A’s reveal 2026 Hall of Famers. Here’s who — and when they’ll come to Sacramento
The Athletics on Friday revealed the franchise’s 2026 Hall of Fame class, which consists of three former players and one longtime executive.
The MLB team later this season will celebrate center fielder Dave Henderson, second baseman Mark Ellis, pitcher John Odom and executive Sandy Alderson, the team said in a news release. Those four will be recognized during the Sept. 12 home game at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento as the A’s host the Seattle Mariners.
Henderson died in 2015 and will be honored posthumously. His big-league career spanned from 1981 and 1994, as he played six seasons for each of the Mariners and the A’s. He won a World Series ring in 1989, part of the then-Oakland A’s team that swept the San Francisco Giants.
Born in Merced and raised in nearby Dos Palos, Henderson retired with a career .258 batting average and 197 home runs, hitting 104 of those during his A’s career. Henderson in the late 1990s through the mid-2000s served as a broadcaster for the Mariners. He died of a heart attack in Seattle in 2015 at age 57.
Odom, nicknamed “Blue Moon,” debuted for the then-Kansas City Athletics in 1964 and was part of the Oakland A’s dynasty that won three straight World Series championships from 1972 through 1974. Odom earned the win in fifth and final game 5 of the 1974 World Series, getting one out in relief of starter Vida Blue before handing the ball over to Rollie Fingers.
Odom retired with 84 wins and 857 strikeouts for his MLB career.
Ellis debuted for the Athletics in 2002 and played with them through the middle of the 2011 season, finishing his career with short stints on the Colorado Rockies, Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals.
An excellent defensive infielder, Ellis in 2006 set the single-season American League record for fielding percentage at the position (.997), and his career mark of .991 remains the fifth-best in MLB history for a second baseman, according to Baseball Reference. Ellis retired from baseball in 2015.
Alderson held front office positions with the then-Oakland A’s from 1981 through 1998, including as the team’s general manager from 1983 through 1997. He rejoined the A’s again in 2019 and 2020 as senior advisor of baseball operations. Alderson during the 2000s and 2010s also held positions with the MLB commissioner’s office and in the front offices of the San Diego Padres and New York Mets, serving as the latter’s team president from September 2020 through September 2022.
Alderson has been noted as a mentor to A’s general manager Billy Beane, of “Moneyball” fame, with ESPN in a 2015 feature calling him the “grandfather” of the statistics-driven roster-building philosophy.
The Athletics are in their second season playing home games at West Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park, which is also home to the minor-league Sacramento River Cats, the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate. The team played in Oakland from 1968 through 2024 and plans to relocate to a new stadium being built on the Las Vegas strip in 2028.
Last September, the team inducted three former players — pitchers Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito — along with broadcaster Monte Moore into its franchise Hall of Fame. The pregame ceremony at Sutter Health Park was filled with gaffes, as the ballpark’s fire alarm sounded shortly before Mulder had been set to give his speech, and Hudson before the festivities remarked that being able to hold such a ceremony at the Oakland Coliseum “would have been really special.”
Echoing Hudson’s point, fans during the fire alarm delay that evening began to chant: “Let’s Go Oakland.”
