Three Giants made the Hall of Fame ballot. Each voter gets three votes.

The Hall of Fame announced eight names on Monday morning, and if you grew up on the Giants you could have stopped reading at the fourth one.

Dusty Baker. Bruce Bochy. Brian Sabean.

Those three, plus Sandy Alderson, Joe Maddon, Lou Piniella, Ted Turner and Bill White, make up the Contemporary Baseball Era ballot for managers and executives. A sixteen-member committee meets in San Diego on December 6 and the results go out on MLB Network at 5 p.m. Pacific that evening. Anyone named on twelve ballots goes to Cooperstown next July.

The names are the news. The ballot rules are the story.

Three votes, sixteen voters#

Under the Hall's own rules, each voter on an Era committee may vote for as few as zero candidates and as many as three. Not eight. Three.

Sixteen voters times three votes is 48 votes in the room, total, if every voter uses every slot. Election takes 75 percent, which is twelve.

So electing Baker, Bochy and Sabean together takes 36 of the 48. That would leave twelve votes for the other five candidates combined, which is exactly enough to elect one more of them and not a single vote to spare for anyone else. It is possible. It requires a room that agrees with itself almost perfectly.

Every voter who wants Bochy and Sabean and also likes Maddon has already spent the ballot before reaching Baker. That is not a knock on Baker. It is what a three-name ballot does to a franchise that put three names on it.

One front office, two dugouts#

The reason all three are on the same ballot is that they were mostly in the same building.

Sabean became general manager after the 1996 season and held the job for eighteen years, through 2014, the longest any Giants GM has held it. Baker managed the first six of those seasons, 1997 through 2002. Felipe Alou had the next four. Bochy had the last eight, and won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014.

Fourteen of Sabean's eighteen seasons, then, were managed by a man who is on this ballot with him. The 2002 club that went to the World Series under Baker and the three champions under Bochy all came out of the same front office. A voter can credit that front office once, through Sabean, or twice, through Sabean and a manager, or three times. There are only three votes to do it with.

Bochy is the easiest call of the three on paper. The Hall's release credits him with 2,252 wins and four World Series titles across the Padres, Giants and Rangers, and notes he is one of six managers with four or more. Baker brings 26 seasons, the 2022 title in Houston and three Manager of the Year awards, the first in 1993, his first season in San Francisco, when the Giants won 103 games and did not make the playoffs.

The man who explains why none of this is automatic#

Piniella is the cautionary tale, and he is on this ballot too.

In December 2023 this same committee, a different sixteen people with the same three-vote rule, elected Jim Leyland with 15 votes. Piniella, who won the 1990 World Series with Cincinnati and managed the 2001 Mariners to 116 wins, got 11. One short.

He did not do anything wrong between 2023 and now. The room simply had other names it liked more, and three slots to put them in.

That is the December question for the Giants, and the Hall has not named the sixteen people who will answer it. The release says the electorate will be announced later this fall.

Sources: National Baseball Hall of Fame, "Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Candidates Announced," November 2, 2026, and the Hall's Era Committee rules page (ballot size, three-vote maximum, 75 percent threshold, sixteen members), both read November 2. Baseball-Reference, San Francisco Giants franchise page, managers and records by season, read November 2. The 2023 committee vote (Leyland 15, Piniella 11) from the vote table on Wikipedia's 2024 Hall of Fame balloting page; the Associated Press reported Piniella one vote short on December 3, 2023.