As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think it’s usually worth it to update my Future Hall of Fame predictions for closers every single season, in the way that I do for starters or position players. However, Billy Wagner’s induction this year seemed like a good excuse to revisit the topic; Wagner marks only the ninth closer in Cooperstown, and with such a small sample to build our Hall standards, I figured it was worth checking to see if things had shifted at all.
It also helps that I think Wagner will probably be the last closer added to the Hall of Fame for at least the foreseeable future. Now that he’s off the ballot, who’s the best reliever who isn’t already elected? Finding “the best X who isn’t already in” is usually a good way to determine a candidate who might start attracting new voters and building momentum for their case.
In fact, that’s actually what happened with Wagner himself; his first big jump in Hall polling came in 2020, which just so happened to come immediately on the heels of Trevor Hoffman, Mariano Rivera, and Lee Smith all being elected between 2018 and 2019. With all of those three out of the way, Wagner gained a few favorable comps in Cooperstown (mostly Smith and Hoffman), but perhaps more importantly, there was no obvious player that would make anyone say “Why should we put Wagner in the Hall if [this guy] isn’t in?”
So with Wagner no longer eligible, who takes up the mantle of “Best Closer Who Isn’t in the Hall of Fame”? It’s not totally clear, and any uncertainty in that answer is going to split momentum in a way that wouldn’t happen if there was a single obvious choice. But just about every potential choice has an additional big asterisk standing in their way on top of that.
My personal pick for the title is Joe Nathan, who leads all eligible relievers outside of the Hall in Win Probability Added at 30.6; that total also places him fifth all-time among relief pitchers.* He’s also top ten all-time in saves with 377, tied for ninth in All-Star Games by a reliever (6), posted a 2.87 career ERA (good for a 151 ERA+, third among relievers with 900+ innings), and even picked up some Cy Young Votes.
*As a heads up, when I say “among relievers” in this article, I’m usually using a statistical cutoff of “>50% of games pitched as a reliever”.
However, Nathan also had the misfortune to hit the Hall of Fame ballot in 2022, the final year of the lingering 2013 Ballot Blockage (Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, et al). The lack of spots hit Nathan hard, and he fell just 0.7% shy of the necessary 5% of the vote to hang around. And because of the Hall rules, he won’t be eligible for the Veterans Committee to even discuss his case until 2031, after his ten years on the ballot would have been exhausted.
Of course, even when he hits that point, I’m not sure the VC will be particularly helpful to his chances. As I mentioned during this year’s Veterans vote, the process has been overloaded as of late, putting a harsh three-vote limit on ballots where you often see six or even seven deserving names. Even if Joe Nathan or another closer reached the VC ballot, I’m still not sure I’d pick any of them over the many likely position player and starting pitcher snubs they’d likely be running against for one of those coveted three spots.
So let’s drop the VC discussion and return to the more favorable BBWAA process. The only closer still on the ballot right now is Francisco Rodriguez. His two biggest advantages over Joe Nathan are that he has more saves (437 to 377) and that he hit the ballot one year later, allowing him to creep over the 5% line. In his third and most recent election, he received around 10% of the vote, which was about where Billy Wagner also was after three years on the ballot, so it’s possible he could see a similar momentum build.
Of course, there are a few big differences there. First, Wagner’s first three elections were on much more crowded ballots that were starting to open up, while K-Rod has the reverse, facing much more open ballots that will peak in the next two years before crowding up again in the back-half of his eligibility. The other issue is that, quite frankly, he’s about 90% of the player Wagner was in numbers, and with 0% of the intangibles. Billy seemed generally liked by his teammates and had fun off-field stories like learning to pitch left-handed in his youth; K-Rod often clashed with colleagues, and his biggest off-field stories were his two domestic violence arrests.
If Wagner took the full ten election cycles to make it in, I just don’t see Rodriguez picking up the 65% he still needs, even with seven more attempts. But the upcoming classes of ballot newcomers also aren’t likely to replace him with another obvious candidate either; the biggest firemen set to appear on the next few ballots are Mark Melancon, Joakim Soria, and Greg Holland.
I suppose it’s possible the Veterans Committee voters spring a surprise on us (and they’ll have plenty of chances to do so), but I think the most likely next closer to get inducted into the Hall of Fame is someone who’s active at the moment. But before we dig into just who that might be, let’s first lay out the methodology.
The Methodology
(As usual, stats are from Baseball-Reference unless noted otherwise.)
At it’s most basic, I’m using the same general approach that I use for my Hitters and Starting Pitchers versions: I go year-by-year through the existing Hall of Fame closers’ careers on Baseball-Reference’s Stathead tool and build a hypothetical “median Hall of Fame” case based on where they were at every age. Then, I look at how many players in history have been above that pace and not been inducted, to find my percentages for how many players at each age have been inducted. And finally, I go through which active players are ahead of that median Hall pace for their age. If you’d like a more detailed explanation, feel free to check the methodology sections of those other two pieces I linked.
I’m going to be a little shorter with this Methodology section though, because there are a few major Closer-specific differences here that I want to focus on. The biggest one is in a change on my end: I use Win Probability Added here, rather than Wins Above Replacement. I’ve gone over the reasons for this in the past, but as a quick summary, it’s because WAR is context neutral, which is kind of the antithesis of thinking that closers should be in the Hall of Fame. WAR will generally massively prefer a pitcher who throws five scoreless innings plus one inning with runs over a guy who throws one shutdown inning, even if that one inning closed out a win.
WPA, for those who are unfamiliar, is instead context-dependent. We can look at the chance of a team winning a game at any point in the game based on history (i.e. home teams with a 1-run lead after the first inning historically go on to win about 65% of the time), and we can look at each play that happens and see how it moves those chances. Then, we can add every play together and credit them to a player as their WPA; each out a pitcher gets increases those chances of winning, and every baserunner decreases them.
You can see why this would be favorable to closers, since the best of them come into games to close out wins for a long time; nailing down just a single one-run win can get you around .15 to .2 WPA (depending on if you’re the home or away team). And the best of them can actually compete with starters here. The top of the all-time WPA leaderboard is generally the starters with absurd numbers you might guess (Lefty Grove, Walter Johnson, and Roger Clemens are 1-2-3), but my overall median for Hall of Fame closers landed at 30.0 even, and that total actual places 46th all-time among all hurlers.
I still do set a limit to make sure I’m looking at relievers specifically, much like I do with starting pitchers (as mentioned earlier, I usually use 50% of games as relief appearances as my cutoff), but I don’t even need to add something to make sure I’m only pulling pitchers from the Liveball Era (post-1920); there just weren’t many Deadball guys who weren’t primarily starting pitchers.
The other major differences with the Closer version of this system are more based around closer as a position compared to starting pitchers or position players. And that goes double for the closers in the Hall of Fame, who are an especially odd bunch. If you remember back to the Hitters articles, you may remember that position players being above the Hall median WAR at Age 25 are already at a 50% chance to make it to Cooperstown, just based on history.
In contrast, a third of the closers in Cooperstown don’t even debut until their age 25 season or later. And that’s not even counting Dennis Eckersley, who had fewer than 20 relief appearances through his first twelve seasons and didn’t become a full-time closer until he turned 32. I was discussing last time how much later the Hall cases for starting pitchers tend to solidify in comparison to position players, since the odds for above-median starters don’t cross 50% until five years after the hitters, doing so at Age 30; well, relievers are another four years after that, finally reaching the 50-50 line at Age 34.
All of that is to say that discussing Future Cooperstown Closers is kind of a different beast. You might get some hot starts, but historically, their cases are generally made or broken by how they do in their 30s. Maybe we’ll see this start to change, now that teams seem to have better ideas of what makes pitchers better candidates for the bullpen or the rotation, and we sometimes see young players with good arms but not much of a repertoire start as relievers.
Of course, there’s also no shortage of electric young arms who started in the bullpen relatively young, and yet still fell well short of Hall standards: Neftalí Feliz, Trevor Rosenthal, Huston Street, Chad Cordero, Joakim Soria… It’s not necessarily a negative indicator of success, there are some success cases up there too (in fact, the top two career WPAs through Age 25 for relievers belong to Hall of Famer Rich Gossage and borderline case K-Rod), and even some of those non-Hall of Fame guys went on to fairly long and successful careers as firemen. But it’s also not even a guarantee that a young closer will continue to see success into their 30s (let alone the reasonably strong sign of future Cooperstown credentials that it seems to be for starting pitchers or position players).
Anyway, since we’re dealing with fewer players here than in the other two articles and the trend doesn’t even appear to be that strong until fairly late in the process, I won’t be going age group by age group. Instead, I’ll just include the Median WPA Pace for Hall of Fame Closers below as a table, alongside the Hall of Fame odds for each age group. As mentioned, the overall median to aim for is 30; if you want earlier notable benchmarks, the most interesting ones are probably approximately 15 WPA by the end of the Age 30 season, or around 20 through Age 32. That last 8.00 can come very gradually.*
*Extremely gradually, even. Hoyt Wilhelm wound up being our median case here; Wilhelm was also a knuckleballer who had the latest Major League debut of any Hall of Fame player at 29, and pitched until he was 49. Billy Wagner (29.10 WPA) is actually the median Hall closer from ages 35 to 47, but does eventually cede the title nearly a decade after his final pitch.
| Age | Hall Closer Median WPA | Induction% |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | 1.80 | 2.33% |
| 26 | 4.50 | 5.36% |
| 27 | 9.00 | 12.50% |
| 28 | 11.40 | 17.65% |
| 29 | 12.25 | 26.67% |
| 30 | 15.40 | 30.77% |
| 31 | 18.85 | 40.00% |
| 32 | 20.30 | 40.00% |
| 33 | 21.35 | 40.00% |
| 34 | 23.35 | 50.00% |
| 35 | 26.80 | 80.00% |
| 36 | 27.90 | 80.00% |
| 37 | 28.10 | 80.00% |
| 38 | 29.10 | 80.00% |
| 39 | 29.10 | 80.00% |
| Overall | 30.00 | 80.00% |
The Players
Entering the 2025 season (I’ll be cutting stats off at last year, just to maintain consistency with the position players and starting pitchers articles), there were only ten active relief pitchers who had amassed 10 or more Win Probability Added for their careers.
Kenley Jansen is our active leader in WPA at 29.0, and who I expect will wind up being our next closer in the Hall of Fame. He’s pretty darn close to that Hall median of 30; he’s been worth 1 or more Win Probability in three of his last four seasons (in a somewhat ironic moment, the one exception was 2023, which was the one where he actually made the All-Star team), and even if he falls short, I imagine he’s already close enough to the mark that voters go for him anyway.
It certainly helps that he already has the traditional closer case, with a ton of saves (447 entering the year, fourth all-time and just 31 behind Lee Smith for third place), a solid ERA, a lot of post-season success, and even an interesting backstory (he converted to closing from being a catcher in the minors; there’s even video of him catching for the Netherlands in the 2009 World Baseball Classic). Really, I think the biggest impediment to him being the next inducted closer is that there’s not really a good timeframe for how long that might take. He’s already appeared in games this year (2-for-2 in save opportunities so far), meaning even if he retires after this season, he won’t hit a ballot until 2031 at the earliest (and our only first-ballot closers are Mariano Rivera and Dennis Eckersley, so it seems reasonable to conclude Jansen would need to be on the ballot for multiple years as well).
But Jansen is also only 37, so he might even pitch for several more seasons. There’s a good chance we’re still a decade or more away from his induction, and there’s plenty of chances for Francisco Rodriguez to unexpectedly build momentum, or a surprise Veterans Committee pick in that time (possibly even K-Rod or Joe Nathan, given how far down the road we’re looking). I mostly just think Jansen’s chances of induction are really good, and no other candidates at this moment look anywhere nearly as strong.
That includes all of the guys below him on the active leaderboard. Craig Kimbrel is the other big name who might be able to beat Jansen to Cooperstown, but I have no idea what to make of his case right now. He’s currently at 440 saves, just behind Jansen, but unlike Kenley, that number isn’t likely to change in the near future. Kimbrel went unsigned during the winter, and only inked a minor league deal with the Braves about a week before the end of Spring Training. There’s no guarantee they call him up this year, and even if they do, it’s not even likely he’ll be the closer (because of another name coming up shortly, who currently holds that role).
That’s extra unfortunate for Kimbrel, because that high save total will be the main thing going for his case unless he can come back and have another good season or two. His WPA sits at a pretty low 22.7, with a cumulative -1.7 over the last six seasons combined thanks to so many meltdowns. I can’t imagine that extended sour note at the end of his career will win over many BBWAA voters, nor will his lackluster history in the postseason. Right now, the player he reminds me of the most is K-Rod (as a young closing phenom who slowly wore down over the years; they’re even separated by just 3 saves on the leaderboard), so uh… I guess wait and see how the latter’s case develops in the next few years. As I’ve said, I’m not optimistic about either of their chances at the moment, but maybe something will change before Kimbrel hits the ballot (which will be 2030*, if he doesn’t make it back to the Majors).
*This also means that, in the event that Rodríguez does start building momentum, he’s going to have an extremely similar player dropping onto his eighth ballot out of ten, coming immediately on the heels of a crowded year seven that may well have three first-ballot picks on it (Miguel Cabrera, Joey Votto, and Zack Greinke). That’s the other reason I’m skeptical about his case, right now it just seems like a lot of roadblocks showing up in his way right at a critical point for him. Greinke or Kimbrel coming back this year would ease things up there a little bit, but still not entirely.
Kimbrel’s last few seasons have been so bad that he actually isn’t in second place on the active reliver WPA leaderboard; I just skipped around because he’s a little easier to discuss, since he contrasts so neatly with Kenley. But our actual #2 at the moment is another questionably-active veteran, David Robertson, with 24.0 WPA. I have no idea why he wasn’t signed this offseason, but I have to imagine some team will still be interested in him once injuries and innings start to take their toll on bullpens. I expect he finds his way back this year.
All that said, I still don’t know that Robertson has much of a shot at Cooperstown. His WPA, while impressive, is still a little short, and he’s unlikely to get more love from traditionalists thanks to his low 177 career save total. He’s been very good in his career, just mostly as a set-up man rather than a closer. In fact, there are only eight relief pitchers with 20+ WPA who have under 200 saves; Robertson is sixth-lowest, and four of the five guys with less than him actually played before the save was even invented. It actually kind of makes him a rarity in the modern game, an all-timer of a reliever who was still somehow largely kept out of the closer role. And while I doubt he gets much support from Hall voters, it will make him something of an interesting test case to watch: how much of the Hall bloc for closers comes from Saves totals, versus general relief dominance?
Aroldis Chapman is fourth with 21.3 WPA. He finishes off something of a trio (or quartet, depending on if you want to stretch things a little). Jansen, Kimbrel, and Chapman are all in the same age group (this will be their Age 37 season), all started their MLB careers in 2010, all of them passed the 20.0 Career WPA mark and 350 saves. You can add Robertson here if you want, although he’s a little offset (he’s three years older and debuted two seasons earlier, plus his save totals as mentioned are a little lower), but the point is, this is a pretty oddly contiguous set of closers, and I kind of think that’s going to work against most of them.
It forms a fairly smooth continuum. Jansen has more Win Probability Added, more saves, a lower ERA, a lower WHIP, a higher K/BB ratio, and more innings pitched than Craig, who in turn beats Aroldis in all of those categories. Maybe it’ll work in their favor and the voters will see them all as a set of similar players who all belong in Cooperstown, but I think the more likely thing is that it’ll allow them to draw neat lines between them: why put Player A in when Player B has uniformly better stats? That’s generally how it’s seemed to have worked for most past Hall ballots.
It also doesn’t help that, while Kimbrel has at least kept close to Jansen in saves (the thing most likely to appeal to closer-friendly voters), Chapman has lagged behind them for a while now, which makes it even more of a stretch for him. He does have a few interesting comparisons that he doesn’t outright lose, but he often doesn’t win them either. For example, his 7 All-Star selections are fourth-most for a relief pitcher (and ahead of Jansen’s 4), but he’s still behind Kimbrel’s 9; or his postseasons haven’t been as bad as Kimbrel’s, although they still aren’t up to Jansen’s standards, either (not to mention that his most “famous” postseason moment was almost blowing the Cubs’ title in 2016). And of course, Chapman also holds the infamous distinction of being the first player to get suspended under MLB’s domestic violence policy back in 2016.
I guess we’ll see how Kimbrel’s case (and, again, K-Rod’s before him) goes, but that kind of just clarifies that Chapman is at least several spots down the waiting list. Maybe the voters will jump the gun and induct one of these guys “out of order” just because they’re available first, but I don’t think we can count on that happening right now, either.
That finishes off the active closers who have mostly-complete Hall cases right now. Everyone else we focus on is below 20 WPA still, meaning that our discussions will move from “how might voters react to their resumes?” to “what do they still need to do to build their resumes?”
The closest one to the 20.0 WPA mark is Josh Hader; he finished his Age 30 season at 17.3 Wins Added, meaning that he is on that rough pace I sketched out in the methodology section. For as rough as his 2024 season felt at times (especially at the start of the year), it was still worth 1.9 WPA in the end; if he can average about 2.0 WPA over the rest of his current Astros’ deal, he would be sitting just above 25.0 WPA and entering his Age 35 season.
He'd probably still need a couple more okay years at that point, but it would put him pretty close to Hall of Fame territory. Not to mention that he’d probably wind up somewhere in the mid-300s saves-wise at that point (his first save of the season was #200 for his career), which would get him into the top twenty all-time. It’s maybe a rosy view, but a string of 2.0 WPA seasons wouldn’t be too unreasonable. Hader has topped it several times before. Of course, there’s also always the chance of collapse; for instance, Kimbrel’s current struggles began in his Age 31 season. That might be an extreme case, but we’ll still just have to wait and see if Hader has it in him to adjust as his skills age. Like I said earlier, Hall of Fame Closers’ cases are basically made in their 30s.
And while we’re on the subject of closers needing success in their 30s, that serves as a useful segue into the next player on the list, Raisel Iglesias. He crossed the 15.0 WPA threshold last season, landing just above it at 15.1, but it was as part of his Age 34 season. However, it was also arguably the best year of Iglesias’s career (in a number of stats, but also Win Probability, with 4.2). He had a bit of a delayed start to his career, not debuting until he was 25 thanks to needing to defect from Cuba, but he’s built up some decent career numbers in spite of that; he even finished 2024 with 224 career saves, just moving into the top fifty all-time (and he should be able to climb quite a few more spots this year). The fact that he’s peaking late feels like a sign that he could sustain more success, even into his later 30s? It’s like I said, Hall closers are generally an odd group, and he would definitely fit right in if he could pull it off.
There’s still a lot in Raisel’s way here, though. His career is still going to be fairly short unless he pitches into his 40s. Also, he isn’t exactly building up a ton of accolades right now; he still hasn’t made an All-Star team in his career, and his only recognition of any kind is a single last-place Cy Young vote back in 2021. Even the guys with 300+ saves and two or three All-Star selections didn’t tend to make a big splash in Hall voting. Maybe that will turn around if he pitches long enough to really build up a Hall resume, but it’s still not an encouraging place to be for a 35-year-old to be, even one coming off a career year. I don’t know, he’s nearer to the mark than I expected coming into this, but that’s mostly because I hadn’t even considered him at all.
Let’s go back to some younger candidates. New Yankees closer Devin Williams is just starting his Age 30 season, and if he’s healthy, he should cross the 15.0 WPA line, putting him right on that Hall Median pace. It’s of course a long way to go from there, but it does mean that he’s more or less where he needs to be to set-up the back-half of his career, and that’s not a point many relivers can say they’ve reached. His save totals are a little low (just 68 entering the season) from all of his years setting up for Hader, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem going forward if he does end up establishing himself as a candidate.
It’s also a step up from his crosstown rival Edwin Díaz, who’s a year older and only at 11.5 WPA; maybe now that he’s a year removed from his missed 2023, he’ll pick up the pace again? And again, being below the Hall median isn’t a death sentence for your chances, half of the inductees have fit that description. It really doesn’t change the end diagnosis, that Edwin will need to have a pretty successful run of seasons in his 30s to really build a case.
Blake Treinen made it into the “10+ WPA Club”, but I’m not sure his chances are all that high. He’s only at 11.2 WPA and in his age 37 season thanks to a late start to his career, and he doesn’t even make up for it with saves (just 80) since he’s mostly been a set-up man. It’s like all the worst parts of Raisel Iglesias’s potential case mixed with all the worst parts of David Robertson’s, even if the end result still leaves him as one of the more successful modern relievers.
And finally, Jordan Romano was yet another late-bloomer in that traditional closer mold, but he had quite the run in Toronto once he figured things out back in 2021. He’s at 10.5 WPA, although he took a step backwards last year due to injury. We’ll have to see if he can turn things around in Philadelphia this year, which will be his age 32 season (early signs: not encouraging). It also doesn’t help that the team’s incumbent closer José Alvarado will keep him stuck in the set-up role for now.
There are a ton more names below that 10.0 career WPA mark, so from this point on, I’ll only highlight the youngest of players, the ones who still have a chance to make that first “15.0 WPA by Age 30” benchmark. The biggest case in this set is easily Emmanuel Clase, who was also actually the closest miss with 9.3 WPA through 2024. It’s an impressive start for someone who was getting Rookie of the Year votes back in 2021; he’s just now entering his Age 27, and already has 158 saves, three All-Star seasons, and a third-place finish in last year’s Cy Young voting. I know we aren’t really doing the “Hall of Fame Pace” thing that the other installments did, but if we were, he’d be a year ahead of pace, totally in the clear for 2025.
Of course, there are a ton of catches there. The most glaring one that springs to mind is “being above the Closer Cooperstown Pace at Age 27 still only amounts to a one-in-eight chance of induction”. The chances for position players and starting pitchers basically never drop that low at any point, and those low points are for the absolute youngest guys; by this age, the starters above the pace at this age are nearing 30%, and the hitters are double that. Are the best young closers just more prone to burning out? I’m probably not helping Cleveland fans’ concerns, given Clase’s shocking implosion in the 2024 postseason followed by immediately blowing a save the next Opening Day.
Still, that’s just a small sample, and as mentioned, even a lot of the “burnouts” in the closing world went on to productive careers, just not Hall-level ones. Honestly, the bigger roadblock for Clase’s case right now might be that he received a PED suspension back in 2020 as a minor leaguer. I alluded to this a little in the other pieces while talking about Fernando Tatis Jr. and Logan Webb, but they’ll probably have close to 20 years before they come up on a ballot (if they even wind up with serious chances in the first place).
That might end their cases on a modern ballot, but I wouldn’t be shocked if voters’ attitudes change in that time frame, especially for guys like Webb and Clase who were busted before they became really big. Of course, it’s also not at all guaranteed to happen; plus, I’m sure any forgiveness would also hinge on not getting suspended a second time, and I have no idea how you’d even begin to guess at the chances for that. So even as our clear “Best Under-30” candidate, Clase still clearly has a lot of landmines left to dodge.
There are a few other candidates of note in the under-30 group, who we can all kind of lump together. None of them is that far ahead of the others, and like I’ve been saying, closer cases aren’t made in successful 20s anyway, they’re made in successful 30s. We’ll just take a shotgun-blast approach, mentioning all of the ones who are well-established and hoping one of them can actually follow through.
Jhoan Durán is the youngest, just entering his age 27 season, and the closest to Clase in WPA at 8.4, less than a Win behind. But he’s also 100 saves behind the Cleveland closer despite being 2 months older, which kind of shows you what a unique situation Emmanuel is in. The youth and exciting stuff (he averaged 100.5 MPH on his fastball in 2004, fourth-highest in the Majors) probably combine to make him the technically runner-up here, although like I said, it’s a narrow lead on a field that’s already a collective longshot.
Ryan Helsey led the league in saves last year with 49; he has 84 in his career, to go along with 8.3 WPA. He’s also the oldest name here (he’ll be turning 31 on July 18th, which is just after the July 1st line that’s used when determining a player’s official age for the year). Félix Bautista is almost a year younger, but is also in his Age 30 season (his birthday falls on June 20th, though, just on the other side of that line). Even after missing all of last season for Tommy John surgery, he’s at 7.4 WPA and 48 saves.
We’ve also got Edwin’s little brother over in Cincinnati, Alexis Díaz. He has 75 saves and 7.8 WPA and is now entering his Age 28 season, although he has yet to pitch in 2025 due to injuries. We’ll have to hope those are just mild and don’t develop into anything worse (I have no idea how realistic an expectation that is when talking about modern pitchers, so “blind hope” is really the best that I can offer). And while we’re here talking about young firemen with stuff, we may as well also mention the Nomadic A’s closer Mason Miller; he’s one of the few arms who can match Duran’s speed, he’s just 26, and he’s had a good amount of success in his young career (3.8 WPA, 28 saves). Again, though, there are looming injury concerns here, in the form of past UCL soreness (he dodged Tommy John Surgery once already, which sounds both miraculous and ominous).
It may seem a little weird talking about them, given that most of them only have two really good seasons as a closer… but the truth is, that actually puts you a good chunk of the way to the Hall of Fame median. Take Billy Wagner, since he’s almost the median Hall of Famer. His career consisted of: one 6-WPA season (1999), four more seasons in the 3-4 WPA range, and two more 2.5 WPA seasons. The other nine years of his career were all 1.6 Wins or fewer (including a -2.6 total for his abysmal 2000 season).
Likely next-inductee Kenley Jansen has one 5.7 WPA season, two more in the 3-4 range, three more in the 2-3 range, and then a bunch of sub-2 season (although no outright negative ones), and it’s gotten him to seventh all-time among relief pitchers. Longtime saves leader Lee Smith (who falls below the Hall median) is even flatter: two 3.5 WPA seasons, another 3.1 season, two more 2.7 ones, and then a bunch of sub-2.0 ones (including a couple closer -1.0). Even Trevor Hoffman, who’s second to only Mariano Rivera in Win Probability among relievers, isn’t that far ahead of them in the grand scheme of things: 6.3 WPA in 1998, 5.5 in 1996, 4.2 in 1999, 3.6 in 2006, and four more in the 2-3 range. Everything else was under 2.0 WPA (including a -2.7 in his final year).
In that context, the younger reliever make sense: they’re here because they have two or three really good seasons, and two or three really good seasons actually gets you a lot of the way to the Hall standard. Half of the battle is having five to seven really good years, but the other half is just being useful (i.e. not a net negative in Win Probability or so unplayable that forced into involuntary retirement) while you pad your Saves total to attract voters’ attention. Keep it up for long enough, and you just might get close to that 30 WPA cutoff, too.
When you put it like that, it sounds so simple. And yet, it’s still only happened a single-digit number of times in the six-plus decades since the Save was officially invented. After giving it this deep dive, I do think this provides a good roadmap of what we can watch for over the next couple of seasons. But I don’t think I’ll need to revisit the topic again for several years, especially if the total elected population remains as stagnant as I suspect it will be.
Which, now that I’ve said it in print, means that I’ll probably have to come back in a year or two when the Veterans Committee decides to induct Dan Quisenberry or John Franco or Firpo Marberry or something. Oh well.
With that endnote, the full 2025 Future Hall of Fame Series is finally in the books. If you’d like to know when my next things goes up here, you can sign up in the box below (or in the one at the top of the page); the mailing list only gets used for new pieces. And on a similar note, if you’d like to subscribe to my non-baseball writings over at Out of Left Field (mostly music and video games), I have a separate mailing list for that which can be found here.
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