We’re back with Part 2 of the Starting Pitchers section of the Future Hall of Fame Series. We’ll once again be picking up right where Part 1 left off; if you missed that one or need to refresh your memory on the methodology, you can find it here. And for that matter, if you missed the Position Players portion of this update, you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
I’m going to try and get one more piece finished for this year’s update, hopefully 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).
Age 29: 31.7 WAR Median; 38.78% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Shane Bieber (17.7 WAR)
We have a couple of former Cy Young winners at the top of this group in Shane Bieber and Corbin Burnes (17.1 WAR). Both of them are pretty far off from Hall pace, in spite of those high peaks. Again, some of that is due to the specific quirks of bWAR, but only a bit; Fangraphs has both of them a little higher, but still only in the low 20s rather than high teens.
Since we’re at the end of the 20s, this seems like as good a place as any to talk about how the difference in quantity for modern pitchers really starts to add up. There are nearly 200 Liveball-era pitchers who have reached the 20 career WAR mark before their age 30 season, so way more than just the best of the best. Like I said earlier, part of the difference is that teams are more hesitant about calling up young arms than they used to be; there are a lot of debuts at Age 20 and 21 and even some 19s in that set of 200ish names, and 23s and later are harder to come by. But even among the pitchers who debuted at 23 (the same age that Bieber and Burnes got called up), you see a big difference. Just to give you a random mix of guys: Charles Nagy (debuted in 1990) got up to 1127.0 innings by this age, David Cone (1986) was at 1267.0, Andy Pettitte (1995) had 1449.2, Tim Lincecum (2007) was at 1411.2, Roy Oswalt (2001) sat at 1413.1, Jered Weaver (2006) was at 1320.1, Jose Quintana (2012) reached 1314.0, Jordan Zimmermann (2009) landed at 1094.0…
In comparison, Bieber is at 843.0, and Burnes is at 903.2. It’s not shocking that guys in the ‘80s and ‘90s threw more, but even seeing guys from a decade or two ago several hundred innings ahead is kind of shocking. Granted, some of that is external factors, like Bieber’s injury history, or Burnes taking several years to really stick in the majors… but that is part of the issue, right? Pitchers take longer to adjust to the modern game and aren’t trusted at young ages, they’re expected to go all out and wear themselves down more quickly, batters will adjust their entire games around driving up pitch counts and taking starters out of the game sooner… It all adds up in the aggregate. Looking at stuff like this is the kind of thing that makes me think future Hall voters will need a big shift how they think about these things.
Shohei Ohtani is also here with 15.0 WAR, but I already covered him back in the Hitters article.
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Showing posts with label Aaron Nola. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aaron Nola. Show all posts
Monday, March 24, 2025
Monday, March 11, 2024
Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Pitchers, 2024 Edition
Following the Future Hall of Fame Hitters article from last time, we return with the second entry in this year’s Future Hall of Fame Series, looking at Starting Pitchers!
Pitching, and starting pitching especially, has been in a constant state of evolution across the history of the game. This goes back to even the earliest days of professional baseball, where there were frequent adjustments to fundamental rules, like the number of balls and strikes that could be counted or the distance of the mound to the plate or even throwing underhand versus overhand. There have definitely been times where I’ve been looking at 1800s pitching stats and noticed a big year-to-year change, only to look up the history and realize it coincided with, say, a year where there were seven balls in a walk, or a decision to move the mound back from 45 feet away from the plate.
Things have stabilized relative to those wild early days, but they’ve never really stopped moving; we’ve seen the introduction of rotations, equipment changes from the deadball to the liveball, the gradual increase in the number of pitchers in said rotations, medical developments that could revive dead careers, the emergence and growing prominence of bullpens and all the strategy switches that entailed, new philosophies and pitches constantly being developed and taught, the effects of growing understanding on the delineation between pitching and defense (plus tons of evolution in defense alongside all this, which is at least related), continued tinkering on things like mound height and distance… you could just go on and on listing these factors. Hitting has changed too, of course, but nowhere near to the extent that the pitching side of the game has.
And all of that represents a major problem when it comes to the Hall of Fame, a historical institution that is entirely subjective and thus, more or less defined by its own precedent. What does it mean to be a Hall of Fame starting pitcher? Pitching today on the whole looks little like it did sixty years ago, let alone way back at the turn of the twentieth century. It would probably stand to reason that if our idea of a pitcher had changed that much, then surely our idea of a Hall of Fame pitcher must have similarly evolved with it.
Except… it largely hasn’t. In fact, not only has the idea of what makes a “Hall of Fame starting pitcher” not evolved at the rate the game has changed, it’s arguably stagnated in such a way that it’s now somehow harder to elect traditionally-deserving candidates; the number of pitchers in Cooperstown has been dropping for a while. By just about any measure, things have gotten worse as of late, and look to get even more dire in the near future. I might be going more in-depth on this matter in an upcoming piece, but just to put some basic numbers to the issue: historically, the Hall has inducted hitters and pitchers at a two-to-one rate, or one pitcher inducted for every two position players.* Keep that in mind as a baseline.
Pitching, and starting pitching especially, has been in a constant state of evolution across the history of the game. This goes back to even the earliest days of professional baseball, where there were frequent adjustments to fundamental rules, like the number of balls and strikes that could be counted or the distance of the mound to the plate or even throwing underhand versus overhand. There have definitely been times where I’ve been looking at 1800s pitching stats and noticed a big year-to-year change, only to look up the history and realize it coincided with, say, a year where there were seven balls in a walk, or a decision to move the mound back from 45 feet away from the plate.
Things have stabilized relative to those wild early days, but they’ve never really stopped moving; we’ve seen the introduction of rotations, equipment changes from the deadball to the liveball, the gradual increase in the number of pitchers in said rotations, medical developments that could revive dead careers, the emergence and growing prominence of bullpens and all the strategy switches that entailed, new philosophies and pitches constantly being developed and taught, the effects of growing understanding on the delineation between pitching and defense (plus tons of evolution in defense alongside all this, which is at least related), continued tinkering on things like mound height and distance… you could just go on and on listing these factors. Hitting has changed too, of course, but nowhere near to the extent that the pitching side of the game has.
And all of that represents a major problem when it comes to the Hall of Fame, a historical institution that is entirely subjective and thus, more or less defined by its own precedent. What does it mean to be a Hall of Fame starting pitcher? Pitching today on the whole looks little like it did sixty years ago, let alone way back at the turn of the twentieth century. It would probably stand to reason that if our idea of a pitcher had changed that much, then surely our idea of a Hall of Fame pitcher must have similarly evolved with it.
Except… it largely hasn’t. In fact, not only has the idea of what makes a “Hall of Fame starting pitcher” not evolved at the rate the game has changed, it’s arguably stagnated in such a way that it’s now somehow harder to elect traditionally-deserving candidates; the number of pitchers in Cooperstown has been dropping for a while. By just about any measure, things have gotten worse as of late, and look to get even more dire in the near future. I might be going more in-depth on this matter in an upcoming piece, but just to put some basic numbers to the issue: historically, the Hall has inducted hitters and pitchers at a two-to-one rate, or one pitcher inducted for every two position players.* Keep that in mind as a baseline.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2023 Edition (Tenth Anniversary, Part 2!)
In the ten years and eleven sets of articles that I’ve been looking at Future Hall of Fame odds for starting pitchers, there’s been a clear downward trend. In my piece last year, I even talked about the decline in the number of starting pitchers who were passing the median Wins Above Replacement for their ages and speculated about the causes.
Returning to the issue this year, things don’t look substantially better; we’re still pretty devoid of players who hit those marks, but looking at it once again, it definitely looks to me like it’s due to teams putting stricter workload limits on young pitchers. Compare things even to a decade ago: we had one pitcher in the league at all under the age of 22 last season, compared with nearly a dozen in 2012. The number of under-23 pitchers basically halved, the under-24s dropped, and so on.
I went and picked some other years from the 1990s and 2000s, and 2022 fell under basically all of them. There did seem to be something of a ceiling here, surprising; there weren’t uniformly more 22-year-olds throwing in 1990 compared to even 2012 (when discussion of innings limits were certainly more wide-spread). If anything, there seemed to be kind of a hard limit, and the quantity from year-to-year would vary below that; I suppose at a certain point, it’s difficult to justify throwing out more young arms than that soft limit just on a talent level. But the overall number of young pitchers went down, and the innings they were being given certainly went down. Sure, innings counts are down on the whole and I’m not positive if the effect is equal across ages, but the end results is still that there are definitely fewer young pitchers racking up 100 or even 200 innings in a season.
Will it work at reducing injuries? I suppose there’s not really a way to tell other than waiting and seeing, but I will say, going back and looking at 22 year olds who threw 150-to-200 innings in a year sure does turn up a lot of non-famous names that ring a bell, either because they were supposed to be good but never stayed healthy or who were good for a bit but suddenly fell out of the game after 8 or 9 seasons, so… I don’t know, maybe the old methods weren’t working out so great.
Pitching in general just seems to be more in flux than hitting, even beyond just the immediate scope. But that makes it difficult to use a system like this, which is entirely based around precedent. And given that WAR is a counting stat, and young pitchers are playing less, it’s an immediate disadvantage that they basically spend their careers coming back from; it’s a big part of why “being successful in your 30s” has become basically a necessity for pitchers making it to Cooperstown (not even getting into how modern Hall voters are mostly ignoring all but the most obvious candidates). Of course, innings totals have been dropping at the top too, which might make putting up a big season and making up ground even harder too…
I’ll do my best to work to combat all of this, listing some of the major leaders in each age group even if they aren’t especially close to the Hall median line. Take the values then as more of a guide for what they need to do to reach the Hall, like “how long do they have to keep this up” or “how good do they need to be to stay in the discussion”.
As a reminder for how my methodology in this series works: first, I take every Hall of Fame starting player (so anyone who’s started in 10% or more of their appearances, and limited to just the post-1920 Liveball pitchers since the Deadball era was even more unrecognizable), and look at all of their career Wins Above Replacement totals* (Baseball-Reference version) at each age. Then, I take the median for each year, to form a sort of “Median Hall of Famer Pace” to follow. From there, I look at how many starting pitchers (with the same 10% limit) in history have been above the pace at each age, Hall member or not. I get the percentages for each age from just doing a simple calculation, (Number of Hall of Famers above the median pace) divided by (Total number of players above the median pace).
*Also, for pitchers, I only use their Pitching WAR, since their value as batters hasn’t typically factored into their Hall chances even before considering the new universal DH.
So (to make up an example with fake numbers), if there were 100 Hall of Famers, and their median WAR at age 30 was 40.0 Wins, then I’d look at how many players in history had 40.0+ WAR by the same age. Say it was 100 players total, with 50 of them being in the Hall, we’d say players with over 40.0 WAR at that age have a 50% chance of induction. Also, I group players by their listed age the previous season, so players in the age 20 group will be playing in their age 21 season in 2023.
With that all out of the way, let’s start looking at players:
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