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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:
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!
However, if you remember those charts I put in Part 1, you may note that we’re seeing fewer and fewer 6- and 7-Win pitcher seasons lately, as pitcher workloads drop lower and lower. Which is kind of the other half of the squeeze we’re seeing; pitchers are debuting later and later and with more managed workloads, cutting into the numbers they can put up in the 20s and setting them behind the early Hall pace; and then when they’re in the middle of their careers, their catch-up ability is also limited by the lower ceiling for big numbers to make up that difference even further.
Back when I was doing my series breaking down the evolution of Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, one of my conclusions was that thinking about the pitchers and their seasons in the context of their era could help, with Cy Young Shares serving as a very easy and relatively straight-forward way to think about it; pitchers who stand out relative to their peers do well even across eras. And one of the more interesting results there was that Félix Hernández actually rated pretty well in that regard, which may explain his success on Hall ballots so far. If you translate the year-to-year growth in the median WAR rate into a more general “Type of Season” counter, you end up with:
Cy Young Award-level seasons (6+ WAR): 3
All-Star-level seasons (4-5.9 WAR): 4
Above-Average seasons (2-3.9 WAR): 7
That’s 14 years, accounting for about 60 WAR between them. Félix only reached about 50 WAR, but he was also playing in the late 2000s and 2010s, an era where we were already seeing lower innings counts and dips in the number of high-WAR seasons. If you just look at the accolades he won without those WAR guidelines though, his peak isn’t really that far off from the median starting pitcher in Cooperstown: he had 1 Cy Young Award plus 2 other seasons where he finished second in voting, and he had 4 additional seasons where he was an All-Star. The “above-average season” part is harder to define, he had at least a couple of those but definitely not 7; but the peak is basically all there. It’s actually an uncannily neat match.
This might be a better way to conceptualize pitchers for the rest of this article, now that we’re getting mid-career guys who actually have some awards under their belt. We’ll still be using the WAR as a guideline, but I think the accolades are going to be at least as important. Defining what makes a “good” versus “great” season for a starter in the mid-2020s is already kind of an open question with nebulous boundaries (and what would make a season “above-average, but just okay” is even less defined, not to mention the extent that voters are willing to overlook falling short on that front anyway), but it also might be worth looking each candidate’s career over and deciding for yourself how their seasons stand up to those lines.
Of course, this is also some level of hypothetical. Félix Hernández looks like a strong candidate in voting so far, but he isn’t actually in yet. Cole Hamels might help shore up that precedent, if he goes in a few years later. Even if I think the likelihoods there are pretty good, it still leaves us in a relatively fluid and poorly defined place. Two data points isn’t really that much to extrapolate from, so it’s an open question who else will follow them and really help us build up our understanding of the new standards. (In fact, some of the names we cover today may be the ones who help flesh out those guidelines, depending on how the next seven or eight years of Hall voting goes!)
That means there’s a lot that can change on short notice. Maybe voters decide that we don’t need to accommodate for the changes in the game; Hernández and Hamels see their momentum stall, and the number of pitchers getting Hall support slowly trickles to a stop as they all fail to live up to the numbers of guys who were throwing more innings. Or more fantastically, maybe we find that the more-cautious approach breaking pitchers into the league does wonders for their arms, and we see a bunch of guys having Cy Young-level peaks into their mid-to-late 30s, thereby helping cancel out how short they’re falling pre-Age 30. Perhaps not likely, but I can think of a couple guys we’ll be covering here today who have had quite a bit of success in their 30s.
Either way, Cooperstown works on a very long timescale, so a lot of this question is going to be developing over the next decade or so as we watch both how pitching evolves in the modern game, and how the newer crowd of voters responds to both that and the 2010s players who reach the ballot. With all that in mind, let’s jump back to where we were in the year-by-year breakdown:
(Editor’s Note: I’ll just be sticking to totals through the end of 2025 to remain consistent with the other pieces in this series, even though this entry accidentally slipped past Opening Day)
Age 31: 41.5 WAR Median; 55.88% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Max Fried (27.4 WAR)
We kick off the back half of this article with Max Fried; for reference, he is a little over halfway to Félix’s career value and a little under halfway to Hamels’s. That may seem underwhelming, but note that he didn’t crack the 40 inning mark until his age 25 season, and thus only reached 1000 career innings last year. Fried finished second to Sandy Alcantara back in the 2022 Cy Young race, plus a fourth-place finish last year and a fifth-place finish back in 2020. Any way you want to break it down, he’s going to need a run of good seasons and health into his 30s, probably another five seasons like his last five or six. Once again, the fact that he’s coming off such a good season is a good sign for the immediate future at least, and we’ve seen pitchers who can adjust as they age continue to put up good seasons into their 30s… but Fried definitely still has a ways to go right now. For now, he’ll at least be one to watch over the next few years’ updates, to see if he can keep extending this current peak.
The runner-up for his age is Framber Valdez at 18.9 WAR. He’s had some good seasons, but nothing as high as Fried’s peak. Fangraphs’ version of WAR likes him a little more than Baseball-Reference, enough to put him just over 20.0 for his career, but not that much above it. He’s definitely going to need to evolve beyond what he’s shown so far to have a real shot at induction.
Age 32: 45.3 WAR Median; 59.38% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Aaron Nola (35.3 WAR)
This may come as a surprise, but Aaron Nola is seventh in bWAR among active pitchers. And yeah, some of that is just going to be longevity (he’s tenth in innings in the same group), but even that seems mismatched with his reputation. For example, he still only has one season where he’s made the All-Star team, 2018, which also happened to be the only year he’s finished in the top 3 in Cy Young voting. He’s gotten stray votes in a few other years, and probably could have picked up another All-Star pick or two (maybe he missed one or two years because he started the final game before the break?). But I think at least some of his problem is going to come down to the “did he feel like a star” question; this is a very light awards shelf.
On the other hand, it does call to mind fellow Phillies starter Cole Hamels, who did quite well on his BBWAA ballot debut despite never finishing above fifth in Awards voting. Again, I think Hamels will see his momentum build in the coming years, which could be a good sign for Nola… except that Nola still has a ways to go to reach Hamels’s numbers, both in Awards (4-time All-Star, that 2008 World Series run that also saw him win the WS and NLCS MVPs) and career totals (over 30 more WAR and nearly 1000 more innings). Nola had a down-year marred by injury in 2025, and bouncing back convincingly from that in 2026 feels like a make-or-break moment. If he can’t do that, then he has no chance of walking the narrow path he has to Cooperstown. “Underrated starter who fizzled out at age 31” just isn’t going to impress Hall voters.
There are a trio of pitchers in this age cohort clustered together in Nola’s wake, although it’s a little shocking to see just how far behind him they are: Luis Castillo (26.0 WAR), Blake Snell (25.3), and Carlos Rodón (22.1). Castillo and Rodón are both 3-time All-Stars, so they have that over Nola, but neither of their awards voting results top his third-place finish. Snell, in contrast with all three, is already a two-time Cy Young Award winner. However, he only has one All-Star selection (he did not make the All-Star team in 2023 despite winning the Cy that year), and his workload has been really light on the whole (he topped out at 180.2 and 180 innings in his two Cy seasons, and hasn’t reached 130 any other year).
Actually, it’s kind of funny to note that our three runners-up form a bit of a sliding spectrum of “consistency versus peak” in how they reached their similar career values. It becomes really apparent if you chart all their seasons from best WAR to worst. You’ve got Luis Castillo, with his smooth descent:
Then you’ve got Rodón, with a wider peak, a steep fall-off to a lower plateau, then another less-steep second drop (ending in the negatives):
And then there’s Snell, with the soaring peak that immediately crashes into a flat plain:
I imagine Snell’s has the best chance of impressing BBWAA voters of the future, although all of them still have a ways to go.
Age 33: 52.5 WAR Median; 86.36% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Robbie Ray (20.7 WAR)
I’ve said it before, but sometimes you just don’t get an even division of talent across age groups. Robbie Ray leads the Age 33 bunch more or less on the strength of two really-good years and two more just-good years. He’s virtually tied in career WAR with Zac Gallen and Sandy Alcantara, who led the Age 29 group that we covered last time. Michael Wacha (20.0 WAR) could pass Ray this year, depending on who has a better season. That’s actually an impressive turnaround for Wacha, who was below replacement level from 2019 to 2021 before eventually becoming a dependable mid-rotation arm in his 30s, but it’s still a far cry from Cooperstown quality.
Age 34: 53.7 WAR Median; 82.61% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Gerrit Cole (42.6 WAR)
I feel like there’s a dividing line of some sort between the Age 33 and Age 34 groups. The guys below this point all still feel like their cases are largely prospective; even for the best of them, they definitely need a few more years to solidify their cases. But for the Age 34 and over guys, most of their Hall cases feel much more concrete? Maybe not all of them are Hall locks yet, but for the ones at the top, they seem to have their “peak seasons” largely sorted out; it’s mostly just a question of getting enough good seasons to pad out the career numbers.
Some of that is probably a function of age; if you don’t really have the kind of high-peak seasons that Cooperstown is looking for by your age 34 season, you probably aren’t going to start racking them up at that point (absent learning a knuckleball or something strange like that). But something else about the shift here is stark in a way that makes me think this might also be some kind of generational dividing line, like the guys born in that 1990-1991 window were the last starting pitchers brought up to the majors before teams’ thinking on pitching development radically shifted. And it even affects the guys who don’t quite look like Hall of Famers, too; for example, from this point, we’ll be seeing a lot of guys with 30+ WAR, even ones who look very unlikely to ever make it to the stage in Cooperstown. That stands out a little, given that Aaron Nola is the only guy we’ve seen so far to reach that career total.
So, is this split a sort of natural divide that just happens to arise around this age, and we’re going to see a bunch of the younger guys make a run to 30+ WAR in the next few years, even some of the ones that don’t end up building a Hall case? Or will we be seeing a decline in 30+ WAR guys, as the guys with more limited innings counts continue to age? I suppose we’ll find out in the coming years.
Our leader for this group is Gerrit Cole, who is interesting. He’ll be returning from Tommy John Surgery later this season, so there are of course question marks around how this year will go. But even if he doesn’t return to his previous heights, he actually looks like he has the peak seasons side covered? He won the 2023 AL Cy Young, he finished runner up two other times and top-five another three, he’s a six-time All-Star, he’s led the league in strikeouts and ERA twice each… if Félix Hernández winds up in Cooperstown, I don’t know how Cole doesn’t follow him in. Obviously, Cole’s ideal case would actually be “he ramps up normally from surgery and adds a few more good seasons, reaching 3000 strikeouts and 200 wins*” (he’s at 2251 and 153 right now, respectively), that would probably make his Hall case a slam-dunk. But even if he’s just a mid-rotation guy from here on, I don’t think he’s that far off from what Hall voters will be looking for in modern starters.
*A small digression, but if he makes it, Cole would probably be the last 200-game winner for some time. Just look at this current leaderboard; the best career total for a guy younger than Cole is Michael Wacha at just 111. The best total for a pitcher 30-and-under is Freddy Peralta at just 70.
I’ll also take a bit of time to highlight runner-up Kevin Gausman here. His sub-30.0 WAR looks weak (28.2), but I think it’s worth pointing out that he’s a case where your version of WAR makes a big difference; Fangraphs puts him nearly 10 Wins ahead of the Baseball-Reference version that I use here. The lack of a high peak is rough, but he has still had a few very good years (including a third-place finish in Cy Young voting in 2023, plus a 2021 campaign that saw him even get a few MVP votes). He was still pitching pretty well in 2025, and while I’m trying not to include 2026 stats too much for consistency reasons, I feel like I can point out that his first start of 2026 was also pretty darn good, so another peak season for him doesn’t seem totally out of the question. Also, he should cross the 2000 strikeout* line soon; maybe not a huge deal for voters, but I think it’s still notable. Really, if he has a few more good seasons up his sleeve, he’ll probably end up with some pretty solid career totals, and I’m curious to see how that will play with future Hall voters; almost everyone coming after him is likely going to be much more limited in their stat compiling, which may make him look better in comparison. The lack of a big peak still probably does him in, though.
*Another milestone digression: It’s nowhere near as endangered as the 300 Win Club, but for years, I had kind of assumed the rising prominence of strikeouts in the game would keep the 3000 K club a more manageable target for pitchers going forward. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though. There’s only one guy between 2500 and 3000 Ks right now (more on him in a second); Cole looks like a possible 3000 guy down the road, but there’s a lot of uncertainty there; and our best 30-and-under guy is Dylan Cease way back at 1231. Gausman has little chance of reaching 3000 himself (barring pitching into his 40s), but he does look like he has a solid chance to reach 2500, and even that seems like it’s becoming rarer and rarer.
Age 35: 59.9 WAR Median; 95% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Zack Wheeler (39.5 WAR)
Like with Cole in the last group, I think you can start to see the shape of a case for Zack Wheeler thanks to his high peak. He’s had two runner-up finishes in Cy Young voting, and last year probably could have given him another strong voting performance had he not ended his season under 150 innings to due a blood clot in his shoulder. He feels a little under-awarded, but I think it’s hard to deny the run he’s been on since 2020; since joining the Phillies that season, he’s been averaging a remarkable 6.7 Wins per 162 games. And given that he’s had big success in the majors at the ages of 34 and 35, I think in a lot of circumstances, you could maybe expect another peak season or two before he hangs it up.
The issues with Wheeler’s candidacy are pretty apparent, though. His overall numbers are still a little short; Wheeler’s results prior to his age 28 season (back in 2018) were more mixed, not to mention limited by injuries. And of course, while “past success in your 30s” isn’t a bad sign of “future success in your 30s” for a pitcher, thoracic outlet syndrome is a scary injury to come back from, historically even dicier than Tommy John Surgery. There’s a very real chance that Wheeler’s peak is over, and given his relatively short resumé, that’s a problem; he needs as many great seasons as he can muster. But the biggest limiting factor might just be Wheeler’s desire to play. He stated last year that he would be retiring after his contract ends in 2027, although he’s since walked that back a little (maybe because of the injury changing his perspective on the matter?). It’s a complex topic, and as much fun as it is to watch him pitch, I don’t think I can blame Wheeler if he decides to hang it up early. But it does mean we’ll just have to play things by ear for him over the next few years.
There are a few other interesting names in this age group, too. Nathan Eovaldi (24.7 WAR) is probably too far away from anything to make a real case for Cooperstown even with his postseason success as a potential X-factor, although his development into an All-Star in his 30s is still a fun story. The more interesting case is Wheeler’s runner-up, Sonny Gray (33.6 WAR). Fangraphs likes him a bit more than B-R, putting him at 38.0 Wins, and he does actually have some peak to those numbers, including finishing second and third in Cy Young voting in seasons separated by eight years. Gray has been solid but not great outside of those, though, but maybe he has a few more surprising good years in his arm. And either way, he’ll probably compile some solid career totals when it’s all said and done, too (he should hit 2000 strikeouts this year, for example).
Really, the odd way Gray’s best seasons are spaced out makes him an interesting player to discuss as a hypothetical, but not actually a great Hall candidate. People tend to prefer runs of dominance in their Hall members rather than a good pitcher sporadically having great years. But I still think it would be really funny if he pitches for a while longer and follows his “a great season every four years” pattern. Just imagine him hitting the Hall ballot in a decade with a resumé of something like “over 50 WAR, just shy of 3000 Ks, solid counting stats and accolades, and a very good five-year peak that’s somehow spread across 2015, 2019, 2023, 2027, and 2031”. That would make for a fun Hall discussion, I’m sure.
Age 36: 60.1 WAR Median; 82.61% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Chris Sale (57.3 WAR)
I think we’ve reached the point where we can describe Chris Sale as a future Hall of Famer, right? My thinking has been trending that way for a bit, but I think his resurgence in Atlanta has been good enough that even the people who don’t try and make these observations years ahead of time are starting to describe him that way too. Sale’s 2025 was less healthy than his Cy Young-winning 2024, but it was still pretty great on a rate basis, and earned him his ninth All-Star nod. Sale’s numbers are good enough at this point that you don’t even need to look at him through that “modern pitcher” lens. In fact, he’s even almost caught up to the Hall of Fame pace, and he’s only about 4 Wins behind the Hall median for position players…
However, the starting pitcher Hall median is actually over 5 WAR higher than the hitter median, with a three and a half Win jump at Age 40 just to drive home that gap. I don’t think it’ll actually make a difference for Sale’s chances in the long term. We’ve already seen several “below median” aces who are still over 60.0 career WAR cruise into Cooperstown in recent memory, including Roy Halladay and CC Sabathia. Sale’s case seems pretty similar to theirs, so I can see him also going in on the first ballot too when all is said and done. I don’t even know that he needs to hold on until any big milestones like 3000 strikeouts (although it couldn’t hurt, and he’s just a bit over 400 away). I haven’t looked into it yet, but I wonder how much of the difference in pitcher and hitter median WAR was driven by that period in the ‘90s and 2000s when the Hall just wasn’t inducting starting pitchers? And if that’s the case, would it make sense to start expecting the pitcher median to revert to the mean a little? Maybe that’s a question I can tackle next offseason.
We’ve got a pretty distant runner-up for this group in Jose Quintana (32.6 WAR). He’s not getting in, but he had a solid first few years in Chicago, and he’s been solid in the decade since even if he never really reached that magic again. It’s wild to remember that time the White Sox had him and Sale at the top of their rotation for half a decade (a period where they somehow still only averaged 75 wins).
Age 37: 61.3 WAR Median; 82.61% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Jacob deGrom (45.2 WAR)
If there’s one pitcher who would benefit from Hall voters looking less at career totals and more at relative dominance of their era, it’s probably Jacob deGrom. We’ve talked about Félix Hernández and Cole Hamels as sort of barometer for modern candidates with lower career totals than some past Hall of Famers, but deGrom is still over 1000 innings behind both of them. And yet… if you just go by value, he’s pretty darn close to Hernández! It makes sense, too, when you see how much he’s done in that limited time: he’s about 150 strikeouts away from 2000 despite only just passing the 1500 inning mark, plus he’s got an ERA that wouldn’t look out of place 100 years ago in the Deadball era, and has outdone even a lot of Hall of Fame closers* despite throwing hundreds more innings. And of course, he certainly has a “High Peak” case similar to Félix’s, with two Cy Young Awards, another third-place finish, a Rookie of the Year Award, five All-Star selections.
Will it be enough for voters? I genuinely don’t know, and I’m not sure we’ll know until he’s actually reached the ballot. Even more than Hernández or Hamels, deGrom feels like the pivot point for how our younger modern pitchers will get judged by Cooperstown going forward, and I’ll be curious to see how it eventually plays out. Even if he sticks around for a few more good seasons, his final totals still aren’t going to come close to the normal Hall case. He’s going to live and die by his rate for the most part. And since his case feels so up-in-the-air, he probably needs as many more of those good late-30s seasons as he can manage, just to add some insurance. To that end, his bounce-back 2026 was a really encouraging sign!
*And I think the comparison to closers is also interesting: at a time in the 1990s and 2000s when the Hall was letting fewer starting pitchers in than ever, they were also adding in a decent number of guys with worse overall stats… they just happened to pitch in the ninth inning and rack up saves to go with it. I’m not sure how it will come into play with regards to BBWAA voters evaluating modern pitchers and their lower-inning, higher-effort counts, but it feels like it should factor in somehow? But I’m also not sure that there will be many more closers getting into Cooperstown in the foreseeable future, either, so maybe it just cancels out.
Age 38: 61.8 WAR Median; 82.61% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Yu Darvish (33.6 WAR)
Yu Darvish has some interesting career numbers, and even some good peak years that you can point to (including two second-place finishes in Cy Young voting and five All-Star selections). I’m not sure how much more he’ll be able to add to that, though; he’s missed significant time the last two seasons, and is starting 2026 on the restricted list for family reasons. His overall numbers are probably a little light barring a late-career resurgence, so any case will have to rest on a lot of intangibles or more malleable “fame” arguments.
And to be fair, I actually think he has those! He’s probably the most prominent pitcher to come over from Japan in MLB history, and depending on how you classify Shohei Ohtani, he could hold onto that title for some time. He has over 3000 strikeouts between the US and Japan, and maybe that shouldn’t count quite as heavily as standard 3000-K Club membership, but I think it should still matter for something.* Of course, while I’ve said as much repeatedly in the past, there’s no real sign that Cooperstown voters are budging in that direction. Maybe they will by the time Darvish is on the ballot, and I imagine he’ll at least do well enough to make it the full ten years in front of BBWAA voters. But actually reaching 75% looks like it’ll be an uphill battle unless something changes.
*I’ve been meaning to write a piece contextualizing Darvish’s international career for some time, like the ones that I did in the past for José Abreu, Yuli Gurriel, and Hiroki Kuroda. Maybe I need to stop waiting for some headline to make it relevant, and just buckle down and finally write it.
Age 39: 61.8 WAR Median; 79.17% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: None
Age 40: 65.4 WAR Median; 79.17% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Max Scherzer (74.7 WAR)
Age 41: 66.7 WAR Median; 82.61% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: None
Age Overall: 66.8 WAR Median; 82.61% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Justin Verlander (82.2 WAR)
We’ll close it out with some easy ones; of course Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander will be going in on their first ballots. There’s no uncertainty there. I will once again point out that there’s a nearly 3-and-a-half Win jump in the Hall Median at age 40. It’s wild to think about how there are (at least historically) enough pitchers still putting up good seasons in their late 30s and early 40s to still be moving the median significantly. Of course, Verlander and Scherzer both had some pretty great seasons at those ages, too (including Verlander winning 2 Cy Young Awards at 36 and 39). Both of them clock in at over 15.0 Wins total from age 36 on.
Obviously, they’re extreme cases, and most pitchers won’t be able to do that well in their late 30s… but it’s clearly also not unheard of. We’ve cast a pretty wide net here, so will any of the younger guys we profiled be able to come close? Maybe the game has just become too different these days for that to continue, but I doubt that until we see some evidence otherwise. There’s always been at least a couple of guys every generation who manage it, and the guys who are already good in their mid-30s are probably the best bets to put up good numbers in their late 30s.
Some of the issue is that you can’t guarantee those guys will be the ones closest to Cooperstown. If someone like Michael Wacha or Jose Quintana, or Nathan Eovaldi goes on a run like that, they’ll just look like Charlie Morton or Rich Hill or Bartolo Colon; nice stories, notable pitchers, but still not Hall of Famers. But if it does line up right, 15.0 or more WAR from age 36 on would do a lot to transform the Hall outlook for some of the on-the-fence guys in their mid-30s, like Aaron Nola, Kevin Gausman, or Zack Wheeler. That’s probably why I won’t totally rule any of them out just yet. Maybe if their results start to seriously flag, but even then, Verlander and Scherzer have shown some ability to re-invent themselves after recent down years. Maybe that’s part of what separates the Hall guys from the borderline ones, though.
And with that, we’ve finally reached the belated end to this year’s Future Hall of Fame updates. I’m very curious to see how Hall discussions around starting pitching develop in the next few years, but no matter how rapidly it changes, it’s still going to be spread out over multiple years. That could make the next few entires in this series into interesting time capsules in this process, even if the full picture is a ways off.
Either way, if you’d like to be notified when any future articles are published, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list below. I’ll also take this conclusion to note that I have a separate mailing list for Out of Left Field as well, and you can find that here if you’re so inclined.
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