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.
