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, 2025 Edition (Part 2)

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).

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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.

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.

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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.