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

Feature photo by Ian D'Andrea. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

The second half of the Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers article (and conclusion to this year’s set of updates) is finally here! We’ll be picking up right where Part 1 left off, so you can catch up on that here if you missed it. Meanwhile, if you would like to go back and read the corresponding pieces for active position players, you can read Part 1 of that here, and Part 2 here. And as always, if you’d like to know right when these articles get published, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list here:

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As I mentioned last time, we’ll be highlighting the leader in Baseball-Reference Wins Above Replacement for each age cohort, since so few modern starters are actually ahead of the Hall of Fame pace (however, those who are ahead of the game will be italicized as well). Before we start discussing specific pitchers, though, I’ll take a moment to go over the specific challenges that we’re seeing now when it comes to predicting the future of starting pitchers in Cooperstown, and how that will influence our discussions in the rest of this piece.


The Interlude
Since I divide these articles by age group, with a range from 20 to (roughly) 40, I tend to think of age 30 as something of a dividing line. This generally works pretty neatly for hitters; you’ll get a few outliers, but guys who are 30 and under usually feel like they’re a little early for “serious” Hall discussion, while the 31-and-up guys are where I feel more comfortable speculating on actual Hall-worthiness and the specific path they might take there. And there are some more concrete details leaning this way, too. For example, the Median Hall Pace for position players really starts to cool off over the age of 30: it only contains three one-year WAR jumps that could even generously be considered “All-Star-level” (and only one of those tops 4.5 Wins). Or, if you take the median Hall of Fame Wins Above Replacement for a position player and split it into groups of “Age 30 and Below” and “31 and Up”, you usually get an almost-2:1 ratio (it shifts with new inductions, but as of this year, this balance sits at 40.0 Wins through Age 30, and 21.1 Wins for After 30).

None of that is true for Starting Pitchers, though, and it throws off a lot of these more instinctual feelings. The Overall Hall Starting Pitcher WAR Median is actually about 5 Wins higher than it is for hitters (66.8 WAR), and that total is more evenly split between the 30-And-Under and After-30 years, at a roughly 55-45 rate. Not only does the theoretical median starter have more All-Star-level seasons in their 30s, the pace actually has two different years where it jumps by over 6 Wins, topping out at a 7.2-WAR leap for the Age 33 season. That’s closer to Cy Young-level than plain-old All-Star-level.

It may seem implausible, but it probably helps to reframe it from “the median elected starting pitcher has a Cy Young-type season at age 33” to “by age 33, the median elected starting pitcher will have had three Cy Young-type seasons”. You could knock those out early and stay ahead of the pace for a while before falling back to the middle, but there are also a good number of pitchers in Cooperstown who were still having great seasons in their early 30s, allowing them to catch up to the ones who rocketed out of the gate. It’s also probably part of why the relatively-light number of young, on-pace starters feels a little less like an issue. We kind of expect them to be a little lighter on total innings and value, but a big part of making or breaking your case for Cooperstown as a hurler is staying great into your 30s, and we actually are seeing that still. Playing that sort of catch-up is still a big part of the process!

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2026 Edition (Part 1)

Feature photo by Johnmaxmena2. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

Just like last time, this article wound up getting pretty long, and will be split into two halves. If you’d like an email when Part 2 goes up, you can join the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list here:

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If you missed the first part of my annual Future Hall of Fame series focusing on the Hitters, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. I think they turned out pretty well, in part because I’m in a rhythm at this point after years of doing it. I know what to cover, what particularly stands out more than usual, the recent history of major players, what worked in the past, all of that.

In contrast, the process of predicting which starting pitchers will get into Cooperstown one day feels increasingly like a mess. I’ve bemoaned it in the past, but this year especially, it feels like multiple trends are accelerating in a bunch of different and sometimes even opposing directions, which pushes the question into incredibly unclear territory.

The core issue comes down to a simple question, “What is a Hall of Famer?” Despite its simplicity, it’s a fairly complex topic, and the easiest answer is unfortunately “a Hall of Famer is whoever voters decide to induct into Cooperstown”. You could take that in a very nebulous, vibe-based way, and decide whether you personally think each candidate “feels like a Hall of Famer”, but that has the obvious issue: that every person is going to feel their own way about that, and sometimes there just isn’t a way to bridge the gap of “I feel like he is” versus “Well, I don’t”.

If you actually want to discuss these things in a productive way, you kind of need some solid criteria to work off of, and the only real hard-and-fast standard we can go off of is “How does a candidate compare to the people who have already been inducted?” That’s part of what this series is about, really. Comparing batters from the 1800s to batters from today is difficult, but there are enough similarities there for it to work as at least some level of precedence.

Sure, strategies have changed, defense has improved, the equipment has gone from a dead ball to a livelier one (and then back and forth again a few times), home run totals have steadily risen the entire way, but the broad outlines have stayed consistent enough, and the things that have changed can at least be accounted for and normalized to one extent or another. For example, 400 home runs was once rarefied air that guaranteed induction, it became a little more common as home run totals continued to creep upwards, voters adjusted. Guys were still trying to reach base and drive in runs, though.

But that hasn’t really been the case for pitchers? Or at least, the shift hasn’t been quite as clean. We went from pitchers who threw complete games every day, to rotations, to bigger rotations, to relievers finishing off games, to bigger and bigger bullpens picking up more of the load as starting pitchers were driven from the game earlier and earlier. And the strategy for individual pitchers changed as the rosters shifted, going from “your five best arms need to pace themselves to cover every inning in a season” to “they’ll have a handful of guys to spell them at the end of games, so they can afford to exert themselves a little more at times”, to eventually “each pitcher can exert themselves as much as possible with no concern to pacing themselves, as teams will readily cycle through dozens of arms to fill an entire season”. 

Rethinking What Makes a Hall of Fame Starting Pitcher, Part 4: How Could We Use Cy Young Shares?

Okay, after three whole articles to this series, it’s time to bring it all home. In Part 1, I broke down the problem with the Hall of Fame’s recent stances on electing pitchers and why it looked like it would be getting worse. In Part 2, I looked at the problem and its sources, and began kicking around some alternative things voters might consider looking at. In Part 3, I proposed Cy Young Shares as a solution, and went through their history and issues; they won’t be able to serve as a straight milestone number in the way that a stat like Wins or Strikeouts does. However! They are still useful at looking at pitchers in their context, and more importantly, they already seemed to have some relation to how voters are voting now.

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So there is clearly a point to looking into this more deeply, even if the hope of a single unified Award Shares milestone is gone. Having an easy-to-understand stat would be nice, for appealing to the bloc of Hall voters that skews more traditional (and besides, it’s not like Wins are going to escape being heavily affected by the context of the game, as career win totals continue to drop). And since the BBWAA seemed to consider Awards success before the crush of 300/3000 inductees, perhaps the induction of guys like Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay is evidence that they’ll start moving back in that direction. If so, it seems like the best way to look at pitchers through this lens is going to be within their respective eras.

So what do our Cy Young Shares leaderboards look like if we divide them into “1970 to 2009” and “2010 to Present”? This is just a simple division based on each pitcher’s career midpoint rather than a full era adjustments, because this is the third full article of what was originally supposed to be a single piece that I’ve been working on and completely re-writing for months and I just want to finally get it out the door, but it’s a good-enough starting point for now. (I can throw “in-depth look at fully era-adjusted Cy Young Shares” on the “potential future article” pile for the time being.)