Welcome back as we travel down the rabbit hole of the Hall of Fame’s struggles to induct starting pitchers. If you missed Part 1 of this mini-series, you can find it here, but if you just need a refresher: I ran some numbers, and as of late, pitchers have fallen to just a quarter of Cooperstown inductees, with a strong possibility to fall even lower in coming years. And starting pitchers are just a fraction of that, proving an even more dire situation. Why isn’t the Hall of Fame inducting starting pitchers?
As it turns out, there’s a bit of a history to that: for a long time, Pitcher Wins were the main way voters seemed to evaluate starters, with Strikeouts also getting some consideration. However, that system didn’t traditionally mean that voters only inducted 300-Win guys; in fact, as late as 1980-1990, the Baseball Writers (the traditional first line of electing Hall of Famers) inducted five starters with under 300 Wins (four of whom also fell short of 3000 Ks).
That changed in the 1990s; from 1991 to 1999, the BBWAA inducted six pitchers, all of whom had 3000 strikeouts and five of whom had 300 wins. At basically the same time, any pitchers who didn’t hit those marks basically stopped getting consideration; it would take over a decade for them to elect a starter without both milestones (Bert Blyleven in 2011, who had 3701 Ks but fell short on wins), and two decades for them to elect a starting pitcher who hit neither milestone (Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay in 2019).
Thankfully, the Hall has a back-up for when the BBWAA falls short in their mission: the Veterans Committee! This special group was designed specifically to cover the players the Writers might have overlooked. If the BBWAA forgot how to induct pitchers without big milestones, theoretically the VC is there to step in and pick up the slack, looking for the modern equivalents to Juan Marichal and Don Drysdale who were no longer getting consideration.
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
Rethinking What Makes a Hall of Fame Starting Pitcher, Part 1: What Has(n't) Been Working Lately
A quick preface: I’ve been working on this piece for a while now, and it’s gone through some re-writes and gotten much longer over time. Right now, it’s long enough that it’s going to need be split into several articles, and I was hoping to have the entire thing written, edited, and ready to go before I started publishing it; but after a few attempts with the last chunk, I think I just need to start putting it out there to really settle into the conclusion. Also, given that the Hall of Fame induction is this weekend, now seemed like a good time to start running it, since it’s about that.
As you may have been able to tell from this year’s Future Hall of Fame Pitchers article, I’ve had Hall of Fame standards for starting pitchers on my mind for a little bit. I could allude to it a little bit there, but I couldn’t go in depth as I wanted to, because… it’s kind of a separate problem? Ultimately, those pieces are talking about current players with a chance at Cooperstown in the future, and sorting through the large variety of issues that Hall of Fame voters have built up on that front is going to push out any attempts to talk about the players themselves.
But now that I’ve covered those modern players, why not turn our focus back to the Hall’s pitching standards? Let’s revisit one of those points I raised during the article: the split between hitters and pitchers in election rates. This is an open-ended question that you could answer with a variety of approaches, with no real “right” answer.
You could say pitching and offense are two sides of the game, and rosters these days are generally half position players and half pitchers, so the Hall election rate should be similar. If you want a more mathematical approach, Wins Above Replacement gets split 60-40 in favor of position players, since part of pitching is really defense (or at least, that’s what Baseball-Reference head Sean Forman says they use, although I imagine other value stats are similar). In years past, rosters tended to skew more towards position players then they do today, and historically, the Hall has also done that, inducting more position players at roughly a 2-to-1 rate, which seems in line with those older roster builds. Either way, our main range for where we “should” be seems to roughly be that 33-40% range?
The recent history of the Hall has been a different story, however. Since the Cooperstown Class of 2000, we’ve seen 76 players inducted, and a full 56 of them have been position players, a rate that’s just shy of 3-to-1. And not only that, but this probably hasn’t even been the worst-case scenario for the Hall. Just imagine a world without the voter backlash against steroid users; we’d probably see at least another half-dozen or so position players added to the Hall, likely more, against just one more pitcher.*
*By my estimate, I’d say Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Gary Sheffield for the position players, against just Roger Clemens. That would get us to a full 3-to-1 ratio.
And as bad as that looks on the surface, every sign is that things are only getting worse from here. Adapting the predictions from my 2024 Election Wrap-Up and adding in some potential Veterans Committee choices, our upcoming classes are likely to include some combination of: Andruw Jones, Carlos Beltrán, Ichiro Suzuki, Chase Utley, Buster Posey, Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, Miguel Cabrera, Jeff Kent, Dick Allen, maybe Lou Whitaker or Dwight Evans, all against… Billy Wagner and CC Sabathia. That’s looking like at least a 5-to-1 ratio to me. Maybe you could throw in an extra surprise VC pick like Curt Schilling to balance that out, but that also goes for guys like Don Mattingly or Dale Murphy (who sandwiched Schilling in their last VC ballot appearance).
As you may have been able to tell from this year’s Future Hall of Fame Pitchers article, I’ve had Hall of Fame standards for starting pitchers on my mind for a little bit. I could allude to it a little bit there, but I couldn’t go in depth as I wanted to, because… it’s kind of a separate problem? Ultimately, those pieces are talking about current players with a chance at Cooperstown in the future, and sorting through the large variety of issues that Hall of Fame voters have built up on that front is going to push out any attempts to talk about the players themselves.
But now that I’ve covered those modern players, why not turn our focus back to the Hall’s pitching standards? Let’s revisit one of those points I raised during the article: the split between hitters and pitchers in election rates. This is an open-ended question that you could answer with a variety of approaches, with no real “right” answer.
You could say pitching and offense are two sides of the game, and rosters these days are generally half position players and half pitchers, so the Hall election rate should be similar. If you want a more mathematical approach, Wins Above Replacement gets split 60-40 in favor of position players, since part of pitching is really defense (or at least, that’s what Baseball-Reference head Sean Forman says they use, although I imagine other value stats are similar). In years past, rosters tended to skew more towards position players then they do today, and historically, the Hall has also done that, inducting more position players at roughly a 2-to-1 rate, which seems in line with those older roster builds. Either way, our main range for where we “should” be seems to roughly be that 33-40% range?
The recent history of the Hall has been a different story, however. Since the Cooperstown Class of 2000, we’ve seen 76 players inducted, and a full 56 of them have been position players, a rate that’s just shy of 3-to-1. And not only that, but this probably hasn’t even been the worst-case scenario for the Hall. Just imagine a world without the voter backlash against steroid users; we’d probably see at least another half-dozen or so position players added to the Hall, likely more, against just one more pitcher.*
*By my estimate, I’d say Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Gary Sheffield for the position players, against just Roger Clemens. That would get us to a full 3-to-1 ratio.
And as bad as that looks on the surface, every sign is that things are only getting worse from here. Adapting the predictions from my 2024 Election Wrap-Up and adding in some potential Veterans Committee choices, our upcoming classes are likely to include some combination of: Andruw Jones, Carlos Beltrán, Ichiro Suzuki, Chase Utley, Buster Posey, Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, Miguel Cabrera, Jeff Kent, Dick Allen, maybe Lou Whitaker or Dwight Evans, all against… Billy Wagner and CC Sabathia. That’s looking like at least a 5-to-1 ratio to me. Maybe you could throw in an extra surprise VC pick like Curt Schilling to balance that out, but that also goes for guys like Don Mattingly or Dale Murphy (who sandwiched Schilling in their last VC ballot appearance).
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