Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2026 Edition (Part 2)

Feature photo by Jeffrey Hayes. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

We’re back with the second half of this year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters breakdown, picking up right where we left off last time. If you missed that one (or need a refresher on the methodology), covering younger players up through age 31, you can catch up on it here! Today, we’re looking at the much more established players.

The first part of the starting pitcher piece should hopefully be coming out by the end of this week as well; once again, if you’d like to be notified right when it happens, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor email list below! The only emails I send on it are when a new article gets published, so it’s a minimal load on your inbox (and if you are subscribed but aren’t seeing them in your inbox, make sure to check your spam folder).

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Age 32: 48.7 WAR Median; 79.46% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Mookie Betts (75.2 Wins Above Replacement)
Manny Machado (61.7 WAR)
José Ramírez (57.6 WAR)
Bryce Harper (54.0 WAR)

To kick things off, we finally have our first players above the overall Hall of Fame median. Mookie Betts has been here for a couple of years now, and I think that he’s far enough over the line now that even if he has a sudden and sharp, Andruw Jones-style drop-off in his play, I think he still makes it into the Hall. Well… technically, I guess that kind of collapse didn’t even stop Jones himself, given that he was finally elected to Cooperstown this year, but I think this hypothetical Collapse-Betts would make it in much more quickly than Jones, possibly even first ballot. Most of it is that he’s better overall than Jones. But I also think there’s a certain level of narrative building that needs to happen once a player hits the statistical profile of a Hall of Fame, a sort of mythologizing that helps to win over the stingier voters, and that can take a little bit of time. But I think once you reach the point where even the less plugged-into-Hall-history voters start describing a guy as “Future Hall of Famer”, it’s basically the end result of that process. I think we’re about at that point with Mookie now.

In contrast, Manny Machado might need a couple more seasons, since he just passed the median career WAR for Hall of Fame position players last year. If he had that sudden collapse in 2026, I think he’d probably have to settle for an Andruw-like crawl to the Hall. But I don’t think it will take too much longer to reach the next stage of the narrative-building. He’s already starting to reach some big milestone numbers, like passing 2000 hits and 350 home runs this past season. A couple more big seasons will speed things up even more, but even a normal drop-off and a few seasons of stat-padding at the end will probably be more than enough to solidify his first-ballot status.

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).

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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.

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:

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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.