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, 2026 Edition (Part 1)

Feature photo by Jeffrey Hayes. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

Opening Day 2026 is fast approaching, but before we get there, I have one more major offseason piece to publish: my annual Future Hall of Fame Series! It feels like the last few editions have all been special occasions that beget nostalgia, like anniversaries or major milestones, but this year in contrast looks rather quaint in comparison; this entry isn’t a round number, and while one of this year’s two BBWAA inductees was once again a former inclusion in this series, it was Carlos Beltran, who already had a pretty solid case and was nearing the end of his career by the time he was featured here. There are still a few more guys on the ballot who retired too early for me to cover them here, but that number continues to drop every year. I’ll cover that when we get there, though. For now, let’s dive right in!

(Note: Once again, this piece got rather long, so I’ll be splitting it up into multiple parts, with the second half to follow next week. Be sure to check back for that! And if you’d like to be notified when that piece and the eventual pitcher pieces go live, a reminder that I also have an email list for Hot Corner Harbor that you can sign up for below!)

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The Methodology
Before we start going over the players, let me give a quick explanation for how my system works. It’s a bit of a multi-step process.

First, I find the Median Hall of Fame Pace, to help give an idea of what a sort of generalized Hall of Fame hitter’s career “could” look like. That’s easy enough, just going through Baseball-Reference’s Stathead search, looking at every Hall of Fame position player, going age by age, and looking for the exact midpoint to find the median Wins Above Replacement for that age-season.* So, to use fake numbers for an example: if there were 25 Hall of Famers, we’d be looking for the WAR total of the 13th one, right in the middle, at age 23, then 24, then 25, and so on. Simple enough. These are the Medians that we’ll be comparing active players too; if a modern player is above that total, they have more WAR than half of the Hall of Famers did at the same age.

*Side note: since part of this series is to be predictive, I limit my numbers to just AL and NL stats, since it’s the most similar to the game today. Also, I only look for the median of Hall members who were active through that age, so anyone who debuted at, say, 23 isn’t included in the age 22 pool.

Second, we find the rough Hall of Fame chances for players above that Median at every age. To do that, I look at how many players in history have attained that median WAR total by that age. Then, I just compare that to the number of Hall of Famers. So, going back to our fake numbers, if there are 12 Hall of Famers above the Age 23 median, and 8 unelected players in history were above that total too, then we have (12 Hall of Famers) divided by (12 Hall members plus 8 non-Hall, or 20 total), giving us a 60% chance of players ahead of the Hall of Fame pace at that age actually going on to Cooperstown. 

Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones Headline a Historic 2026 Hall of Fame Class, Plus What It Means Going Forward

For the third year in a row (and tenth time in the last twelve elections), the Baseball Writers Association of America has inducted multiple players into the Hall of Fame. For 2026, centerfielders Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones will be joining Veterans Committee pick Jeff Kent on the stage in Cooperstown this July. And behind them, we saw a lot of interesting developments with downballot candidates that will end up shaping the next few Hall of Fame ballots.

Full voting results per the BBWAA:

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— Ryan Thibodaux (@notmrtibbs.com) January 20, 2026 at 3:23 PM

But first, let’s start with the inductees. First, it’s actually a little bit of a shock to see the writers inducting a centerfielder, let alone a pair of them simultaneously like Beltrán and Jones. The BBWAA had only inducted eight* of them period prior to today, with no overlaps in their election years. As Jayson Stark noted on social media, the writers had only added two center fielders total to the Hall’s ranks over the last 45 years combined (between Ken Griffey Jr. in 2018 and Kirby Puckett in 2001; you have to go back to Duke Snider in 1980 to find a third). The Veterans process had done some things over the years to help correct this, but on the whole, the position was probably underrepresented in Cooperstown on the whole. 

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*There is some flexibility here, given positions can change. For example, Andre Dawson (inducted in 2010) played his early days in center, and that’s where he accumulated the majority of his value. But he did play more games in right field by the end of his career, and that’s notably where he was during his 1987 MVP season. I’m going by what MLB and the Hall itself have been using here (picture taken from the MLB Network broadcast).



And even setting all of that aside, this is certainly a solid pair of players to be inducting! We’ll start with Beltrán, who cleared the 75% line for induction with ease, landing at 84.2% on his fourth ballot. The advanced stats side of the community has historically been a big supporter of his candidacy, with career WAR totals (70.0 according to Baseball-Reference, 67.4 by Fangraphs’ version) that traditionally indicate a very likely Hall of Famer.

Which makes it funny to note that by most traditional metrics, Beltrán still had a very strong case! Over 20 seasons with the Royals, Astros, Mets, Giants, Cardinals, Yankees, and Rangers, Carlos amassed 2725 hits, 435 home runs, 565 doubles, and 312 steals, all of which are impressive totals even before you get into the deeper stuff that makes his career even more legendary.

He’s one of just five players with 400 homers and 300 steals, and the only one who was a switch hitter. Those steals came at an 86.4% success rate, the lowest caught stealing rate for any player with 300 swipes. He had a great batting eye, giving him a .350 OBP and a 119 adjusted OPS+, meaning he was basically a center fielder who could hit like a first baseman.