Nearly every Hall of Fame election I’ve participated in sadly has been dominated by the issue that plagued baseball for an entire generation: performance-enhancing drugs. With so many great players tainted by PED connections, most of the toughest calls I had to make in my previous 13 Baseball Writers' Association of America ballots required me to invoke the Hall’s longstanding off-the-field criteria, which instruct voters to consider character, integrity and sportsmanship in addition to playing performance.

The good news: There were still a few lingering PED cases on the 2024 ballot, but not many. And all of them concerned players who have been on this ballot for many years, so there wasn’t a whole lot of new research that needed to be considered.

That did not, however, make the 2024 ballot easy. Quite the opposite, because for the first time in a long time, there were a number of really difficult decisions to be made strictly on a player’s on-field performance. Which, to be honest, is how it should be. This is supposed to be the ultimate baseball debate: Is Player X a Hall of Famer or not? And it’s such a better debate when the question involves on-field performance and only on-field performance.

This was actually a smaller ballot than has been typical since I started doing this: Only 26 players up for election, 12 of those first-time nominees who retired five years ago, the other 14 returning candidates who continued to receive at least 5 percent support for up to 10 years of eligibility. As always, a player must be named on 75 percent of the roughly 400 ballots sent out to writers who have been active members of the BBWAA at least 10 years to earn induction into Cooperstown.

And it was refreshing to learn tonight that three players crossed the magic threshold and earned induction: Adrián Beltré, Joe Mauer and Todd Helton. Those three all-time greats will join Jim Leyland, who was elected last month by the Contemporary Era Committee, on the stage in Cooperstown this summer.

It’s Hall of Fame election night, and while that may not be huge news here in Washington, it’s big news across the baseball world at large.

At 6 p.m. Eastern, we’ll learn the names of the newest residents of Cooperstown, and it could be a sizeable list for the first time in several years.

The votes all were submitted before New Year’s Day, so there’s been plenty of time for everyone to speculate and pontificate on the eventual results. The ever-present Hall of Fame Tracker by Ryan Thibodaux has once again given interested fans and media members alike tantalizing evidence of what we may learn tonight, based on the ballots that already were made public by some members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you already know that I’ve been a voter since 2011 but I don’t reveal my ballot until after the results are announced. Please do check back this evening for my full column explaining why I did or did not vote for each of the 26 players who appeared on this year’s ballot.

But since there’s nothing else to do between now and then but delude ourselves into thinking the Nationals might actually make some news for the first time in weeks, let’s look at some of the major storylines heading into tonight’s announcement …

At the risk of offending someone, I must state the following:

I don’t care about your Hall of Fame ballot or your explanation for it. And that’s especially true if you don’t have a vote and it’s a mock.

Same rule applies to your fantasy team. It's a fantasy if you think you can hold my interest after about 20 seconds.

OK, I’m glad we got that out of the way. Here’s my ballot, with the class of 2024 announced tonight at 6 p.m. on MLB Network.

Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, Andruw Jones, Joe Mauer, Gary Sheffield and Billy Wagner. No one with ties to the Orioles.

Current short-season Single-A Auburn manager Patrick Anderson says the Nationals need a lot of catchers at their lower levels so they can build stamina at that spot in the lineup. Catching is a position that can administer wear and tear on bodies over the course of a season, especially for teenagers just getting their first taste of playing pro ball. "That position beats them up," Anderson said. "They are not used to 140 games at the low Single-A level. Those guys can get hurt sometimes....

Joe Mauer's Hall of Fame case is complicated. If Mauer, 35, who officially announced his retirement Monday, is judged as one of the game's best-hitting catchers, then he'll be in Cooperstown. If the final five seasons of his 15-year career figure into the case, it could be a different story. It's shaping up to be a long debate. Mauer, playing for the Minnesota Twins, is the only catcher in history to win three batting titles. He was also an American League MVP with a career OPS of .827. He...