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    Friday, March 21, 2025

    Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2025 Edition (Part 1)

    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 FĂ©lix 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 FĂ©lix 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.

    Monday, March 17, 2025

    Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2025 Edition (Part 2)

    In an effort to make these very long articles more readable, I decided to split up this year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters update into two roughly equal halves. Part 2 will be picking up right where Part 1 left off, starting at Age 30. If you missed that first article (which includes an introduction and an explainer for the methodology as well as the under-30 players), you can go back catch up on it here.

    The next update, focusing on starting pitchers, should start going up soon. If you would like to be notified right when that goes live, you can sign up for the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list using the box below (or in the similar box at the end of the article).



    Age 30: 39.9 WAR Median; 75.00% of all players at this mark elected
    Active Players: Francisco Lindor (49.6 WAR)


    I’ve been banging the “Francisco Lindor is a Future Hall of Famer” drum for a while now; he’s made the list as a likely candidate every single year since he debuted. But last year, it felt like baseball writers who weren’t obsessed with trying to figure these things out way-too-early also started to notice. I saw a few writers before the 2024 season noting that Lindor was already in pretty historic company, the kind that tends to land you in Cooperstown, only for a number of fans on social media to push back.

    In the end, those doubters wound up with egg on their face. 2024 felt like a tipping point for him, the kind that really starts to lock-in a player’s eventual ballot narrative, and in such a big way that even the less-observant start to take notice. Lindor was never winning the MVP over Ohtani’s legendary year, but he was the clear runner-up in the NL while leading the Mets to a surprise NLCS run. It’s kind of funny that this is the thing that convinced people, given that he’s finished top 10 in the MVP voting six times in nine-and-a-half seasons (the half was his late-call-up debut, where he only played in 99 games but came in second in Rookie of the Year voting); for some reason, a lot of people just hadn’t noticed how long and how good he’s been. Anyway, he should pass all of 50 WAR, 1500 hits, and 250 home runs in early April.

    Alex Bregman is also almost here, just a hair shy of the median (39.6 WAR). A regular All-Star season could get him back over the mark for next year. We’ll see if that short-term deal for Boston drives him even higher than that, though; I imagine his main goal is to have a huge 2025 season with the Red Sox, then try the market for a longer contract next year (possibly one where half of the deal isn’t in deferred money). After Bregman is his former division rival, Corey Seager (36.8 WAR). It’s impressive that he’s actually made up ground on the Hall pace these last two years, despite missing a quarter of his potential games to injuries. He’s going to have to either keep that up or actually stay healthy for a few more years though, because it’s another two more years of 4+ WAR seasons before the Hall median starts to slow back down a little. Matt Olson (32.8 WAR) and Ketel Marte (31.2 WAR) are also both within 10 Wins of the median, although clearly neither is close enough to make all of that ground up in 2025. It’s going to have to be a multi-year catch-up plan for either of them; but on the other hand, they are both very talented and coming off some solid seasons, so I felt like I needed to at least mention them.

    Thursday, March 13, 2025

    Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2025 Edition (Part 1)

    A quick note: This year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters piece wound up being nearly 10,000 words. So, in order to break things up a little bit and make it less imposing, plus to buy me more time to work on the Pitchers piece, I’m going to be splitting it up. One half this week, one 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.



    It’s once again that time of the spring, where I update my yearly Future Hall of Fame Series and look at which active players are on pace for an eventual Cooperstown enshrinement. But before I get into the weeds, allow me to go on a brief nostalgic tangent about the series.

    We are just coming off the Baseball Writers inducting three new Hall of Famers in Billy Wagner, CC Sabathia, and Ichiro Suzuki (here’s my wrap-up on those results, if you missed them). I noted last year that Joe Mauer and Adrian BeltrĂ© marked the first two real-life Hall of Famers who had actually been covered in this series when they were active. I never got to discuss Wagner here, who retired in 2010, but Sabathia and Suzuki represent the third and fourth inductees that I’ve included in this series.*

    *Technically, Ichiro only just made it, as my initial 2013 columns only covered players under 30 (although Sabathia got a specific mention despite being 31), and I kept things to 35-and-under until 2017, which wound up being his last full season.

    It still feels notable, since it’s only the second time this has happened after writing this column for over a decade. But after thinking about it a little more… I guess this is just going to be the new normal? Like, Wagner was about to be aged off the ballot anyway, so we’re nearly out of the era of “guys who retired before I started”, and while it took a few years for me to start including the oldest players in the league and I missed some big names in that window, next year’s new candidates will be guys who last played in 2020, which was well after I started taking a more comprehensive approach.

    At this point, it’s going to be difficult for an induction class to have not have someone who made this series at some point. Andruw Jones might go in next year and he retired after 2012, but he finished behind Carlos Beltrán (who made it onto that 2017 list with Ichiro) on this year’s ballot, and I don’t see any way the former makes it in next year while the latter misses out.

    And that will be the case going forward… kind of indefinitely? Even if I just decided not to continue this series next year, the Hall will still be dealing with guys that I wrote about here for so long into the future that it’s kind of wild to think about. Like, just as an example, Manny RamĂ­rez’s final year on the BBWAA ballot is next year, 2026, and he debuted as a 21-year-old back in 1993; using that as a reference, a 21-year-old that I cover this year could conceivably be on a hypothetical 2058 ballot, a year that only registers as “sci-fi setting” to me. The timescale that the Hall of Fame works at is just difficult to fathom, sometimes.