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    Tuesday, March 14, 2023

    Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2023 Edition (Tenth Anniversary, Part 2!)

    In the ten years and eleven sets of articles that I’ve been looking at Future Hall of Fame odds for starting pitchers, there’s been a clear downward trend. In my piece last year, I even talked about the decline in the number of starting pitchers who were passing the median Wins Above Replacement for their ages and speculated about the causes.

    Returning to the issue this year, things don’t look substantially better; we’re still pretty devoid of players who hit those marks, but looking at it once again, it definitely looks to me like it’s due to teams putting stricter workload limits on young pitchers. Compare things even to a decade ago: we had one pitcher in the league at all under the age of 22 last season, compared with nearly a dozen in 2012. The number of under-23 pitchers basically halved, the under-24s dropped, and so on.

    I went and picked some other years from the 1990s and 2000s, and 2022 fell under basically all of them. There did seem to be something of a ceiling here, surprising; there weren’t uniformly more 22-year-olds throwing in 1990 compared to even 2012 (when discussion of innings limits were certainly more wide-spread). If anything, there seemed to be kind of a hard limit, and the quantity from year-to-year would vary below that; I suppose at a certain point, it’s difficult to justify throwing out more young arms than that soft limit just on a talent level. But the overall number of young pitchers went down, and the innings they were being given certainly went down. Sure, innings counts are down on the whole and I’m not positive if the effect is equal across ages, but the end results is still that there are definitely fewer young pitchers racking up 100 or even 200 innings in a season.



    Will it work at reducing injuries? I suppose there’s not really a way to tell other than waiting and seeing, but I will say, going back and looking at 22 year olds who threw 150-to-200 innings in a year sure does turn up a lot of non-famous names that ring a bell, either because they were supposed to be good but never stayed healthy or who were good for a bit but suddenly fell out of the game after 8 or 9 seasons, so… I don’t know, maybe the old methods weren’t working out so great.

    Pitching in general just seems to be more in flux than hitting, even beyond just the immediate scope. But that makes it difficult to use a system like this, which is entirely based around precedent. And given that WAR is a counting stat, and young pitchers are playing less, it’s an immediate disadvantage that they basically spend their careers coming back from; it’s a big part of why “being successful in your 30s” has become basically a necessity for pitchers making it to Cooperstown (not even getting into how modern Hall voters are mostly ignoring all but the most obvious candidates). Of course, innings totals have been dropping at the top too, which might make putting up a big season and making up ground even harder too…

    I’ll do my best to work to combat all of this, listing some of the major leaders in each age group even if they aren’t especially close to the Hall median line. Take the values then as more of a guide for what they need to do to reach the Hall, like “how long do they have to keep this up” or “how good do they need to be to stay in the discussion”.

    As a reminder for how my methodology in this series works: first, I take every Hall of Fame starting player (so anyone who’s started in 10% or more of their appearances, and limited to just the post-1920 Liveball pitchers since the Deadball era was even more unrecognizable), and look at all of their career Wins Above Replacement totals* (Baseball-Reference version) at each age. Then, I take the median for each year, to form a sort of “Median Hall of Famer Pace” to follow. From there, I look at how many starting pitchers (with the same 10% limit) in history have been above the pace at each age, Hall member or not. I get the percentages for each age from just doing a simple calculation, (Number of Hall of Famers above the median pace) divided by (Total number of players above the median pace).

    *Also, for pitchers, I only use their Pitching WAR, since their value as batters hasn’t typically factored into their Hall chances even before considering the new universal DH.

    So (to make up an example with fake numbers), if there were 100 Hall of Famers, and their median WAR at age 30 was 40.0 Wins, then I’d look at how many players in history had 40.0+ WAR by the same age. Say it was 100 players total, with 50 of them being in the Hall, we’d say players with over 40.0 WAR at that age have a 50% chance of induction. Also, I group players by their listed age the previous season, so players in the age 20 group will be playing in their age 21 season in 2023.

    With that all out of the way, let’s start looking at players:

    Sunday, March 5, 2023

    Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2023 Edition (Tenth Anniversary!)

    Once again, we’re at the point in the offseason where I predict active players’ chances at making the Hall of Fame. And even more notably, this year marks the tenth anniversary of my first entry in the series, from all the way back in 2013! It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but it has.

    And I guess part of the reason it doesn’t feel that long is that the Hall of Fame kind of moves at a glacial pace. For example, the youngest stars I wrote about back in 2013? They’re entering their age 30 season this year (and they’ve posted a remarkable track record in that time, but more on that later!). In fact, very few of the players from my first article have even reached a Hall ballot, since I only covered players 30 and under in that entry.

    A number of those players have retired, sure (not all of them, though!), but it kind of serves as a real-time demonstration of how dramatically slow the Hall’s process is; you need to play for at least ten seasons (so even the 2013 thirty-year-olds likely needed a few more years to be eligible), then you need to wait five seasons after retiring, then you can finally be considered in that sixth year. I think the only names from those first articles to appear on the BBWAA ballot so far are Prince Fielder and Carl Crawford; how long has it been since you’ve thought about either of them?* You get a few more if you expand it the 2014 article, since I raised the bar to 35 that year, but on the other hand, that one also included Albert Pujols, who was of course so young that he was an All-Star as recently as last year!

    *Side note that I just had to drop somewhere: I casually glanced at Crawford’s Wikipedia page to see what he’d been doing since retirement, and it is a lot to take in. The high points include things like his son going in the first round of the draft last year, and the record label he founded signing hip-hop superstar Megan Thee Stallion. The low points include a lot of violence and getting sued by Megan over that contract. I was expecting maybe one or two small notes, not all of that. Fielder didn’t even get a post-career section on his page, and he had a cooking show!


    Anyway, with all of the sentimental stuff out of the way, let’s do a quick refresher of the method I use here. First, I take every Hall of Fame position player, and look at all of their career Wins Above Replacement totals (Baseball-Reference version) at each age. Then, I take the median for each year, to form a sort of “Median Hall of Famer Pace” to follow. From there, I look at how many players in history have been above the pace at each age, Hall member or not. I get the percentages for each age from just doing a simple calculation, (Number of Hall of Famers above the median pace) divided by (Total number of players above the median pace).

    So (to make up an example with fake numbers), if there were 100 Hall of Famers, and their median WAR at age 30 was 40.0 Wins, then I’d look at how many players in history had 40.0+ WAR by the same age. Say it was 100 players total, with 50 of them being in the Hall, we’d say players with over 40.0 WAR at that age have a 50% chance of induction. Also, I group players by their listed age the previous season, so players in the age 20 group will be playing in their age 21 season in 2023.

    Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. Otherwise, let’s jump right in:



    Age 20: 0.4 WAR Median; 23.91% of all players at this mark elected
    Active Players:
    None


    There just really weren’t that many 20-year-old position players in the league last year. Only Francisco Álvarez and Ezequiel Tovar saw any playing time at all, totalling just 14 games and 49 plate appearances between them. That might sound normal, but it’s actually a little surprising, since the low WAR total helps offset the small player pool; in fact, 2022 is the first full season (so excluding 2020) since 2017 that we haven’t had an active 20-year-old who made it to the Hall median for the age!


    Age 21: 2.0 WAR Median; 35.76% of all players at this mark elected
    Active Players:
    Julio Rodriguez (6.2 WAR)
    Wander Franco (6.1 WAR)
    Michael Harris II (5.3 WAR)


    In contrast with the Age 20 bracket, Age 21 is already packed with over-the-line players. We of course have our two reigning Rookies of the Year in Rodriguez and Harris, plus Franco, who makes it despite really only having two half-seasons under his belt so far. And even that set is only scratching the surface here.

    After them, you also have a pair of former first-round picks in Riley Greene and Corbin Carrol, who made it over halfway to 2.0 Wins in under 100 games (1.4 and 1.2, respectively), plus Gunnar Henderson (0.9) and Vaughn Grissom (0.8) just missing the halfway point despite neither hitting a major league roster until August (in fact, Henderson still maintains his Rookie status for 2023!). Given that the median bar is still fairly low for age-22 players, don’t be surprised if this age group has five or six names over the line when the next edition of the series rolls around.

    Tuesday, February 14, 2023

    Scott Rolen's Hall of Fame Resume, and the Larger Context of Third Base, Part 2

    Last time, I wrote about Scott Rolen’s Hall of Fame induction, and started moving beyond Rolen and into the wider context of his position, third base. Go back and check that out if you didn’t see it, because it’s going to be context for the rest of this piece, where I move from talking about third base and the Hall in general, to talking about specific third basemen.


    <Moving Beyond Rolen>

    The Hall has always undervalued having a mix of skills, that’s something that happens across positions. Especially players who don’t fall in the top seven or eight at their position; sure, sometimes they nail it, but not always. Shoot, that’s part of what hurt Duke Snider, who had the record for “lowest first-ballot vote to get inducted by the BBWAA” prior to Scott Rolen’s election this year; like Rolen, he’s even tenth-best at his position by bWAR!

    If there’s something stand-out about third base in this regard, a big reason why it’s especially undervalued in Hall voting, my guess is that doing a lot of different things well seems like the default way to build up an overwhelming amount of value at this position, and it leads to them being more likely to slip through the cracks.

    For instance, let’s take a look at the players roughly in the tier below Rolen. I went through and looked at the top third basemen by Baseball-Reference WAR, this time using the designations Jay Jaffe uses for JAWS so that each player will only be featured at one position (specifically, at the position where they accumulated the most value in their career).

    Using those designations, Rolen is tenth. Edgar Martinez is eleventh (again, Jaffe doesn’t have a DH designation yet, so Edgar and Molitor both count as third basemen), so we’ll ignore him. The twelfth-through-sixteenth spots for third base are: Graig Nettles, Buddy Bell, Home Run Baker, Ken Boyer, and the late Sal Bando. Of those five, only Baker is in Cooperstown, an early Veterans Committee pick (he retired in 1922, and thus got overlooked in the initial Hall shuffle). Nettles, Bell, and Bando have combined for six appearances on any Hall ballot, four of them from longtime Yankee Nettles, and all of them from the BBWAA process. None of them has been reconsidered by the VC since then.



    Boyer by himself has reached 21 appearances between the BBWAA and Veterans Committee, but even that feels misleading; he actually was dropped after five ballots because he failed to reach 5% on any of them (the voting rules were a little different back then). The BBWAA actually reinstated him five years later and he immediately started hitting the 15%-25% range, although he has yet to climb much above that since then (even in his VC appearances). It’s also worth noting that Ron Santo (speaking of overlooked third basemen) got this same special treatment following his own one-and-done BBWAA appearance. And while we’re on this subject, when Boyer hit the ballot for the first time in 1975, he was vying to become just the second third baseman elected by the BBWAA, ever. Yes, despite forty years of Hall elections up until that point.