, it's ordinary in a bad way.
Like many of his peers at the time, Ramírez is known as a steroid user. Ramírez tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in a 2003 survey performed by MLB, the results of which were supposed to remain confidential. He was suspended 50 games after testing positive for a fertility drug often used in steroid cycles in 2009. And in 2011, he tested positive for testosterone, receiving another suspension that pushed him into a brief retirement.
As expected, alleged steroid use has proven to largely be a case-killer in Hall of Fame voting. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, two players with even better résumés than Ramírez, never got above 66% of the vote and are now at the mercy of the Era Committee. Mark McGwire never got above 23.6%, Sammy Sosa topped out at 18.5% in his final year of eligibility, and Rafael Palmeiro fell off the ballot in his fourth go-around. Alex Rodriguez is currently going through the same process, hitting 40% this cycle.
Pretty much the only player to be substantively tied to steroid use and make it into Cooperstown is Ramírez's teammate David Ortiz, who was also alleged to have tested positive in that 2003 study and still made it in on his first BBWAA ballot.
Other inductees like Ivan Rodriguez, Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza faced accusations in their careers, but never with the proof that Ramírez faced.
Don't bet on Manny Ramírez making the Hall of Fame by committee
It remains possible that Ramírez reaches the Hall of Fame. As of this moment, it is not likely.
Simply put, the Hall of Fame clearly doesn't want steroid users to continue clouding its operations as the hallowed ground of baseball. That was made fairly clear when the Hall decreased the maximum list of BBWAA ballots from 15 to 10 right as Bonds and Clemens hit the scene.
The Contemporary Era Committee has so far been even less kind to the PED group than the BBWAA. Bonds and Clemens have gone through two committee votes in 2022 and 2025 and got fewer than five out of 16 votes both times. In committee votes, you need 12 out of 16 votes to receive induction.
Because of a rule change instituted in 2025, Bonds and Clemens won't be on a committee ballot again until 2031. If they fail to crack five votes one more time, it's the end of the line. They will not be eligible for any future ballots, barring a rule change.
The Hall of Fame isn't used to closing doors like this, but the discourse over steroids has overshadowed the voting in Cooperstown for decades now. So instead of steroid users looming among the candidates every three years, the Hall has made it so they are likely to come up twice, once they're done with BBWAA voting, and then never again, barring a favorable committee.
A similar fate likely awaits Ramírez.
Category: General Sports
