Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2025 Edition (Part 1)

Editor’s Note: I will once again be splitting this longer piece up into two more manageable posts, with Part 2 coming early next week. If you’d like to get an email notification when that goes up, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list in this box below; I only use it when there’s a new baseball piece up (even my pop culture site uses a different list), so you don’t need to worry about getting too many messages.

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With the two parts devoted to position players taken care of, we can now move on to the next focus in the 2025 update to the Future Hall of Fame Series: the starting pitching. And this year’s entry is especially exciting, because it represents something of a full circle moment here.

Last year’s Future Pitchers article was the most dire entry since I started this series, with almost no active pitchers projecting as “on a Hall of Fame pace” and little sign that things would be turning around in the near future. Because of that, I turned my attention towards finding out what got us into this mess, as well as rethinking how the Hall of Fame could evaluate pitchers, with the end result being a pretty in-depth series on the subject.

How the Hall arrived at this point is a multi-faceted issue, but a generalized summary (check those articles out if you’d like to know more) would be “Cooperstown voters have been inflexible at evaluating pitchers, but usually the massive changes that the role was seeing cancelled each other out to some extent, so the Hall could always find some pitchers to induct”. Something about this seemed to change in the 1990s, though: a string of pitchers with 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts hit the ballot in rapid succession, and writers seemed to respond to this by taking it as a sign that these clubs should be prerequisites for induction, rather than special distinctions for the absolute cream of the crop.

The result was actually a massive slowdown* in pitcher inductions, as they went from about a third of inductions to a quarter (with starting pitchers making up an even smaller share of that, thanks to the rise of closers as a role). Starting pitcher standards have been all around pushed higher, right as the role seems to have faced new challenges in the modern game; pitchers are debuting later, throwing more pitches at even higher effort, consequently throwing fewer innings, upping their risk of major injuries… all things that mean modern numbers are lower than ever before.

*This seems counterintuitive, but the reasons for that seemed to be: 1) this run of pitchers by itself was not actually enough to cover a full 2-to-1 hitter-pitcher ratio, and the slightly lesser pitchers that would have pulled that ratio back up got very overlooked in comparison; 2) there were so many 300/3000 guys in such short succession that they kind of started getting in each other’s (and everyone else’s) way, meaning a lot of milestone club members didn’t even go in on the first ballot and instead hung around ahead of everyone else.

This poses a problem for the Hall of Fame, given that the standards for induction are highly defined by what comes before. I suppose you can take the stance that we must stick to the old numbers even as they become infeasible in the modern game… but we have adjusted before, for example holding Liveball Era pitchers to the offense of their era, rather than wondering why they aren’t putting up the numbers of their Deadball Era counterparts. I looked at some ideas in that other series about comparing pitchers within their eras, if you’re interested in reading more.

But one other thing I highlighted towards the end of the Rethinking Hall of Fame Pitchers mini-series was Félix Hernández, who was about to join the ballot with a resume that was very of-its-time, and consequently seemed like a prime candidate to get once again overlooked. Except… it didn’t happen; King Félix got above 20% of the vote this year, well above the 5% needed to return to the ballot next year.

Hall voters have actually been adapting lately, if only to reset the artificially heightened standards from those ‘90s ballots. It’s been a slow process, but you could see it in things like Mark Buehlre hanging around rather than getting immediately bounced on his first try. But Hernández seems like a real shift; Buehrle’s case makes sense within the existing context of Hall of Fame pitchers (the bottom half of Cooperstown, but still within it’s boundaries), but Hernández’s Cooperstown credentials really only make sense taken within the context his era (the overall numbers were low, but he loomed large over his era). It seems like voters aren’t just open to reverting to the pre-‘90s pitching evaluations, they might even be willing to account for the modern game as it exists when they vote for pitchers, rather than just blindly reverting to older standards like pitching wins.

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.