Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2026 Edition (Part 1)

Feature photo by Johnmaxmena2. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

Just like last time, this article wound up getting pretty long, and will be split into two halves. If you’d like an email when Part 2 goes up, you can join the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list here:

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If you missed the first part of my annual Future Hall of Fame series focusing on the Hitters, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. I think they turned out pretty well, in part because I’m in a rhythm at this point after years of doing it. I know what to cover, what particularly stands out more than usual, the recent history of major players, what worked in the past, all of that.

In contrast, the process of predicting which starting pitchers will get into Cooperstown one day feels increasingly like a mess. I’ve bemoaned it in the past, but this year especially, it feels like multiple trends are accelerating in a bunch of different and sometimes even opposing directions, which pushes the question into incredibly unclear territory.

The core issue comes down to a simple question, “What is a Hall of Famer?” Despite its simplicity, it’s a fairly complex topic, and the easiest answer is unfortunately “a Hall of Famer is whoever voters decide to induct into Cooperstown”. You could take that in a very nebulous, vibe-based way, and decide whether you personally think each candidate “feels like a Hall of Famer”, but that has the obvious issue: that every person is going to feel their own way about that, and sometimes there just isn’t a way to bridge the gap of “I feel like he is” versus “Well, I don’t”.

If you actually want to discuss these things in a productive way, you kind of need some solid criteria to work off of, and the only real hard-and-fast standard we can go off of is “How does a candidate compare to the people who have already been inducted?” That’s part of what this series is about, really. Comparing batters from the 1800s to batters from today is difficult, but there are enough similarities there for it to work as at least some level of precedence.

Sure, strategies have changed, defense has improved, the equipment has gone from a dead ball to a livelier one (and then back and forth again a few times), home run totals have steadily risen the entire way, but the broad outlines have stayed consistent enough, and the things that have changed can at least be accounted for and normalized to one extent or another. For example, 400 home runs was once rarefied air that guaranteed induction, it became a little more common as home run totals continued to creep upwards, voters adjusted. Guys were still trying to reach base and drive in runs, though.

But that hasn’t really been the case for pitchers? Or at least, the shift hasn’t been quite as clean. We went from pitchers who threw complete games every day, to rotations, to bigger rotations, to relievers finishing off games, to bigger and bigger bullpens picking up more of the load as starting pitchers were driven from the game earlier and earlier. And the strategy for individual pitchers changed as the rosters shifted, going from “your five best arms need to pace themselves to cover every inning in a season” to “they’ll have a handful of guys to spell them at the end of games, so they can afford to exert themselves a little more at times”, to eventually “each pitcher can exert themselves as much as possible with no concern to pacing themselves, as teams will readily cycle through dozens of arms to fill an entire season”. 

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.

Built with Kit

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.