Rethinking What Makes a Hall of Fame Starting Pitcher, Part 4: How Could We Use Cy Young Shares?

Okay, after three whole articles to this series, it’s time to bring it all home. In Part 1, I broke down the problem with the Hall of Fame’s recent stances on electing pitchers and why it looked like it would be getting worse. In Part 2, I looked at the problem and its sources, and began kicking around some alternative things voters might consider looking at. In Part 3, I proposed Cy Young Shares as a solution, and went through their history and issues; they won’t be able to serve as a straight milestone number in the way that a stat like Wins or Strikeouts does. However! They are still useful at looking at pitchers in their context, and more importantly, they already seemed to have some relation to how voters are voting now.

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So there is clearly a point to looking into this more deeply, even if the hope of a single unified Award Shares milestone is gone. Having an easy-to-understand stat would be nice, for appealing to the bloc of Hall voters that skews more traditional (and besides, it’s not like Wins are going to escape being heavily affected by the context of the game, as career win totals continue to drop). And since the BBWAA seemed to consider Awards success before the crush of 300/3000 inductees, perhaps the induction of guys like Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay is evidence that they’ll start moving back in that direction. If so, it seems like the best way to look at pitchers through this lens is going to be within their respective eras.

So what do our Cy Young Shares leaderboards look like if we divide them into “1970 to 2009” and “2010 to Present”? This is just a simple division based on each pitcher’s career midpoint rather than a full era adjustments, because this is the third full article of what was originally supposed to be a single piece that I’ve been working on and completely re-writing for months and I just want to finally get it out the door, but it’s a good-enough starting point for now. (I can throw “in-depth look at fully era-adjusted Cy Young Shares” on the “potential future article” pile for the time being.)