So there is clearly a point to looking into this more deeply, even if the hope of a single unified Award Shares milestone is gone. Having an easy-to-understand stat would be nice, for appealing to the bloc of Hall voters that skews more traditional (and besides, it’s not like Wins are going to escape being heavily affected by the context of the game, as career win totals continue to drop). And since the BBWAA seemed to consider Awards success before the crush of 300/3000 inductees, perhaps the induction of guys like Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay is evidence that they’ll start moving back in that direction. If so, it seems like the best way to look at pitchers through this lens is going to be within their respective eras.
So what do our Cy Young Shares leaderboards look like if we divide them into “1970 to 2009” and “2010 to Present”? This is just a simple division based on each pitcher’s career midpoint rather than a full era adjustments, because this is the third full article of what was originally supposed to be a single piece that I’ve been working on and completely re-writing for months and I just want to finally get it out the door, but it’s a good-enough starting point for now. (I can throw “in-depth look at fully era-adjusted Cy Young Shares” on the “potential future article” pile for the time being.)
1970-2009 Leaderboard, based on career midpoint (*-Hall of Famer)
| Name | CYAs | Award Shares |
|---|---|---|
| Roger Clemens | 7 wins | 7.66 |
| Randy Johnson* | 5 wins | 6.5 |
| Greg Maddux* | 4 wins | 4.92 |
| Steve Carlton* | 4 wins | 4.29 |
| Pedro Martínez* | 3 wins | 4.26 |
| Tom Seaver* | 3 wins | 3.85 |
| Jim Palmer* | 3 wins | 3.57 |
| Roy Halladay* | 2 wins | 3.5 |
| Tom Glavine* | 2 wins | 3.15 |
| Johan Santana | 2 wins | 2.72 |
| Bret Saberhagen | 2 wins | 2.2 |
| Catfish Hunter* | 1 win | 2.02 |
| Gaylord Perry* | 2 wins | 2.01 |
| Ron Guidry | 1 win | 1.91 |
| Curt Schilling | 1.85 |
2010-Present Leaderboard, based on career midpoint (*-active)
| Name | CYAs | Award Shares |
|---|---|---|
| Justin Verlander* | 3 wins | 5.21 |
| Max Scherzer* | 3 wins | 4.61 |
| Clayton Kershaw* | 3 wins | 4.58 |
| Gerrit Cole* | 1 win | 2.9 |
| Corey Kluber | 2 wins | 2.6 |
| Félix Hernández | 1 win | 2.46 |
| Jacob deGrom* | 2 wins | 2.44 |
| David Price | 1 win | 2.11 |
| Zack Greinke* | 1 win | 2.03 |
| Adam Wainwright | 1.98 | |
| Chris Sale* | 1.88 | |
| CC Sabathia | 1 win | 1.84 |
| Blake Snell* | 2 wins | 1.77 |
| Tim Lincecum | 2 wins | 1.53 |
| Shane Bieber* | 1 win | 1.32 |
The biggest impact of this quick-and-basic method of dividing things is probably CC Sabathia* getting sorted into “Modern”, because the middle of his career falls exactly on that 2010 cutoff even though his lone Award Win and the bulk of his shares come from pre-2010. His 1.84 Cy Shares would land right in between Curt Schilling and Fergie Jenkins on the “Classic” chart, instead of between guys like Tim Lincecum (2.2% of the BBWAA vote in 2022) and Adam Wainwright (likely one-and-done in 2029). I suspect that CC’s performance on the ballot next year will fall closer to Jenkins than those two anyway, so it’s a bit of a moot point, but it does give you a pretty good contextualization of how much harder votes were to come by before the rule change.
*Of course, if we’re just talking about “CC Sabathia getting hurt by arbitrary award rules”, this decision still probably pales in comparison to real life. Remember his best season, that 2008 campaign where he almost single-handedly carried the Brewers to the playoffs? That herculean effort netted him a mere .06 Win Shares, since he split the season between the AL and NL, and awards voting doesn’t allow voters to consider stats from the other league. We can’t say for certain that he would have won the Cy Young Award that year, but it doesn’t feel like a big leap. That would probably net him something like another .7 or .8 Award Shares at least. Meanwhile, the actual 2008 NL Cy Young Tim Lincecum was almost certainly the biggest beneficiary; that would probably only lose something like .3 to .4 Award Shares. That goes at least a little way to explaining why their Award Share totals might “feel” off from their actual careers and reputations.
It’s actually kind of convenient for us how neatly this split between the two eras goes, outside of Sabathia.* The pitchers most affected outside of CC are probably Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke, and neither of them seem like they’ll need much help getting in. After them… I guess Jon Lester and John Lackey each missed out on maybe two seasons of down-ballot votes? But neither of them is sitting on the Hall borderline right now either, so it feels lower priority.
*I’m mostly focusing on the most recent eras because that’s when the election rate of starting pitchers totally dried up, but it also helps that it’s so much cleaner than the “Early” and “Classic” era split. Tommy John, Luis Tiant, and Mickey Lolich all fall into the “1970-2009” Era by their career midpoints, but all had good seasons lost to the limited pre-1970 voting system (I noted last time that using MVP shares prior to 1970 honestly makes more sense for pitchers, since the Cy Young ballots in those days were just “pick the best” with no runners-up, and that’s quite a few extra wrinkles to handle here). Tiant’s 1968 might be the most significant: he led the AL with a 1.60 ERA and finished fifth in MVP voting, tied with AL WHIP leader Dave McNally (0.842). Of course, both wound up with 0 Cy Shares that season, as the award unanimously went to AL MVP Denny McLain, who famously went 31-6 while throwing 336.0 innings. All of Tiant, John, and Lolich’s Cy Young Shares look rather middling among the 1970-2009 set, but the leaderboard is tight enough that even another 0.1-0.3 points would move them up quite a few spots. On the other hand, all of them did at least get 15 years on the ballot, so it’s hard to feel like they were the most overlooked players here. Would slightly more Cy Young Shares have been enough to get them over the line? Maybe, but I’m also not positive. Tiant especially was probably just generally underappreciated by voters in his day, like Bert Blyleven but with 1500 fewer innings due to various injuries and such (and therefore, lower counting stats, meaning he would have had an even harder time winning over traditional voters than Blyleven). I’d still go to the mat for Tiant and John particularly, but I don’t know if this particular stat will be the thing to finally convince the doubters.
The “Classic” leaderboard is pretty well covered in Hall representation, but I wanted to look at snubs. What does it look like with just non-Hall of Famers? I’m only including the Classic leaderboard, because the Modern rules obviously haven’t been around for long enough to produce any electees yet; Sabathia has a good chance to be the first next year (I was a little worried that he might get overlooked, but early buzz from voters and the seeming reversal of recent voting trends seem like positive signs that he’ll make it in fairly quickly, if not first-ballot).
| Name | CYAs | AwSh | BallotYr | IP | WAR | W | K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roger Clemens | 7 | 7.66 | 2013 | 4916.2 | 139.2 | 354 | 4672 |
| Johan Santana | 2 | 2.72 | 2018 | 2025.2 | 51.7 | 139 | 1988 |
| Bret Saberhagen | 2 | 2.2 | 2007 | 2562.2 | 58.9 | 167 | 1715 |
| Ron Guidry | 1 | 1.91 | 1994 | 2392 | 47.8 | 170 | 1778 |
| Curt Schilling | 1.85 | 2013 | 3261 | 79.5 | 216 | 3116 | |
| Chris Carpenter | 1 | 1.81 | 2018 | 2219.1 | 34.2 | 144 | 1697 |
| Brandon Webb | 1 | 1.69 | 2013 | 1319.2 | 31.1 | 87 | 1065 |
| Cliff Lee | 1 | 1.58 | 2020 | 2156.2 | 43.2 | 143 | 1824 |
| Dwight Gooden | 1 | 1.56 | 2006 | 2800.2 | 53 | 194 | 2293 |
| Rick Sutcliffe | 1 | 1.56 | 2000 | 2697.2 | 33.9 | 171 | 1679 |
| Fernando Valenzuela | 1 | 1.55 | 2003 | 2930 | 41.5 | 173 | 2074 |
| Tim Lincecum | 2 | 1.53 | 2022 | 1682 | 19.5 | 110 | 1736 |
| Randy Jones | 1 | 1.47 | 1988 | 1933 | 17.7 | 100 | 735 |
| Mike Scott | 1 | 1.44 | 1997 | 2068.2 | 22.7 | 124 | 1469 |
| Denny McLain | 2 | 1.42 | 1978 | 1886 | 19.3 | 131 | 1282 |
| David Cone | 1 | 1.38 | 2009 | 2898.2 | 62.3 | 194 | 2668 |
| Orel Hershiser | 1 | 1.32 | 2006 | 3130.1 | 56 | 204 | 2014 |
| Jack McDowell | 1 | 1.27 | 2005 | 1889 | 27.8 | 127 | 1311 |
| Jimmy Key | 1.25 | 2004 | 2591.2 | 48.9 | 186 | 1538 | |
| Dave Stewart | 1.22 | 2001 | 2629.2 | 26.5 | 168 | 1741 | |
| Kevin Brown | 1.21 | 2011 | 3256.1 | 67.8 | 211 | 2397 | |
| Frank Viola | 1 | 1.2 | 2002 | 2836.1 | 47 | 176 | 1844 |
| Bartolo Colón | 1 | 1.07 | 2024 | 3461.2 | 46.2 | 247 | 2535 |
| Vida Blue | 1 | 1.06 | 1992 | 3343.1 | 45.1 | 209 | 2175 |
| Doug Drabek | 1 | 1.02 | 2004 | 2535 | 29.2 | 155 | 1594 |
Roger Clemens at the top isn’t a surprise; his issues are not from his career numbers, and have been well-covered at this point, so I’d rather focus elsewhere. Santana and Saberhagen being such strong runners-up lines up with my assessment that they’re two of the bigger pitching snubs at the moment. It also kind of lines up with something that’s kind of been weighing on me: why they feel like much stronger candidates than other 2-Cy Young candidates. Even though Saberhagen and Santana are tied with guys like Tim Lincecum and Blake Snell and Corey Kluber and Jacob deGrom* in that regard, the former two’s overall performances were much more dominant, notching higher Award Shares even in lower-point eras.
*Even Kluber and deGrom kind of separate themselves from Snell^ and Lincecum in this regard, which is something that I think I had implicitly felt before? Like, even when looking for a way to differentiate Santana and Saberhagen, I couldn’t shake the feeling that deGrom was maybe one more good season from feeling like a similar “high-peak” Hall candidate (now if only he could stay healthy enough for it). While we’re discussing the pitchers in this bunching of the rankings, it’s also interesting seeing Felix Hernandez rate so highly here, even with just 1 actual Cy Young season under his belt; I’ll be curious to see how he fares once he hits the ballot as well.
^I wrote this bit before taking a brief vacation where I hit a few ballparks that I hadn’t seen before, and I was lucky enough to be in Cincinnati for Blake Snell’s recent no-hitter! So I will also add that he definitely has the time and talent to move further up these leaderboards, and I’ll definitely be pulling for him along the way.
It’s also kind of surprising seeing that Ron Guidry is right behind them, given that he’s one of the single-Cy Young guys. Of course, that one Award being a unanimous election (1978) will get you pretty far on the leaderboards by itself*, and he had a strong runner-up finish (1985), a third place finish (1979) and a few other stray votes on top of that. Like Saberhagen and Santana, Guidry had a relatively short career and failed to reach 200 wins or 2000 strikeouts. I think he’s a little weaker than both of them, but as someone who considers those two to be classic “high peak, short career” Hall of Famers, seeing Guidry with them does feel like a compelling argument. It’s hard to feel bad about a guy who stuck around the Hall ballots for nine years, but the fact that he never topped 10% of the vote does feel a little sad. Of course, Saberhagen and Santana going one-and-done one and two decades later shows how dramatically voters’ opinions swung in a short time.
*Part of the reason I made my leaderboard cutoff “over 1 Award Share” rather than a flat 1 is that the player right on that line, Jake Peavy, never received a single Cy Young vote outside of his unanimous 2007 campaign. I was a little shocked that Peavy’s overall case fared better than some of the guys on the low-end of this leaderboard thanks to that high peak and his decent career totals from a fairly long career, but he still wouldn’t rank among my top dozen overlooked pitcher candidates.
I also have to wonder if they’ll all be helped at all by the continued downward trend of pitcher workloads. In their era, it was easy for voters to hold not even reaching 3000 innings (or barely even clearing 2000, in Santana’s case) against them; the list of starting pitchers to make the Hall without hitting that mark is already short, and even shorter if you remove players who missed time due to World War II or who were segregated to the Negro Leagues. Granted, there were still a few of them, and I think they comfortably fit within the tradition of electees like Sandy Koufax or Dizzy Dean, but it’s clear the BBWAA didn’t.
However, with the elections of Pedro Martinez and Roy Halladay, we’ve already seen our first sub-3000 inning BBWAA selections since Koufax (excusing relievers, of course). And we’re either going to see more of that going forward, or a total cessation of starting pitcher selections. Justin Verlander is the only active starter with more than 3000 innings at the moment (plus Zack Greinke, if you count him as active), Max Scherzer has over 100 innings still to go, and Clayton Kershaw is still over 250 away. Those three plus Charlie Morton are the only active pitchers even above 2000 innings (and Morton just reached the mark earlier this year, in his seventeenth season).
And that’s to say nothing of 200 wins; what once seemed to be considered a bare minimum for Hall consideration has become almost unattainable in the era of reduced workloads and larger bullpens. Of pitchers who have debuted since 2000, only eight have reached 200 wins, and only four of them (Verlander, Greinke, Scherzer, and Kershaw) are still active. After that quartet, the next closest to the mark is Gerrit Cole, who just reached 150 last week. There aren’t even a full dozen active 100-win guys on top of that. As Hall voters are forced to appreciate pitchers who didn’t compile eye-popping career totals, I can see them developing an appreciation for guys like Guidry, Saberhagen, Santana (although their selection will still be in the hands of the Veterans Committee at that point, which is an added layer of unpredictability here).
Moving on from them, the other two 2-Cy Young pitchers here, Tim Lincecum and Denny McLain, fall towards the middle of the pack in terms of Cy Young Shares despite their pair of outright wins. And outside of Award Shares, their other career totals regularly fall at the bottom of the pack. It makes sense; only Brandon Webb threw fewer innings than either of them, and he didn’t even reach the ten seasons necessary to qualify for the Hall of Fame before injuries ruined his shoulder.
It’s not hard to see why those high peaks didn’t offset the rest of their lacking resumes. I’ve already covered a little of the weirdness of Lincecum’s case; neither of his wins was unanimous, with 2009 being one of the closer votes we’ve seen, and the more “dominant” win was that 2008 one I mentioned that arguably should have gone to Sabathia. For as impressive as The Freak’s career was, it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would fill writers with rosy memories of him dominating his era once he finally hit the Hall ballot years later.
McLain is the opposite. He’s the one pitcher who found his way onto this snub leaderboard in spite of pitching mostly in the pre-1970 “only one name” ballots. His low Award Shares count from a tied 1969 Award was offset by his legendary unanimous 1968 season. Of course, he was also out of the league just over three years after that second award, finished before his age 29 season due to run-ins with gamblers, league suspensions, clashes with management, and of course injuries.* McLain appearing on the ballot prior to the ‘90s pitching crush might have saved him, had his career not been littered with those other red flags that likely scared off any potential advocates; he reached three different BBWAA ballots due to different rules of the time, and yet still never reached 1% of the vote in any of them.^
*For any younger readers not familiar with the full downfall of the one-time biggest star in baseball, I highly recommend the Society for American Baseball Research’s biography on McLain, which is an appropriately-wild read.
^This is just a small theory, but I noted in a previous installment that Mickey Lolich fared pretty well on Hall ballots, despite never winning a Cy Young and finishing below 1.00 in Cy Young Shares. Some of that was probably that he built up decent career totals, some of it might have been accounting for good seasons pre-1970, some of it was that voters were more willing to keep starters on the ballot… but I also wonder if some of his success was him picking up some of the shine that his rotation-mate McLain lost after his abrupt downfall.
Going back to the top of the Award Shares, after Santana, Saberhagen, and Guidry, we have Curt Schilling; like Clemens, there are extenuating circumstances in his case that have been well-covered over the last decade or so, and we don’t need to dwell on them yet again. I’m kind of shocked that Chris Carpenter and Brandon Webb are the players right after him on the leaderboard. As mentioned, Webb didn’t even play long enough to qualify for the Hall, and his stats pretty clearly reflect that.
Carpenter also had injuries limit his playing time pretty hard, although he racked up more innings than I remembered. I suppose part of that is the six years (and 870 innings) of league-average work he put up in Toronto before arriving in St. Louis and getting the Dave Duncan make-over that turned him into a Cy Young contender. His actual-dominant time in St. Louis only spanned nine seasons (and just under 1350 innings), three of which saw him throw less than 18 innings. He probably also falls into the same territory as Lincecum, where even at his award-winning peak, he was never so dominant that he was running away with awards, meaning no Hall voters were looking at that period as “the Chris Carpenter Era” when he actually reached the ballot (indeed, he lost the 2009 award to Lincecum himself by just six points).
After that, the Cy Shares leaderboard sees a big bunching of players: fifteen names all separated by less than 0.40 shares, or basically one decent third-place showing in a single year’s voting. It’s hard to not not group them all together, and you start to notice patterns there. But, maddeningly, none of the patterns fit perfectly. Randy Jones, Mike Scott, Rick Sutcliffe, Frank Viola, Jimmy Key, Doug Drabeck, and Jack McDowell? None of them reached 200 wins or 2000 strikeouts, and quickly fell off the ballot.
Meanwhile, Orel Hershiser reached both cutoffs and did well enough to stick around. Vida Blue was a little low in Award Shares, but did reach both milestones and got a few chances. Kevin Brown hit both, but had steroid ties and thus was ignored. Bartolo Colon is closer to Blue on Award Shares, and leads everyone here not named “Clemens” in innings, wins, and strikeouts; but he also had a steroid suspension, so no dice.
Fernando Valenzuela fell short on wins, but reached 2000 strikeouts, and reached multiple ballots. Dwight Gooden basically tied Valenzuela’s Award Shares and beat him on both wins and Ks, but presumably his legal troubles scared off voters? David Cone* matched Gooden’s wins, had even more strikeouts, and none of the legal issues… but also didn’t reach a second Hall ballot? And Dave Stewart didn’t reach either 200 wins or 2000 Ks and never won a Cy Young Award despite decent showings…yet still made it to two ballots?
*Also worth mentioning that Cone, like Sabathia, has a bit of an asterisk in his Cy Shares total: in 1992, he was traded mid-season from the Mets to the Blue Jays. Cone would make the All-Star game that season and help the Jays to their first of two straight titles, but wouldn’t get any votes from writers due to splitting his time between leagues. And he was better than several pitchers who got votes that year, but definitely not the best pitcher in the league. Moreover, it’s difficult to say how many shares he lost out on, because of the other big issue with Cy Shares… the voters, especially historically, can be kind of weird. Dennis Eckersley won the Award that year, one of several times in those years that the writers were wowed by a big Saves total. So even if I think Cy Shares may be useful in capturing certain ideas and have an appeal to certain kinds of Hall of Fame voters, I also wouldn’t hang an entire Hall case on it, or really even use it to replace any of the other stats that see use now. I think it’s mostly just another tool in the toolbox, and another lens through which to look at candidates, albeit one that can step in while Wins continue to wane.
None of the showings are great, and there’s not a ton of differentiation in Award Shares anyway, so ultimately it’s probably best to not get too lost in the numbers here. Voters wanted some level of dominance, and some level of career numbers, but they weren’t always super rigid on the specifics. I imagine things like the other players on the ballot played into things as well.
It’s interesting seeing 200 wins getting treated something like a cutoff here, albeit one with a little bit of wiggle room; as previously mentioned, it’s definitely going to become a larger issue with the present crop of major leaguers. Should voters adjust the mental standards accordingly (and I’m feeling more encouraged that they will than I have in the past), will the rest of the Hall follow suit for earlier players? Or will they still try to hold them to the standards of their era, even as we see more evidence that those standards were already moving out of reach?
Like, we didn’t just suddenly wake up in the modern game, we slowly moved there over the years, and that’s probably part of how the Hall started missing so many starting pitchers compared to what they did in the past. The changes just weren’t so overwhelming at first that you’d still get a few freaks of nature who could hit the old marks.
But slowly, everything kept moving, and eventually, you reach a point where even the occasional Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson wouldn’t have been able to have had the career they did, had they come up in 2002 or 2012, let alone 2022. The game they saw in the late 1960s or 1980s, where you could ease off on some pitches to make sure you could throw for longer, and hitters will still chase pitches trying to put them in play, just doesn’t exist anymore. Now, you have hitters trying to relentlessly foul off pitches until you slip, which means more pitches; so you counter by going all-out more and more, which means more high-stress pitches, and teams move to more relievers to keep fresh arms throwing hard…
It’s a stark difference from today, but things were already moving in this way for years. Velocity has been going up for years, as has extreme breaking stuff. Hitters had already been using things like video replay to review different pitchers and help visualize and recognize what would be thrown to them, and were already moving towards working more walks rather than relentlessly putting things in play (meaning even more pitches thrown). Teams were moving towards more and more pitchers, first with five man rotations and then relievers, both to keep arms fresh for this extreme stuff and to throw off hitters*. The number of starters reaching longevity milestones like 150 and 200 wins had been dropping for years, even as the size of the league nearly doubled from 1960 to 2000; not even twice the number of games and roster spots for pitchers could fully offset the decline (and of course, in 2024, we’re now in the longest lull between expansion teams in MLB history, so there’s no longer and countervailing factor to offset the continued decline).
*To steal a factoid Mike Petriello mentioned the other day: in 1941, Ted Williams faced 74 different pitchers over the course of a season; in 2023, Mookie Betts faced 297 different pitchers. And as you can probably imagine, even by the 1980s and 1990s, we had already gone pretty far along that path; Cal Ripken Jr. faced 151 different pitchers in his 1983 season.
We’ve more or less covered the snub leaderboard, so it might be worth going back to the overall era leaderboard and tying it all together. Santana and Saberhagen are tenth and eleventh on the leaderboard for that 1970-2009 era. Roger Clemens is the only pitcher ahead of them on the leaderboard not in the Hall of Fame, and every one of the rest was a first-ballot writer’s pick, to boot. Right after them are two more BBWAA choices in Catfish Hunter and Gaylord Perry, both just barely above 2.00 career Cy Shares, although neither of them was a first-ballot choice.
Weirdly enough, that 2.00 mark would look like a pretty hard dividing line, were it not for Saberhagen and Santana. Of the next 22 players, a grouping that takes us all the way down to 1.20 career Award Shares, only three are in Cooperstown: Fergie Jenkins (1.82), Nolan Ryan (1.48), and Dennis Eckersley (1.24, although 1.16 of that is from his closing days). That span of 22 also includes our top two relievers by Cy Young Shares, Dan Quisenberry (1.49) and Mike Marshall (1.38), which is definitely unexpected.*
*I’m mostly including the relievers here for the sake of completeness. I’ve already written four articles and over 12,000 words discussing starting pitchers, and I don’t have time to figure out what’s going on with relievers on top of that… but that’s a really weird and fascinating top two, right?
The rest of the starter inductees from this 1970-2009 era are spread out well below this point. First-ballot pick John Smoltz is at 1.19 Cy shares (with only 0.13 from his closing days), Mike Mussina is just shy of 1 at 0.92, Jack Morris is at 0.73, Bert Blyleven is at 0.45, and Phil Niekro and Don Sutton are bringing up the rear right behind him at 0.43. So just like with most stats, there really isn’t a point where a player’s Hall of Fame case completely disappears; you just might want to focus elsewhere if you’re making the case for someone like Luis Tiant (0.29) or Dave Stieb (0.29) or Mark Buehrle (0.04).
And of course, you can already see those goalposts moving in the post-2010 era of expanded-ballot voting; we already have three different pitchers over 3.00 Cy Shares (there were only nine total from 1970-2009), with Gerrit Cole a good possibility to join them soon. And there are nine 2.00+ guys, with Adam Wainwright just missing (1.98) and Chris Sale (1.88) and Blake Snell (1.77) the most likely next members of the club. Of course, the difficult thing is it’ll take time for things to settle in, before we can really start drawing direct comparisons to the earlier era.
We should hopefully have a clearer idea of where things stand before many of these names hit the ballot, but the clear hard-luck test case will of course be none other than Felix Hernandez, who is set to hit the Hall ballot this winter. It’s a shame too, given that his career seemed to be defined by bad luck, but it does feel like you could make a Hall case for him as a “high-peak, low-longevity” guy who still managed to rack up some decent career totals: 169-wins and 2524 Ks while dominating the league for a bit, despite burning out young (his last pitch in the majors came at just 33).
Will he at least stick around the ballot while we try and figure this out? I really don’t know. Seeing guys like Mark Buehrle and Tim Hudson get some appreciation is nice (even if they’ve stalled out or fallen off the ballot, respectively), but I don’t know whether that spirit will extend to him. He feels like the closest case we’ve seen to a Johan Santana- or Bret Saberhagen-type candidate since those two went one-and-done, and I really don’t know that the voters’ mentality has moved all the way back to where it was in the days of Ron Guidry.
Which is a shame, because if we think it’s important to continue recognizing the best pitchers of the day in the Hall of Fame, it will probably be necessary to expand our consideration to guys like King Felix. I mentioned way back in Part 1, the rate of pitchers going into Cooperstown has fallen from something like 33 to 40% of inducted players to just 25%, with starting pitchers specifically dropping to something like 16 to 17% of the total. And the next five or so years of elections are likely to drop that rate even lower (the VC makes things even more uncertain, but my charitable estimates were at something like 20% even with relievers, but very likely lower).
We’ll probably see a slight bump in the early 2030s as guys like Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Clayton Kershaw retire (plus whatever’s happening with Zack Greinke), but even that wave will probably at best get us to a few years of 50/50 splits, as they’ll likely be arriving on the ballot at the same time as guys like Miguel Cabrera, Joey Votto, Freddie Freeman, Paul Goldschmidt, possibly Buster Posey (if he’s not a first-ballot guy), Andrew McCutchen (I don’t think he’ll get inducted, but if David Wright and Jimmy Rollins can stick around for multiple elections…), maybe Nolan Arenado or Giancarlo Stanton or Jose Altuve, and so on. And of course, once that’s gone, we’ll be right back to hoping some slice of the Gerrit Cole/Chris Sale/Jacob deGrom cohort* are well-positioned for induction, all while the hitters’ side of things will be lining up some combination of Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, Jose Ramirez, Aaron Judge, and possibly more.
*Also, writing this out now, it’s notable that the percentage of pitchers for the last few decades has always been buoyed by closers, but I really don’t see that continuing in this span? I think we get Kenley Jansen and maybe Craig Kimbrel if he can pull it together and finish strong (although that’s not a lock). But also, a lot of the non-Mariano Rivera closers have taken ages to get inducted, so it’s possible that even if they do eventually reach the Hall, it still doesn’t happen until after four or five ballots, meaning they still might do nothing for our hitter/pitcher balance until even after this window.
I don’t know, it seems like it will be difficult to see pitchers drop below that 20 to 25% line. There’s always at least a few good names you can dream on. But 20-25% still feels pretty rough, not to mention that we’ve already been undershooting the traditional induction rates for multiple decades now. And if you think (as I do) that maybe the way to fixing this is reconsidering some traditionally below-Hall-median pitchers, then maybe Felix Hernandez is also in that next level. He didn’t quite have the longevity of a Mark Buehrle or a Tim Hudson, but he had a pretty high peak and still put up bigger totals than guys like Corey Kluber or Tim Lincecum or David Price. It seems to me like King Felix may also fall on the better side of that Hall-border bubble.
I think I’ve finally exhausted everything I wanted to cover in this series, so it may be time to bring it all home; after four whole pieces and thousands of words, what are the takeaways on starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame? The Hall of Fame starting pitcher has been in a dire place for a while, but the biggest factor limiting their induction seems to have been voters getting unnaturally fixated on big, shiny milestones and neglecting everything else. They seem to finally be turning a corner there, but it’s a slow process, and there does seem to be a bit of a gap in arguing for pitchers’ merits.
And Cy Young Shares may be something to utilize there! They are rather limited, but they may have a certain appeal to more traditional Hall voters. And surprisingly, they do seem to line up with how voters have acted historically, at least to some extent! However, the changing nature of the Award itself means we probably won’t get a cut and dry milestone to publicize (although some sort of era-corrected stat may be a possibility?), and the best way to use Cy Shares at the moment appears to be comparing pitchers within the era.
And on my end, I feel like it has changed my view on certain pitchers’ Hall cases. It’s solidified my opinion on Johan Santana and Bret Saberhagen as drastically overlooked by voters, and I really think at least some of the many voters who passed them by the first time might give them a second look if you framed the argument this way. I think I’m preemptively moving Felix Hernandez into the same tier of guys like Mark Buehrle and Tim Hudson, who are maybe below the median Hall member but worthy of support.
Plus, while there are a lot of pitchers who I was hoping would benefit from this look who maybe didn’t (David Cone, Luis Tiant, Tommy John…), I also don’t think it was a big negative for them either. And there are a whole class of older candidates who I have a greater appreciation for, like Ron Guidry, Orel Hershiser, Fernando Valenzuela, Mickey Lolich, and Vida Blue (Dwight Gooden should probably be in that set too, although his other issues cost him at the time). I don’t know that I would vote for all of them for the Hall, but I feel like I have a much better understanding of what their supporters saw. And given that we’re still fairly behind the pace in electing pitchers to Cooperstown… I don’t know that I’d mind it if any of them found their way in, either.
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