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?

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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).




For as rough as this already sounds, you might have also picked up on yet another problem when I grouped together Wagner and Sabathia. We’ve been lumping together starting and relief pitching in our rates so far, but historically, things were overwhelmingly tilted towards starters. The Hall didn’t see its first closer elected until Hoyt Wilhelm in 1985, followed by Rollie Fingers in 1992. Prior to 2000, that was all we had.

Since then, the ranks have grown substantially: we’re now up to eight closers in the Hall, with Wagner poised to become the ninth next year. I don’t know that I disagree with any of the six closers elected over the last 25 years (maybe Bruce Sutter?), but it does draw even further attention to the declining number of pitchers getting inducted. Like, Wagner and Sabathia will be sharing the ballot year, and while I would vote for both of them if I had a ballot, it also seems worth noting to me that Sabathia threw nearly four times as many innings as Wagner.

Even Mariano Rivera (Class of 2019) and Trevor Hoffman (Class of 2018), arguably the two most deserving modern closers, finished with 1089.1 and 1283.2 innings, respectively. To stick to Rivera’s 2019 classmates, Roy Halladay was relatively light on innings for a Hall of Fame starter, and he still has more than twice as many innings (2749.1) as Rivera. Combining Hoffman and Rivera’s innings totals would still leave you nearly an entire second Mariano Rivera away from Mike Mussina’s 3562.2 innings.

Given all of that, it seems like maybe we should be seeing a little bit more than two starting pitchers elected for every reliever. It also doesn’t help that relievers are managing this while at a comparative disadvantage, being a mostly modern innovation while the Hall of Fame has an entire division set to electing older (i.e; “pre-closer”) stars. For example, that “14 starters, 6 relievers” ratio is bolstered by 4 Negro League starting pitchers getting inducted; those inductions were all very deserving, but it feels notable that the only way the Hall could even manage a 2-to-1 starter-reliever ratio over the last quarter-century is by inducting long-overdue starters who retired before star relief pitchers were even a thing, let alone a wide-spread part of the baseball landscape.

Even if you want to limit our look to just BBWAA elections in that span, we go from 30% relievers to 38% (five out of thirteen), and the induction of Sabathia and Wagner will move that to a full 40%. Sure, the main imbalance we’ve been talking about here is hitters-to-pitchers, and I think closers are a part of the modern game and deserve to be recognized in the Hall. But by and large, the voters seem to be doing a reasonable job at doing so; the “missing” pitchers in Cooperstown appear to be exclusively starting ones at the moment.

So, to that end, what I was hoping to do with these articles was to provide another way to highlight deserving candidates and think about modern pitchers in terms of the Hall. I’ve done this a few times in the past: for instance, here’s me stumping for modern candidates who probably deserve more attention, here’s me talking about how voters have largely stopped giving non-obvious pitchers any consideration at all, here’s me making the case for high-peak/short-career candidates. However, given the scope of the problem and the complete lack of attention that Cooperstown has given it, it’s probably worth looking at this discussion from as many other angles as possible, just to cover all of our bases (or, since we’re talking about pitching… keep all the bases open?).

If we’re trying to figure out alternative ways to make Hall of Fame cases for pitchers, it might make sense to start with what voters have traditionally looked at when voting. And the answer here is… actually much more straightforward than I thought it would be. It’s 300 wins, followed by 3000 strikeouts.

When Bert Blyleven was elected in 2011, it marked the first time in 20 years, since Ferguson Jenkins all the way back in 1991, that the BBWAA elected a starting pitcher (counting Dennis Eckersley as a closer here) who didn’t have 300 wins. Both Blyleven and Jenkins came within 20 wins (287 and 284, respectively), both far surpassed 3000 strikeouts (3701 and 3192, respectively), and neither one was a first ballot choice (we’ll actually return to this point in a second).

Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz were fellow sub-300 wins pitchers who would earn a plaque a few years after Blyleven, but once again, both had more than 3000 Ks to make up for it (plus Smoltz could tack on 154 saves on top of that).* It wouldn’t be until 2019, when Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay were elected, that they would elect a starter who failed to hit both milestones; those two would be the first since Jim Palmer way back in 1990, meaning the BBWAA went nearly 3 decades between non-milestone electees.

*And, in the interest of completeness, this 2011-2018 era would also see the induction of Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux (both 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts), and Tom Glavine (just 300 wins).

I know it’s easy to automatically write everyone in between off, and just give some kneejerk “well, they didn’t have the numbers then” response. But hitters aren’t at all held to those standards (even ignoring that 3000 hits and 500 home runs are much less team-dependent than 300 wins), and for good reason! A Hall of Fame that required big milestones would be missing out on so many amazing players: Joe DiMaggio, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Morgan, Brooks Robinson, Johnny Bench, Ron Santo, Johnny Mize… Shoot, even if you just wanted to limit yourself to position players inducted between 1991 and 2019, you’d lose out on guys like: Chipper Jones, Ozzie Smith, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, Larry Walker, Ivan Rodriguez, Barry Larkin, Tim Raines, Roberto Alomar… Most players do not hit those numbers! There’s a reason we hold them in such high regards, because even the best of the best often don’t reach them!

Of course, even considering that, it’s also not hard to see that the voters over this period were getting a little weird about pitchers. For instance, after Palmer in 1990, there were seven pitchers elected before Blyleven in 2011, and they were all some big names: Jenkins and Gaylord Perry in 1991, Tom Seaver in 1992, Steve Carlton in 1994, Phil Niekro in 1997, Don Sutton in 1998, and Nolan Ryan in 1998. Every one of those pitchers had 3000 strikeouts, and all but Jenkins had 300 wins.

In spite of those credentials, less than half of those seven were first-ballot Hall of Famers. Ryan, Carlton, and Seaver made it in on their first attempts, but Perry and Jenkins were both third-ballot selections, and Niekro and Sutton both needed five cycles to get elected. I’ve heard suggestions that Perry and Jenkins were snubbed a few times as punishments (for rampant ball-doctoring and cocaine suspensions, respectively), and that at least seems plausible, but I still have not heard an explanation for what the issues were with Niekro and Sutton.

It’s also interesting as a contrast for the era that came before. From 1980-1990, the baseball writers inducted five starting pitchers: Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Don Drysdale, Catfish Hunter, and Jim Palmer. Gibson and Palmer were first-ballot picks, Hunter and Marichal took three tries (although, as I recently learned while writing another piece, there were some unusual circumstances for Marichal), and Drysdale took a full decade of attempts to make it in.

But what’s perhaps more notable is that none of those five reached 300 wins, and only Gibson made it to 3000 strikeouts. It’s like the string of 300 win, 3000 strikeout pitchers in the ‘90s somehow both crowded each other out of spots on the ballot and completely shifted voters' expectations of what it took to be a Hall of Fame starting pitcher. There really was a regular influx of starters making the Hall of Fame in the decades before, some of whom weren’t even big milestone pitchers; then we cap off this insane run of seven pitchers getting inducted, six of whom were 300-3000 guys, and it takes over a decade for any other starter to get in, and two decades for a non-milestone guy to make it.

If things were tough even for pitchers with big milestones, you can imagine how tough things were for everybody else who hit the ballot in that time. From 1991 to the present day, seventeen starting pitchers stuck around for multiple Hall ballots without getting inducted by the BBWAA. That already sounds pretty rough; these seventeen players, plus the fifteen starting pitchers inducted over this span, brings us to 32 starting pitchers to garner notable Hall of Fame consideration over a 34 year period, or less than one new name per year.

That number already seems too low; just for comparison, the BBWAA outright inducted 39 position players in that same span. The 2024 ballot by itself had 11 position players who finished between 5% and 75% of the vote, meaning a fairly run-of-the-mill election cycle (possibly even a light one, given recent history) saw as many position players reach “returning candidate” status as the last thirty-four years of starter elections combined.

Things look even worse as you delve into those starter numbers even more. One of those seventeen “returning candidate” pitchers is Jose Rijo, which is more a technicality than an example of voter support (he made a comeback to the big leagues after his first election, which got him a second ballot despite not hitting 5% of the vote the first time). Two of them are Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling, who are kind of the inverse of what we’re looking for, the Hall downgrading traditional “Big Milestone” candidates rather than expanding their consideration to non-milestone cases. I’m also not really sure how to classify Andy Pettitte; he didn’t hit any big milestones, but he does have a resume that looks like it would appeal to traditional Hall voters over the course of five or six elections, were it not for the steroid thing.

Another four of the remaining cases are Jim Bunning, Mickey Lolich, Luis Tiant, and Jim Kaat. Those names are the kind of thing we’re looking for, but they carry a different asterisk: all four of them actually reached the BBWAA ballot prior to 1991, before getting trapped in “returning candidate” purgatory for fifteen elections, which carried them into our 1991-present window (at least Kaat and Bunning eventually made it via the Veterans Committee). If anything, that just makes them stand out more, as the last remnants of the era that was willing to consider non-milestone pitchers.

So, that leaves us just a dozen new non-inductee serious candidates over the last thirty-four years. I’ve included the full list below if you want to see the names and results. You can quibble with the names who made it I suppose, but that’s just generally the case with Hall of Fame ballots, and especially the down-ballot results (I’m not sure I would have sent Jimmy Rollins and David Wright on to multiple ballots, just to pick two veterans who will be returning for the 2025 Election, but I also don’t know that I can get too upset about them idling in the 5-15% range as long as things are less crowded). Really, I’m just happy to see any starters getting consideration at this point. It also gives me extra appreciation for Mark Buehrle just managing to stick around as long as he has, even if I think he should actually be inducted.

Name	Ballots	First Yr	Peak%	Peak Yr	bWAR
Jim Bunning*	15	1977	74.2	1988	59.5
Mickey Lolich	15	1985	25.5	1988	48
Luis Tiant	15	1988	30.9	1988	66.1
Jim Kaat*	15	1989	29.6	1993	50.5
Vida Blue	4	1992	8.7	1993	45.1
Ron Guidry	9	1994	8.8	2000	47.8
Tommy John	15	1995	31.7	2009	61.6
Jack Morris*	15	2000	67.7	2013	43.5
Dave Stewart	2	2001	7.4	2001	26.5
Jose Rijo^	2	2001	0.2	2001	36.5
Fernando Valenzuela	2	2003	6.2	2003	41.5
Orel Hershiser	2	2006	11.2	2006	56
Roger Clemens	10	2013	65.2	2022	139.2
Curt Schilling	10	2013	71.1	2021	79.5
Andy Pettitte @	6	2019	17	2023	60.2
Tim Hudson	2	2021	5.2	2021	57.9
Mark Buehrle @	4	2021	11	2021	59.1

(Note: Players with ^ after their name were later elected via the Veterans Committee. Players with * after their name are still on the ballot. Jose Rijo has a * after his year total because he’s a special case I’ll mention later. bWAR, like most stats in this piece unless otherwise mentioned, is from Baseball-Reference.)

That’s it. You could also build a pretty strong list of guys from this era who didn’t even reach the 5% needed for a second ballot: David Cone, Bret Saberhagen, Dave Stieb, Johan Santana, Jerry Koosman, Dwight Gooden, Kevin Brown, Frank Tanana…

Really, seeing all the guys who didn’t even get a second look, I’m almost more shocked that anyone else did, and trying to pick out a pattern of who made it to 5% was tough. The closest thing I could think of was wins, but even that overlaps a lot with “the guys who hit the ballot prior to 1991”, and there were also plenty of post-1991 guys with big win totals who went nowhere (Jamie Moyer, Dennis Martinez, David Wells, Bartolo Colon), as well as a few sub-200 win guys who forced their way back.

I’d imagine crowdedness of the ballot also factors in; for example, David Wells (239 Wins) and Kenny Rogers (219 wins), both guys with 50+ career WAR and decent win totals, would have still been something like the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth best guys on their ballots in 2013 and 2014. Maybe they had the types of careers that should have merited 5% of the vote, maybe not, but there’s just no way they’re going to get a fair discussion on that when there are something like twenty plausible inductees hanging around the same time and only ten ballot spots available.

But then again, hitting during relatively lean years of the mid-2000s to early-2010s didn’t appear to do much for all of the starters who landed on the ballot in those years, like Stieb, Martinez, Gooden, Saberhagen, Cone, Brown, Chuck Finley… really, anyone outside of Hershiser and Valenzuela. And even then, both of those guys still fell off after their second years, in elections that were honestly probably even less crowded than the 2024 ballot.

Of course, thinking more about those “relatively lean” new classes, it might be worth remembering what was happening higher up the ballot at the same time: Tommy John (on the ballot from 1995 to 2009), Bert Blyleven (from 1998 to 2011), and Jack Morris (from 2000 to 2014) were regularly hanging out just below the inductees, with John perpetually pulling 20-30% of the vote and Blyleven and Morris moving from the 20% range up into the 40-50% range after a few tries. This is more of a theory on my part, but I wonder if those three perpetually appearing in the top ten crowded out any newcomers. And to be fair, that’s a hard set for any starting pitcher to stand out against… but it does also highlight that the issues here are all voter-generated.

It’s not like any of these three choices were bad, especially not by the traditional standards. John and Blyleven finished with 288 and 287 wins, a stone’s throw from the 300 that voters revered; Blyleven could add 3701 Ks on top of that. Even Morris wasn’t exactly a slouch here, with over 250 wins and just shy of 2500 strikeouts. Keeping 300 game winners on the ballot for three or four years crowds the ballot, but it doesn’t clog the ballot anywhere nearly as badly as circulating 280-win pitchers for fifteen years.

And none of these three would have been an indefensible choice; two of them even made it in eventually! But they didn’t have the magic 300, and voters had apparently become married to that as a requirement, so they just hung around. Position players in that era like Andre Dawson or Jim Rice would naturally gain momentum over the years, but even a stellar pitcher like Blyleven needed an external push to get voters to reconsider his career.

Of course, even then, there’s nothing saying the ballot needs to be limited to just ten spots (or fewer, since there’s always been a contingent of voters hesitant to use all of their votes, even if it’s shrunk in size over the years), or that you can only pick three pitchers; those were also all decisions by the voters and the Hall. They weren’t doing themselves any favors, but there’s nothing saying you can’t at least circulate a few other pitchers to go with those three. But I think that no matter how you slice it, the big foundational sin at play here is that the BBWAA voters’ standards for starting pitchers just got blown way out of proportion in the 1990s. Everything else seems to be related to or downstream of that fact, and the Hall is still reeling from it today.

While that was a major issue, though, you don’t get to a problem of this size with just one major malfunction. We’re running a little long now, so tune in for part two where I tackle the obvious other half of the Hall’s induction problems, as well as some of their attempts to address them. And of course, if you’d like to be notified with an email when Part 2 goes live, consider subscribing to my mailing list below! I only use it when there’s a new article here given that they’re kind of irregular, so you don’t need to worry about spam or anything like that (although if you’d also like emails about my pop culture writing over at Out of Left Field, I have a separate list for that too!).

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