Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 2016

Elections to the Baseball Hall of Fame for 2016 proceeded according to rules most recently amended in 2015. As in the past, the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) voted by mail to select from a ballot of recently retired players, with results announced on January 6, 2016.

Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza were elected to the Hall of Fame. The Pre-Integration Committee, the last of three new voting committees established during an earlier rules change in 2010 to replace the more broadly defined Veterans Committee, convened in December 2015 to select from a ballot of players and non-playing personnel who made their greatest contributions to the sport prior to 1947 – called the "Pre-Integration Era" by the Hall of Fame – but failed to select any inductees.

The Hall of Fame induction ceremonies was held on July 24, 2016 at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, with commissioner Rob Manfred presiding. On the day before the actual induction ceremony, the annual Hall of Fame Awards Presentation took place. At that event, two awards for media excellence were presented – the Hall's Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters and the BBWAA's J. G. Taylor Spink Award for writers. The other major Hall of Fame award, the Buck O'Neil Lifetime Achievement Award, will not be presented again until at least 2017.

On July 26, 2014, the Hall announced changes to the rules for election for recently retired players, reducing the number of years a player will be eligible to be on the ballot from fifteen years to ten. Two candidates presently on the BBWAA ballot (Lee Smith and Alan Trammell) in years 10-15 were grandfathered into this system and retained their previous 15 years of eligibility. In addition, BBWAA members who were otherwise eligible to cast ballots were required to complete a registration form and sign a code of conduct before receiving their ballots, and the Hall will make public the names of all members who cast ballots (but not their individual votes) when it announces the election results. The code of conduct specifically states that the ballot is non-transferable, a direct reaction to Dan Le Batard turning his 2014 Hall of Fame ballot over to the sports website Deadspin and allowing the site's readers to make his Hall votes (an act that drew him a lifetime ban from future Hall voting). Violation of the code of conduct will result in a lifetime ban from BBWAA voting.

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