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:
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”.
So… how do we account for that in an institution that covers the entire span of baseball history? How directly should we compare the pitchers of today to the past? Complicating the matter is that everyone agrees that there’s some level of discontinuity here. People generally didn’t expect 1900s pitchers to throw 500+ innings in a season like 1800s pitchers did; nor did they hold liveball era pitchers to the better numbers that were normal during the deadball era; and as the pitcher-friendly ‘60s ended, voters seemed to understand that the lowering of the mound and the introduction of the Designated Hitter (among other league-wide changes) would cause numbers to spike to some extent. Maybe individuals would gripe about those things, but at least at the institutional level of the Hall of Fame, voters continued to find pitchers to induct.
But at some point, that clearly changed. Fewer pitchers were getting inducted to Cooperstown than before, with starting pitchers representing an even smaller part of the total inductions (even as voters showed little problem inducting closers who threw a fraction of the innings). It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact cause for that shift, but the change seems to have become the most pronounced in the 1990s. That corresponded to a wave of pitchers with 300 wins (or close to it) all joining the ballot at the same time, at which point voters seemed to stop considering everyone else who didn’t reach that mark.
And it wasn’t just that those other candidates were idling on the lower end of the ballot for a while and then fading away, they were mostly dropping off immediately, with little indication voters were giving them a second look. Even the ones who had actually had fairly dominant stretches on the mound or who reached more minor milestones were often going one-and-done! It also stood in stark contrast with position players, where things basically went unchanged; the Hall voters continued to induct guys without 3000 hits or 500 home runs, and where more borderline candidates could easily hang around for years.
This all wound up being a major problem, because the Pitcher Win was kind of on the way out (both in-game thanks to the rise in bullpens, and outside of it thanks to the increasing realization that there were simply better ways to assess starting pitchers). However, without that guiding light, voters seemed to increasingly turn to… nothing? I have a full series on this if you’d like to read more, but basically the fever seemed to break a little in the 2010s, when the next (and possibly final?) wave of 300 winners hit the ballot and voters seemingly remembered that they could also induct dominant pitchers who didn't reach that milestone.
However, this Post-300 Win Era of Cooperstown is still largely being written, leaving us with a lot of uncertainty on the matter. And compounding the issue even further, the league’s current trends have not just continued the changes we were seeing in the 1990s and 2000s, but accelerated. So while we’re already unsure of how voters will treat the aces of the 2010s, trying to predict even further out will probably require some degree of extrapolating those very-incomplete trends to even greater levels.
The most concrete thing we have to go off of at the moment is “BBWAA voters seem to like Félix Hernández and Cole Hamels right now, despite their resumés being on the lighter side of tradition; their early results are solid, but they’re both still several ballot cycles away from election at least”. We can guess that those feelings will transfer to some of their contemporaries, although which feelings, to which contemporaries, and to what extent are all unclear. And of course, “Will the aces of the 2020s even end up with numbers similar to Hernández and Hamels?” is basically opening an entirely new jar of Spider Tack to sort through.
So, what can we do about it here? I don’t want to give up on covering pitchers in this series entirely; I have fun writing these, and want them to remain a fairly comprehensive time capsule of their era. One thing that I’ve started doing in recent years is listing the active leader for each age bracket, rather than only listing the ones who make it above the Hall Median for each season. Given that we’ve regularly been having updates where fifteen of the twenty age ranges have no one above the pace, it gives us a little more to talk about.
But the other thing that we can do is to try and account for how the Hall itself might change. Again, we’re working on very incomplete data here, going from “comparing current players to ones already in the Hall” to “comparing current players to older players who may or may not be in the Hall by the time they’re on the ballot”, not to mention that we’ll need to be understanding the potential rationales for those players who aren’t yet inducted. That’s a lot of big “ifs” to be working around, but I’m not sure what our alternatives are.
Look, it’s possible that none of that comes to pass. Maybe in the end, the Hall electorate decides to just hold fast on the current standards, inducting only the handful of remaining guys who make the cut as-is and then just not inducting any starting pitchers again between 2034 and whatever year in the future cybernetic UCL replacements are approved and guys start pitching enough to reach 300 wins again. But if you think that starting pitchers should continue to receive representation in Cooperstown, we’re going to need to do something to account for the differences in modern pitching.
I’ll be introducing some theories on how I see Hall voting for starters developing in the back-half of the article, once we have some guys with more developed careers that we can begin to line up with guys like Hernández and Hamels. But for the first half, we’ll treat it more as a look at who’s in the lead for each age, what they’ve done so far, compare it to what’s already come before, and let ourselves dream big for what they could achieve going forward.
The Methodology
But before we get into that, let me quickly recap the system I’ll be using for all of this; if you’re already familiar with that from the older entries in the series, feel free to skip ahead.
I begin by building the Median Hall of Fame Pace to serve as a sort of generic career to compare players to. I do that by going through the list of Hall of Fame starting pitchers on Baseball-Reference’s Stathead tool and checking how that set’s career Wins Above Replacement looked in every year along the way, from age 20 to the end of their careers. At each point, I pick the one in the exact middle, just as it says in the name. Strung together year-after-year, those form the Median Pace that we’ll be using. 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. That pace is also what we’ll be comparing the active players to.
Just like with the Hitters, I limit the search to AL and NL stats to try and keep things a little more consistent with the modern game. However, there are two additional restrictions that I use here. First, I limit my data to only Liveball Era pitchers, meaning ones who started their careers in 1920 or later. As mentioned earlier, even by the 1960s and 1970s, starting pitching looked very different from the earliest days of Major League Baseball, so this seemed like a good way to remove some particularly egregious outlier numbers while maintaining a reasonably-sized sample to work with. Also, since we’re looking at starting pitching specifically, I limit all of these searches to pitchers who have started at least 10% of their games (to help catch young pitchers in the process of transitioning to the rotation); closing pitchers get their own unique process.
Once we have our Hall of Fame Pace set, the next step is to look at how starters keeping to that pace have performed in Hall voting historically. Again, I search each age group to find how many starters in the Liveball Era have outperformed the median Cooperstown member for that age, then compare that to the number of inducted players to figure out our approximate odds. 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.
I remove players who are still active, not yet Hall-eligible, or still actively on the BBWAA ballot from the set, to try and keep it to just players with a relatively definitive answer to “In the Hall, yes or no?” But everything else stays in. Most of the guys in the “not in” set will be guys who fell below the Hall pace due to injury or burnout, but they aren’t necessarily the only ones who count there. So do PED guys with great numbers who are being kept out for non-play reasons, or guys with normally-great numbers who just got overlooked by voters, or guys who were banned for gambling. We aren’t looking to see if these players will end up with Cooperstown-worthy careers, we’re just looking to see if they actually made it to Cooperstown. It’s a small distinction, but an important one.*
*Is it reasonable to, say, weigh the odds of a modern star failing a drug test today similarly to stars in the 1990s at the peak of steroids? Maybe not, but we can’t always predict what new issues will crop up in ten or fifteen years, either. And I guess it helps you keep in mind that nothing is ever guaranteed, and there’s always a small chance of something going wrong, even for the guys who seem otherwise set for easy induction.
And of course, there’s the converse to that statement. Things like the Veterans Committee can change basically any older player from a “no” to a “yes” on a moment’s notice. And definitionally, half of the guys in the Hall of Fame are going to fall short of the median anyway, so failing to hit these marks really isn’t a death sentence for a player’s chances, either. That’s going to become especially relevant as we move on to the more established cases, but I’ll cover that when we get there. In the meantime, let’s move on to the active players (all of whom will be listed under their ages from the 2025 season):
The Players
Age 20: 1.0 WAR Median; 16.33% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Didier Fuentes (-0.9 WAR)
I start the pitchers with an Age 20 number for parity, since the hitters start there too and there are some older Hall pitchers who began there. However, it’s feeling more and more anachronistic; teams had already been getting more conservative on rushing young arms to the majors for years even before the recent trend of pitching development kicked in and dropped it to virtually nothing. Only nine active starting pitchers even appeared in the majors during their age 20 season at all, and one of those nine was Taijuan Walker, whose debut was over a decade ago now. Didier Fuentes had a pretty rough 13 innings last year, but that still made him the only Age 20 starter in the bigs.
Age 21: 2.1 WAR Median; 11.88% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Trey Yesavage (0.3 WAR)
Again, there were only two pitchers in this age bracket even in the majors last year, so being the leader may not seem like a big deal. Trey Yesavage might deserve some extra credit for his stellar post-season run, though. He’s still yet to even throw in Spring Training games yet this year because the Blue Jays are being super cautious about his workload following those October innings, so it’s not clear how much value he’ll be able to add to that total this year.
Age 22: 4.3 WAR Median; 16.48% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Eury Pérez (3.9 WAR)
Another one of those nine players to debut at Age 20 is Eury Pérez from the Marlins, who threw over 90 good innings in 2023, missed all of 2024 for Tommy John surgery, then returned last year for 95 more okay innings. Another nine 22-year-old starters had innings in the majors in 2025, including runner-up Luis Morales (1.2 WAR) over in Sacramento and some strong debuts from top prospects like the Tigers’ Jackson Jobe and the Pirates’ Bubba Chandler… But none of those guys have even reached the 91.1-inning total Pérez hit three years ago.
Age 23: 6.75 WAR Median; 16.5% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Paul Skenes (13.5 WAR)
It really can’t be overstated just what a unicorn Paul Skenes is in the modern game, not just in how he dominates but in how quickly he reached that level and the extent to which he’s done it. After finishing third in the NL Cy Young in his Rookie of the Year 2024 debut, he upgraded to his first Cy Young award last year, with those two seasons giving him enough WAR to not just put him above the Hall of Fame pace, but set him up through the 2027 season. Yeah, that may not sound as impressive as some of the hitters, but given how much rarer it is for modern pitchers to even match the Hall mark, being any number of years ahead of the Hall pace at all feels even more shocking. Even if you go back a little further, he still stands out. Chris Sale through age 23 already had an All-Star selection, but was still about 4 Wins shy of Skenes; Zack Greinke was at about half of his value, and Justin Verlander was nearly 10 Wins behind at the same age. The only starters of the 2000s who had done better than Skenes at this young of an age are Clayton Kershaw and Félix Hernández, and even a bunch of other guys from that period who you think of as shooting out of the gate at a young age (like Mark Prior or Dontrelle Willis or CC Sabathia or Madison Bumgarner) actually fell short of his value. Obviously, there’s still a ton of uncertainty here going forward, but I don’t think it makes what he’s already accomplished any less impressive.
There were a full 16 starting pitchers in this age group in 2025, and the runners-up are Cade Horton (2.0 WAR) and Nolan McLean (1.8). Both got some Rookie of the Year support last year (including Horton finishing second in NL voting), but they’re also both still behind Eury Pérez in total WAR, and well behind in workload.
Age 24: 9.8 WAR Median; 16.67% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Simeon Woods Richardson (4.0 WAR)
Whatever came after Skenes was going to be a bit of a come-down, but this age in particular is looking rather thin right now. Simeon Woods Richardson has mostly been “just okay” so far. But with over 250 innings already under his belt, he has a bulk to his performance that many of his contemporaries so far do not. Of course, how much longer that lead can last (barring him taking a step forward) is an open question, as more high-ceiling guys start to settle into the starting rotation for the long term; for example, in only 14 starts and 73 innings last year, Cam Schlitter made it halfway to his total (2.0 WAR).
Age 25: 12.3 WAR Median; 17.43% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Hunter Greene (13.5 WAR)
Hunter Greene hasn’t reached the peaks that Paul Skenes has so far, but he’s been good in his own right over the last two years. And more importantly, he’s got a large number of innings so far, thanks in part to holding his own for two extra seasons at ages 22 and 23. Greene is just shy of 500 innings already, putting him nearly 50 above the next closest under-26 starter (Reid Detmers). WAR runner-up Bryan Woo (7.1) is next closest in quantity, and still trails him by a full 100 innings.
Greene will probably keep his lead here for the next few years at least, since that’s just too big a gap to close in one year. However, he’ll be missing the first half of 2026 with elbow surgery, which is still a setback. And it means that he’ll almost certainly fall below the Hall of Fame pace, since the pitcher track takes an absurd 6-Win leap at Age 26. Even if he returns in July and pitches like he didn’t just miss three months, he’s just not going to be worth that much value. 6-WAR seasons among pitchers (really, any high-WAR cutoff) are becoming increasingly rare as pitchers throw fewer and fewer innings. It’s simply hard to be worth that much with 50 or 75 or even 100 fewer innings than what guys were throwing back in the day. But the fact that the whole league has still moved in that direction seems like as good a reason as any to rethink the Hall’s standards, in my mind. It really is a reflection of the state of the game today, and I think that’s part of what the Hall of Fame is about.
Age 26: 18.3 WAR Median; 26.39% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Garrett Crochet (12.2 WAR)
That leap means that we aren’t going to be seeing any more pitchers keeping above the Hall Pace for a while. But it’s also going to be a few more years until we even get someone above Greene’s total, which kind of highlights just how surprising his quick start at a young age and relative health (prior to this year) has been in the modern game.
But while this group doesn’t have the total results yet, they certainly aren’t lacking in peak. Garrett Crochet, coming off a runner-up finish in AL Cy Young voting, leads the bunch. He’s only been a starter for two seasons (with four seasons before that split between being a reliever and a Tommy John patient), but he’s made the All-Star team both times; that’s about as good as a guy can do in the modern starting game.
Andrew Abbott (11.7 WAR) is second, although he lacks the recognition (minus his All-Star selection last year) of the next two players. How seriously you rate him probably relates to how much you think he can continue to outrun his peripherals going forward. Newly-minted Astros ace Hunter Brown rates a little behind him in Baseball-Reference’s WAR (9.6), but the difference in those peripherals gives him an edge in Fangraphs’ version (10.2 to 7.1). Also, while both made their first All-Star team in 2025, Brown seems to be largely seen as the better arm, and finished third in Cy Young voting behind Crochet while Abbott only saw down-ballot support. And Spencer Strider is fourth in bWAR at 7.8, but leads them all in fWAR 11.2. Of course, we’ll need to see how he does in 2026 now that he’s no longer rehabbing from his own Tommy John surgery, but if he can get back to his 2022-2023 peak, he’s just as formidable a candidate as anyone.
Of course, even when pitchers were still racking up stats that could put them ahead of the Hall pace, even being above the median at this age and having All-Star seasons under your belt wasn’t necessarily a strong indicator of future induction. Especially not when you compare them to position players; by this age, hitters being over their Hall pace already puts them above 50% chances at Cooperstown, over twice as likely as above-pace pitchers. There’s just so much more uncertainty on this side of the ball overall. Your best bet is probably to cast a wide net and hope one of them survives the wear and tear into a longer career.
Age 27: 22.1 WAR Median; 28.79% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Jesús Luzardo (11.3 WAR)
As you might have been able to guess from the relatively low total, Jesús Luzardo’s lead here is as much a function of quantity as quality; he’s just shy of 700 career innings, nearly 60 ahead of second place (George Kirby) and over 150 ahead of anyone else under the age of 27. The fact he’s been healthy enough to throw that much is a positive sign, and his more recent seasons have been genuinely good. But he’s going to need to improve even more to get the type of peak seasons necessary for actual Cooperstown consideration (something I’m sure Philadelphia would also love to see, given his recent major extension).
Really, a lot of guys in this age group fit that mold, “have shown promise, but need to be more consistent and build up a real peak run of seasons”: Trevor Rogers (9.6 WAR), Nick Lodolo (8.5), George Kirby (7.9), Cole Ragans (7.4)...
Age 28: 26.5 WAR Median; 33.93% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Logan Webb (21.2 WAR)
We’re at least back in the neighborhood of the Hall Pace (even if we’re still far enough away that no one here will be catching up to it this year). Logan Webb is the workhouse of the modern starting pitching class, averaging 205 innings over the last four seasons and leading the NL in innings for three years straight (with two of those three leading the majors overall). And he’s been constantly above average over that entire span too, with a 3.22 ERA that translates to about 24% better than league average; FIP likes him even more, with a 2.94 mark that’s about 34% better (probably why Fangraphs like him about 3 Wins more, too).
It hasn’t gotten him a Cy Young yet, but he’s constantly in the conversation. Maybe he can just have one year where it all lines up for him and he takes it, or maybe he’ll improve his game on his own. I feel like actually having at least one season where you can say you were the best pitcher in the league is a major part of a Hall case for modern pitchers (although maybe that’s changing too, as notable non-winner Cole Hamels just debuted at 24% of the vote on the most recent ballot). Either way, this is a level of consistency and quality that’s pretty rare today, and I think it makes him one of the favorites we’ve covered so far, this early in the process. Certainly the tops of the players who haven’t won a Cy Young yet.
But speaking of Cy Young winners, Tarik Skubal is the first runner-up here, with 17.9 WAR. He became the first pitcher to win back-to-back AL CY Awards since Pedro Martínez back in 1999-2000.* For anyone wondering how he’s still second after that, the answer is that those two seasons represent over half of his career performance at this point; Skubal trails Webb by nearly 300 innings, in large part due to missing large chunks of 2022 and 2023 with injuries. That makes this feel especially difficult to predict in so many directions. Two Cy Youngs isn’t an undeniable Hall credential, but it’s still mostly just a good start; plenty of two-time winners are on the outside of Cooperstown looking in. And while the lack of bulk (so far) isn’t great and introduces a lot of uncertainty, given that voters have started supporting high-peak guys with lower career numbers (like Félix Hernández), it certainly feels like things are moving in a direction will make a potential lack of length matter less. Obviously, you’d like Skubal to pitch a long time anyway to really maximize his chances anyway, but standards of “he needs seven or eight more good seasons” would obviously mark an improvement for his chances over “he needs eleven or twelve more good seasons”.
And while we’re talking high-peak guys, we may as well spare a mention for another recently-extended Phillie, Cristopher Sánchez. He’s not at Skubal’s level, but his last two years (including finishing second to Skenes in Cy Young voting last year) is the start of a pretty good peak, too! Still, he has even less time than Skubal by over 200 innings (thanks to not getting called up until his age-24 season back in 2021 and not even getting a half-season until 2023), so you gotta take all the uncertainty of Skubal’s case and double or even triple it. If he can make another Cy Young run this year and show last year wasn’t a one-off fluke, it would go a very long way.
*This is kind of a misleadingly-framed stat since it’s happened five times in the NL in the interim, between Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Tim Lincecum, and Randy Johnson. But getting to include that full list lets me point out that it’s still pretty good company for Skubal.
Age 29: 31.7 WAR Median; 38.78% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Zac Gallen (20.7 WAR)
Sandy Alcantara (20.7 WAR)
There are a lot of options to discuss in this group compared to the last few, but the overall vibe feels a lot worse. Those options felt like high ceilings that could still be realized, whereas a lot of the options here feel like early favorites who have fallen off track. And co-leader Sandy Alcantara might be the most notable example; the former Cy Young winner looked like a perennial ace back in 2022 and 2023, missed the next season for Tommy John Surgery, and then struggled mightily in his return last year. Was it a case of a pitcher needing a one-year tune-up to get back on track after major surgery, or is the Alcantara of old just not coming back? Not much you can do but wait and see how this year goes.
At least he has an obvious explanation that may resolve itself, though. In contrast, what’s Zac Gallen’s deal? Back before 2024, he was coming off of his first All-Star campaign and two straight years of making the top-five in Cy Young voting. 2024 itself was fine, a little less good but you could maybe chalk it up to a mid-season hamstring injury that limited his innings a little… But last year was even worse, and there wasn’t even an injury that you could point to. His ERA ballooned, his FIP wasn’t quite as dramatically bad but was still worse than any of his previous three years, his strikeouts dropped, and yet he didn’t even miss a start, nor has there been any news of offseason injuries that I’m aware of. It seems like it cost him a big free agent deal, too, as after little news all offseason, he ended up returning to Arizona, taking a one-year deal for the same amount as the qualifying offer and giving himself another chance to prove himself for next offseason. Will it work? I guess we’ll find out, but in some ways, it would be a little less concerning if there was an obvious thing to point to like “he was pitching through another hamstring problem” or something.
The rest of the honorable mentions all have similar major question marks around them, but with even less of a base to build from than Gallen and Alcantara. The strongest one here might be runner-up Ranger Suárez (17.8 WAR). The downsides in his case are obvious; he started kind of late (his first 100-inning season was his Age 25 campaign back in 2021), and he hasn’t really had that high of a peak yet. But he’s at least been reliable since locking down his spot in the rotation, and he’s even improved (making an All-Star team in 2024 and being a pretty notable snub from the team last year). It’s going to be tough to build much of a case if you aren’t the type of guy regularly getting Cy Young votes and such, but we’ll see if he can make that next step as he begins his new mega-deal with Boston.
Dylan Cease is right behind him, at 16.7 WAR. He’s thrown a lot more innings than Suárez despite breaking out around the same time, and had higher peaks too, finishing second and fourth in Cy Young voting. But he also alternates those with 4.50 ERA seasons that aren’t wowing most people. If you go by more pitching independent stats, he’s actually been relatively stable over that span, and Fangraphs’ WAR actually puts him ahead of all three of those other guys at 21.0 Wins. That may be a better sign going forward, but that total still feels a little low as-is. He’s almost certainly going to need a few unambiguously dominant seasons, the kind that don’t need that “well, if you look at the fielding-independent numbers…” disclaimer. Maybe his big deal in Toronto will help him reach those new heights, but it still feels like a long way to go.
We’ve also got guys like Pablo López (16.6 WAR) and Freddy Peralta (14.9 WAR) here. Again, there’s talent, but nobody has much of a resumé under their belt yet, and any real case is going to need several successful seasons in their 30s. That’s not actually as wild as it sounds, as pitchers are much more likely to break out later than hitters, and often a big part of the gig (especially these days) is “just survive your early years while you figure out what you’re doing”. It could happen, for any one of them. But it’s still not a great sign, and it wouldn’t be at all shocking to see all of these guys flame out pretty early, either.
Age 30: 36.7 WAR Median; 52.78% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Corbin Burnes (19.1 WAR)
We’ve got another year with a few good candidates and a LOT of question marks. Corbin Burnes is honestly one of the strongest candidates we have, with a Cy Young to his name and a bunch of other years getting votes, plus four All-Star selections. And once again, Fangraphs likes him even more than B-R (22.3 fWAR). But of course, he missed half of last year for Tommy John Surgery, and won’t return until the second half of this year. Not much we can do now but wait and see if he comes back strong or needs more time to get his groove back.
Runner-up Shane Bieber (18.5 WAR) also has a Cy Young under his belt (albeit for the shortened 2020 season) and a few other awards and honors to his name. But again, he’s thrown just 71.0 innings (including his playoff run last year) over the last two seasons thanks to Tommy John Surgery and rehab setbacks, and it looks like he’ll be starting 2026 on the IL too. We’re going to need to wait and see if his body will cooperate before we even ask about whether he can have another Cy-quality season.
Also, Shohei Ohtani falls into this age group, but I already covered his case back in the Hitters article. We don’t need to re-hash that here, this article is long enough as it is.
We’ll take a break here, with the back half of this list coming in Part 2 (hopefully) later this week. If you’d like to be notified when that goes live, a reminder that I have a mailing list that I use to send links to new articles right after I publish them here! And for anyone who’s already on the list, make sure to check your spam filters, as they sometimes get sent there. You can subscribe to that list here:
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