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, 2024 Edition

Last year’s entries in the Future Hall of Fame series marked my tenth anniversary of writing the series. I remarked at the time that it felt like less time than that because Hall voting moves at such a glacial pace: you need to play for at least ten years (but almost certainly more), and then you need five years of retirement and another year of voting on top of that. Given that I started the series to look at younger players, it made sense that there weren’t many actual Hall results to compare it against; the youngest players from those early articles are still largely in their primes, for the most part!

But we actually did reach a new milestone this year: Adrian Beltre and Joe Mauer are the first players I covered in this series to actually get inducted to Cooperstown! I didn’t actually mention them until the second year of the series, since the 2013 article was focused on players who were 30 or younger. I extended that to 35-and-under the next year, which roped in those two as well as Albert Pujols and Chase Utley (among others), but left out older stars like Derek Jeter or David Ortiz. Those would have given me an easy inductee several years ago, but I didn’t extend the boundaries of my coverage to cover players older than 35 until the 2017 article (which means that I’ve also covered likely upcoming inductees Ichiro Suzuki and Carlos Beltran).

Sure, it’ll still be a while before we see a non-shoo-in player from the series inducted, let alone one who I tracked over the entire course of their career; but like I said, that’s just a big part of covering the Hall of Fame. We’ll have to take the small milestones as we hit them.

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Before we start going into this year’s numbers, let’s first take a moment to go over what this method actually is, what it tracks, and all of that other stuff. First, I used Baseball-Reference’s Stathead search feature to look at every Hall of Fame position player, ordered by (their version of) Wins Above Replacement. That makes it easy to find the median Hall of Famer, right in the middle of the pack. Then, I search for the same set by age, looking at where the median fell for all Hall of Famers through their age 20 season, then their age 21 season, and so on, all the way until we’re back to the overall median. That gives us our “Median WAR by Age” line, which we’ll be comparing the players to.

From there, we can get our approximate odds for players who are at or above the median at different ages. First, we look at those median marks for each age and the half of the Hall of Fame members who are above it. Then, I compare it to all of the eligible players who were also above that mark at that age but did not eventually get elected, and take the percentage of players who made it to the Hall out of total players above the median.

To use some fake round numbers as an example: say we had 100 Hall of Famers, and our median for the set through age 22 was 5.0 WAR. We’d have 50 Hall of Famers above 5.0 WAR. Say also that there were 100 other players, who had 5.0 WAR through their age 22 season but did not make the Hall of Fame. That would give us: (50 5.0 WAR Players in the Hall) divided by (150 total 5.0 WAR players), equaling out to roughly 33% chances of induction.

Remember, none of this is necessarily commenting on whether a player will be worthy of induction, or should be inducted; there are of course things like normal snubs above the Hall line who are not inducted, below-median players who make Cooperstown anyway, below-median players who are inducted for extenuating circumstances, “worthy” players who aren’t in for non-play reasons (e.g. steroids), players who might yet get in via the Veterans Committee, and a whole host of other caveats. Those are all interesting and important, but not really a thing that we can universally account for. All this method does is serve as an objective measuring stick to give us an unusual perspective: how do active players stack up against average Hall of Famers when they were the same age, and how did those average Hall of Famers stack up against everyone else through that age?

For additional errata, I’m grouping players by their age during the 2023 season, so the players in the Age 23 group will be in their Age 24 season in 2024. Player Age for a year is based on what their age will be on July 1st in a given season, as is the standard convention. And lastly, I’m only including American League and National League stats, because this whole system is based on comparing precedent to current players, and while the Negro Leagues results are major league stats, I’m not sure they make for a conducive yardstick given the differences in the leagues and the Hall induction methods.


Okay, all that out of the way, we’re ready to jump in to the position player results (with active pitchers to follow in the next article):