Editor’s Note: I will once again be splitting this longer piece up into two more manageable posts, with Part 2 coming early next week. If you’d like to get an email notification when that goes up, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list in this box below; I only use it when there’s a new baseball piece up (even my pop culture site uses a different list), so you don’t need to worry about getting too many messages.
With the two parts devoted to position players taken care of, we can now move on to the next focus in the 2025 update to the Future Hall of Fame Series: the starting pitching. And this year’s entry is especially exciting, because it represents something of a full circle moment here.
Last year’s Future Pitchers article was the most dire entry since I started this series, with almost no active pitchers projecting as “on a Hall of Fame pace” and little sign that things would be turning around in the near future. Because of that, I turned my attention towards finding out what got us into this mess, as well as rethinking how the Hall of Fame could evaluate pitchers, with the end result being a pretty in-depth series on the subject.
How the Hall arrived at this point is a multi-faceted issue, but a generalized summary (check those articles out if you’d like to know more) would be “Cooperstown voters have been inflexible at evaluating pitchers, but usually the massive changes that the role was seeing cancelled each other out to some extent, so the Hall could always find some pitchers to induct”. Something about this seemed to change in the 1990s, though: a string of pitchers with 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts hit the ballot in rapid succession, and writers seemed to respond to this by taking it as a sign that these clubs should be prerequisites for induction, rather than special distinctions for the absolute cream of the crop.
The result was actually a massive slowdown* in pitcher inductions, as they went from about a third of inductions to a quarter (with starting pitchers making up an even smaller share of that, thanks to the rise of closers as a role). Starting pitcher standards have been all around pushed higher, right as the role seems to have faced new challenges in the modern game; pitchers are debuting later, throwing more pitches at even higher effort, consequently throwing fewer innings, upping their risk of major injuries… all things that mean modern numbers are lower than ever before.
*This seems counterintuitive, but the reasons for that seemed to be: 1) this run of pitchers by itself was not actually enough to cover a full 2-to-1 hitter-pitcher ratio, and the slightly lesser pitchers that would have pulled that ratio back up got very overlooked in comparison; 2) there were so many 300/3000 guys in such short succession that they kind of started getting in each other’s (and everyone else’s) way, meaning a lot of milestone club members didn’t even go in on the first ballot and instead hung around ahead of everyone else.
This poses a problem for the Hall of Fame, given that the standards for induction are highly defined by what comes before. I suppose you can take the stance that we must stick to the old numbers even as they become infeasible in the modern game… but we have adjusted before, for example holding Liveball Era pitchers to the offense of their era, rather than wondering why they aren’t putting up the numbers of their Deadball Era counterparts. I looked at some ideas in that other series about comparing pitchers within their eras, if you’re interested in reading more.
But one other thing I highlighted towards the end of the Rethinking Hall of Fame Pitchers mini-series was Félix Hernández, who was about to join the ballot with a resume that was very of-its-time, and consequently seemed like a prime candidate to get once again overlooked. Except… it didn’t happen; King Félix got above 20% of the vote this year, well above the 5% needed to return to the ballot next year.
Hall voters have actually been adapting lately, if only to reset the artificially heightened standards from those ‘90s ballots. It’s been a slow process, but you could see it in things like Mark Buehlre hanging around rather than getting immediately bounced on his first try. But Hernández seems like a real shift; Buehrle’s case makes sense within the existing context of Hall of Fame pitchers (the bottom half of Cooperstown, but still within it’s boundaries), but Hernández’s Cooperstown credentials really only make sense taken within the context his era (the overall numbers were low, but he loomed large over his era). It seems like voters aren’t just open to reverting to the pre-‘90s pitching evaluations, they might even be willing to account for the modern game as it exists when they vote for pitchers, rather than just blindly reverting to older standards like pitching wins.
Of course, that puts the Future Hall of Fame Pitchers column in a tough position. First, since this year is one of our first big data points, it’s difficult to know if this is actually the start of a trend. It’s instead entirely possible that Hernández’s total remains mostly stagnant around 20%, no other players like him receive any support, and we just see the number of elected starting pitchers continue to fall off until MLB finds some kind of rule changes that push us back towards what starting pitching used to look like. We’re really only going to be able to tell which side we fall on in coming years.
On the other hand, if this is the start of a growing trend, that introduces another problem: it kind of invalidates this model. This is entire system is built off of comparing active players to what has come before, and whether what came before made it to Cooperstown. I don’t if the election chances are for position players are pinpoint accurate, but I definitely think they serve as useful guidelines to determine what Hall of Fame cases look like over time, a mapping of possible outcomes, and when Cooperstown cases really start to firm up.
I already don’t use Deadball Era stats when looking at pitchers here, because even modern Hall of Famers don’t look very much like Walter Johnson or Christy Mathewson (let alone even older pitchers like Old Hoss Radbourn or Tim Keefe). If this is a big break in thinking about starting pitchers, we’re going to be learning about the new standards together in real time.
To that end, I’m going to keep my format from last year. I’ll list the existing Hall of Fame Pace and stats that I’m working off of, but I’ll also discuss the top performers in each age group and try to theorize about what they might need to do to build their cases going forward, even when they’re far not on pace at the moment. This feels like a reasonable compromise; I imagine being compared to their contemporaries will be the basis of any new standard, and pointing out leaders in each age bracket (and how they compare to the age brackets around them) can be a good proxy for that.
The Methodology
This part will be a review of how I build this list; feel free to skip ahead to the next section if you’re familiar with past years’ entries, as it’s the same system this year. Essentially, what I’m doing has two parts.
-The first is building a trendline tracking what the median career for a Hall of Fame player looks like. This is pretty straightforward; I just go age by age among existing Hall of Fame starting pitchers, sort them all by their career Wins Above Replacement at that age, and then see what the WAR was for the player exact middle of the pack. Once I have that, I look to see which active players at each age fall above that median Hall pace.
(There are a few specific quirks I use, mostly for consistency in doing this. I usually only include AL and NL stats for simplicity’s sake, since I want to focus on something that can be applied to modern players, and the other major leagues were just a little too different for what I’m looking for. Also, I limit my median points to Hall of Famers who were actually in the league at that age; so for example, if only half of Hall of Famers played in the majors at age 20, I take the median of that half, not just set it at zero.)
The one big twist between position players and starting pitchers is that I limit my list to just starters from the Liveball Era (so anyone who debuted in 1920 or later). It’s unfortunate that we have to cut out so many pitchers from what’s already a fairly limited set, but as mentioned in the intro, I just don’t think there’s much we can get comparing modern pitchers to those older guys. Hitting has changed too, but the contours still look similar. It’s been a long time since anyone has been regularly crossing the 350 inning mark like we used to see at the turn of the twentieth century, let alone the 600-inning seasons of the 1800s.
-The second part is to see how players above that Median Hall of Fame Pace have done historically, to get some idea of what we might expect of the active players above their age’s median. To do this, I filter out the players who are still active or on the Hall of Fame ballots, since those results are inconclusive. Then, I look at every remaining AL or NL starting pitcher who has been above the Hall median at each age, then see what percentage of them have gone on to make the Hall of Fame. It’s pretty simple, but the only real definition of what makes a Hall of Famer is to look at who’s already in and go off of that; this method is just putting numbers to that.
(Again, for pitchers, I limit my searches to just the Liveball Era. Also, I put a small filter to ensure that we’re just comparing starting pitchers, since relievers are their own thing. I generally use 10% of games as a starter as my cutoff, which is usually small enough that I’ll catch young players who are going from the bullpen to the rotation, while any permanent moves to the bullpen get filtered out.)
If you need a more concrete example with some fake numbers, think about it like this: say we have 100 Hall of Famers, and through their age 22 season, the median career WAR is 5.0; that gives us 50 Future Hall of Famers. Then, I’d look at how many total players in history had 5.0 WAR through their age 22 season; let’s say that I wound up with those 50 above-median Hall of Famers, plus another 100 players who didn’t get elected to the Hall of Fame. That gives us (50 Hall of Famers) out of (150 total players above the age 22 median WAR), so we’d get 33.3% chances of a player above the median at that age going on to make the Hall of Fame.
There are a few weird gray areas, but a lot of those spring from the weirdness of the Hall itself. I’ve already covered the uncertainty that comes with the changing pitching landscape, for one. But there’s also things like players who have fallen off the ballot, only to make it in later; new Veterans Committee inductee Dick Allen was, for a long time, one of the “young players above the median who didn’t get in”… until he got finally inducted this year, after years of being considered a snub. Players can fall off, or they might hold up and just get overlooked by voters. That might get corrected one day, but it might not; Bobby Grich and Lou Whitaker still struggle to appear on Veterans ballots.
And conversely, Allen been replaced with a lot of players with PED ties like Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa, because obvious numbers aren’t the only thing voters consider; of course, that might also change again in the future as the electorate continues to change. Really, that’s why I try and keep it simple for the pure numbers side. “Did they go on to be deserving of Cooperstown?” can get messy, “Are they in or out?” is a simple binary. That’s also why I kind of like going down the list of players and discussing their cases individually, to discuss those external factors that can get left out.
These details feel particularly relevant to pitchers; as mentioned, pitching is going through something of a transformation, and it’s unclear what the game will look like as it happens. And all of these issues compound when it comes to Hall of Fame voting, which in many ways feels like it’s only barely starting to adjust to the five-man rotation; again, I did a whole series on that last summer, if you’d like to know more.
Still, we are starting to see signs the voters might be changing. There have been a lot of recent elections (like Roy Halladay, Mike Mussina, and CC Sabathia) which seem to indicate that the voters are finally adapting a little, and guys like Mark Buehrle are getting enough support to actually stay on the ballot. This year in particular, Félix Hernández making it not just to a second ballot, but to 20% of the vote feels like a big shift. There are still a long way to go, and a lot of guys getting overlooked, but it feels like something has started to change here.
That does make it difficult for a prediction system built entirely on precedent, though. Things may start to change slowly as new inductees make the Hall, but that will still take many years, and they won’t comprise anything close to the majority of what we’re looking at. Still, we’ll run with what we have, and see how it holds up later.
Anyway, with all of that out of the way, let’s move on to what our 2025 Hall of Fame pace looks like, and who all is closest to it (the active leader for each age group is listed, and the few starters who are actually ahead of the median for their age will be underlined as well):
The Players
Age 20: 1.0 WAR Median; 16.33% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Caden Dana (-0.4 WAR)
20-year-old starting pitchers are basically an endangered species, even with the already-threatened realm of “starting pitchers”. Caden Dana was the only Age 20 starter last season, and he’s one of just eight active pitchers period who were starting games in their age 20 season (and two of those eight are Taijuan Walker in 2013 and Clayton Kershaw in 2008, both of which feel like an eternity ago).
Age 21: 2.1 WAR Median; 11.88% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Eury Pérez (2.5 WAR)
There were only two 21-year-old starting pitchers in the majors in 2024 (again, using my “10% of games as a starter” threshold that I mentioned in the Methodology section), and somehow neither of them led the age group in WAR. Eury Pérez missed the entire season for Tommy John Surgery, and yet he built up enough of a lead as a 20-year-old that he’s still over the median pace. AJ Smith-Shawver (0.5 WAR) actually saw gametime in 2024, and is in second place.
Age 22: 4.3 WAR Median; 16.48% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Paul Skenes (5.9 WAR)
In the Hitters portion of this article, I discussed how historic Jackson Chourio and Jackson Merrill’s rookie seasons looked. Skenes’s Rookie of the Year win over them was deserved I think, but it is difficult to make it sound as historically impressive in the same way; any “best pitching” season list that stretches the entire history of the game is usually going to get overwhelmed with seasons from the Deadball Era. But within his context, Skenes’s 2024 was obviously impressive; bWAR has it as one of the top ten best age-22 pitching seasons of the Expansion era. It also got him ahead of the Hall of Fame pace, and he may even be able to stay there for a few seasons if he can remain healthy (though I’m not sure I’d take that bet on any pitcher in this day and age).
Paul Skenes will be our final “Ahead of the Hall Pace” pitchers for… most of the article, really. We only have three more of them, and you can probably guess exactly who they are. Rhett Lowder (1.9 WAR) is the runner-up for this group, and Skenes’s rotation-mate Jared Jones is right on his heels (1.8 WAR). Those three represent one-third of all Age 22 starters that pitched in 2024.
Age 23: 6.75 WAR Median; 16.50% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Jonathan Cannon (1.9 WAR)
Moving up one age bracket doesn’t quite double our pool of starters; we go from nine 22-year-olds to seventeen 23s. Jonathan Cannon’s 2024 wasn’t amazing (4.49 ERA, 4.65 FIP in 124.1 innings), but it was solid enough to lead the bunch. And since he’s a member of the White Sox, it’s not like they were overflowing with better options, so he just got to keep going. I imagine that will probably also be the case in 2025, and that guarantee of playing time can go a long way in holding his lead here. Not long enough to get him close to Hall pace, though.
Age 24: 9.8 WAR Median; 16.67% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Hunter Greene (9.1 WAR)
We had twenty-four 24 year-old starting pitchers in 2024, which is a fun coincidence. It’s also wild to see how steady the growth we’re seeing across these three age groups is, from nine to seventeen to this.
You may remember from the hitter article where I talked about how it was really hard to make it on the Hall of Fame pace if you didn’t debut until age 24 or later because you need to make up so much ground so quickly. The line for pitchers isn’t too different, really; even just restricting to Liveball Era debuts, only four Hall of Fame starters debuted at this age or later (Randy Johnson at 24, and Lefty Grove, Phil Niekro, and Carl Hubbell at 25; all of those cases are pretty extraordinary, even within the context of Cooperstown).
Given that most teams seem to be aiming to bring up their young starters in the 23 to 25 range and often ease them into the role… well, it’s not hard to see why the old Hall pace doesn’t seem to fit with the modern game anymore. Pitchers are getting called up later, they aren’t pitching as many innings (which limits the total value they can build in a given year)*, and there’s a high chance they wind up losing an entire season or more to injury on top of all that.
*Just for a quick comparison, here’s every 4-WAR pitching season from 2001-2004, here’s every one from 2011-2014, and here it is again for 2021-2024. There are fewer of them, basically every milestone above 4.0 has few members too, the overall peaks are lower… it’s basically all the same story. Wins Above Replacement is based on playing time, pitchers have less playing time because they have fewer innings, and so they have less WAR.
With all of those challenges laid out so plainly, it becomes even more impressive that Hunter Greene is as close to the mark as he is. In his third season, Greene finally had a breakout year, picking up his first All-Star selection and even getting some Cy Young votes. He’s close enough now that he could even make it above the median line next year with a decent season, especially if he stays healthy (add your standard wood-knocking here). He only needs about 3 WAR next season, which seems pretty doable.
There is some reason for concern here though, even outside the injury front: how repeatable was Greene’s breakout year? Fangraphs’ WAR liked him a lot less than B-R’s, to the tune of 3.8 Wins versus 6.2. A lot of his run prevention success (the main thing factoring into bWAR) came from doing unusually well on home run rate, batting average on balls in play, and stranding runners, and Fangarphs’ calculations tend to evaluate those all as things out of the pitcher’s control. There’s a real chance for regression here… but Greene is still a young, developing pitcher with room to grow, so he may find a way to offset that. And like I said, even if you factor in some drop-off in 2025, he’s only 3 WAR away, so there’s also a chance both things happen.
Age 25: 12.3 WAR Median; 17.43% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Spencer Strider (6.7 WAR)
Last year, I pointed out that Spencer Strider was a good illustration of the issues stacked against modern young pitchers, noting that even with great rookie and sophomore seasons, his (relatively) late start and limited innings meant there was a hard cap keeping him under the Hall median. He was still close enough that another big season could have gotten him the rest of the way here, but instead, he hurt his UCL in Atlanta’s home opener and only just started throwing again. Tanner Bibee (6.6 WAR), Andrew Abbott (6.1 WAR), and Garrett Crochet (5.9 WAR) are all also right around here.
You can try and game out what a path above the median might look like for any of them from here, but needless to say, it’s tough (and for Strider at least, nowhere near as straightforward as it looked like it could be a year ago). It also doesn’t help that Age 26 is where the median pace for starters really starts leaping forward; the next ten years will average a gain of just under 5 Wins per year, with the Age 26 increase coming in at a full 6.0 Wins. And that’s still only the third-largest gap in that stretch! Of course, like I mentioned before, standing out against your peers might be a good alternative to hitting those traditional cutoffs, so Strider probably stands above the field here with his two very strong seasons (with Crochet deserving an honorable mention thanks to last year’s breakout).
Age 26: 18.3 WAR Median; 26.39% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Jesús Luzardo (7.5 WAR)
Luzardo is just barely ahead of Alek Manoah (7.4 WAR), Cole Ragans (7.3 WAR), and George Kirby (7.1 WAR), all of whom have had higher peaks than Jesús. However, we also still haven’t found anyone who can even beat Greene’s 9.1 WAR yet, so it’s kind of difficult to feel too optimistic about any of their individual chances of catching up to the Hall pace. Manoah actually had a chance two years ago, as he was at about 8.9 WAR then. But between his 2024 UCL injury and his bizarre 2023 struggles, he’s spent the last two seasons going backwards; pitching is unforgiving and unpredictable.
Age 27: 22.1 WAR Median; 28.79% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Logan Webb (17.5 WAR)
We finally have a pitcher in the double digits, although he’s still kind of far from where he needs to be. Logan Webb is another case that’s pretty illustrative in showing the differences in the modern game. He’s been a mainstay in the Giants’ rotation for four seasons now, and all of them have been pretty solid. He’s gotten Cy Young votes the last three seasons, finishing runner-up in 2023 and sixth last year while leading the league in innings both times… and all of that adds up to just 17.5 WAR. Some of it is that B-R is less keen on his value (Fangraphs likes him a little more, although not nearly 5 WAR more), some of it is Webb’s early seasons getting delayed by COVID (and a failed PED test in the minors, which is a whole other can of worms that I got into on the Hitters article when talking about Fernando Tatis Jr.), but some of it is that pitchers just don’t throw as many innings as they used to, so they don’t build up quite as much value. If nothing else, though, regularly picking up Cy Young votes and leading the league in categories feels like the kind of things that might win over a future electorate that has adjusted for the modern pitching landscape.
Also, keep in mind that we’re at the point where the Cooperstown median is rapidly rising. Webb would need a 9-Win 2025 season to catch up in one year. Coincidentally, Tarik Skubal (11.5 WAR) is the runner-up in this age group. Skubal’s historic 2024 season saw him win the AL Cy Young unanimously and take home the league’s Pitching Triple Crown, something that’s only happened a few dozen times in history. It was worth 6.4 bWAR, to give you some sense of what Webb might have to do to reach that 9-Win mark. Granted, Skubal only reached 192.0 innings, which is also pretty light historically… but that was still good for fifth in the AL. And for that matter, even if Skubal somehow repeats his 2024 season in 2025, he’d still be about 9 WAR short of his 2026 goal.
Age 28: 26.5 WAR Median; 33.93% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Sandy Alcántara (20.6 WAR)
Sandy Alcántara remains the leader of his age group, despite not throwing a single pitch in 2024. This is another case where making it above the Hall pace would have been hard but manageable before last year, but now seems all but impossible post-Tommy John surgery. Alcántara needs 5.2 WAR just to not lose ground on the rising median, on top of being nearly 6 WAR behind. You can count the post-2000 seasons where a pitcher has gone above 10 bWAR on one hand, and the most recent of those was still way back in 2009. And it’s not like the pace is going to slow down all that much in the foreseeable future.
The runner-up here is Zac Gallen (19.6 WAR), who managed to get within a win of his former teammate last season. Sandy’s 2022 Cy Young season probably gives him the edge, but it’s not like Zac is a total slouch on award voting (he finished third in 2023 and fifth in 2022). Third-place finisher Dylan Cease (15.6) is trailing both of them by a decent bit, but he also has some decent award success under his belt. A strong run into their early 30s could go a long way for any of these guys.
Continued in Part 2
That’s a fantastic breakdown of how Hall of Fame pace for pitchers is evolving with modern trends. The shift in how starting pitchers are used—fewer innings, later debuts, and increased injury risk—makes the traditional benchmarks feel outdated. Hunter Greene’s position is particularly interesting since he’s so close to the historical median despite those challenges.
ReplyDeleteThe use of pitchers has changed so dramatically over the past decade (give or take a few years) that is is almost unfair to compare them to pitchers pre 2010. It has nothing to do with their talent or athleticism, but instead the way teams have changed the usage of starting pitchers; less innings, 5 man rotations, late starts, middle relievers, and more.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you in that voters need to re-evaluate how they pick starting pitchers for entry into the HOF. Using the old comparisons don't work for this new breed of pitchers. It almost feels like that same massive change to the game as when it went from the dead ball era to the live ball era!