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

Feature photo by Jeffrey Hayes. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

Opening Day 2026 is fast approaching, but before we get there, I have one more major offseason piece to publish: my annual Future Hall of Fame Series! It feels like the last few editions have all been special occasions that beget nostalgia, like anniversaries or major milestones, but this year in contrast looks rather quaint in comparison; this entry isn’t a round number, and while one of this year’s two BBWAA inductees was once again a former inclusion in this series, it was Carlos Beltran, who already had a pretty solid case and was nearing the end of his career by the time he was featured here. There are still a few more guys on the ballot who retired too early for me to cover them here, but that number continues to drop every year. I’ll cover that when we get there, though. For now, let’s dive right in!

(Note: Once again, this piece got rather long, so I’ll be splitting it up into multiple parts, with the second half to follow next week. Be sure to check back for that! And if you’d like to be notified when that piece and the eventual pitcher pieces go live, a reminder that I also have an email list for Hot Corner Harbor that you can sign up for below!)

Built with Kit

The Methodology
Before we start going over the players, let me give a quick explanation for how my system works. It’s a bit of a multi-step process.

First, I find the Median Hall of Fame Pace, to help give an idea of what a sort of generalized Hall of Fame hitter’s career “could” look like. That’s easy enough, just going through Baseball-Reference’s Stathead search, looking at every Hall of Fame position player, going age by age, and looking for the exact midpoint to find the median Wins Above Replacement for that age-season.* So, to use fake numbers for an example: if there were 25 Hall of Famers, we’d be looking for the WAR total of the 13th one, right in the middle, at age 23, then 24, then 25, and so on. Simple enough. These are the Medians that we’ll be comparing active players too; if a modern player is above that total, they have more WAR than half of the Hall of Famers did at the same age.

*Side note: since part of this series is to be predictive, I limit my numbers to just AL and NL stats, since it’s the most similar to the game today. Also, I only look for the median of Hall members who were active through that age, so anyone who debuted at, say, 23 isn’t included in the age 22 pool.

Second, we find the rough Hall of Fame chances for players above that Median at every age. To do that, I look at how many players in history have attained that median WAR total by that age. Then, I just compare that to the number of Hall of Famers. So, going back to our fake numbers, if there are 12 Hall of Famers above the Age 23 median, and 8 unelected players in history were above that total too, then we have (12 Hall of Famers) divided by (12 Hall members plus 8 non-Hall, or 20 total), giving us a 60% chance of players ahead of the Hall of Fame pace at that age actually going on to Cooperstown. 

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

A quick note: This year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters piece wound up being nearly 10,000 words. So, in order to break things up a little bit and make it less imposing, plus to buy me more time to work on the Pitchers piece, I’m going to be splitting it up. One half this week, one 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

It’s once again that time of the spring, where I update my yearly Future Hall of Fame Series and look at which active players are on pace for an eventual Cooperstown enshrinement. But before I get into the weeds, allow me to go on a brief nostalgic tangent about the series.

We are just coming off the Baseball Writers inducting three new Hall of Famers in Billy Wagner, CC Sabathia, and Ichiro Suzuki (here’s my wrap-up on those results, if you missed them). I noted last year that Joe Mauer and Adrian Beltré marked the first two real-life Hall of Famers who had actually been covered in this series when they were active. I never got to discuss Wagner here, who retired in 2010, but Sabathia and Suzuki represent the third and fourth inductees that I’ve included in this series.*

*Technically, Ichiro only just made it, as my initial 2013 columns only covered players under 30 (although Sabathia got a specific mention despite being 31), and I kept things to 35-and-under until 2017, which wound up being his last full season.

It still feels notable, since it’s only the second time this has happened after writing this column for over a decade. But after thinking about it a little more… I guess this is just going to be the new normal? Like, Wagner was about to be aged off the ballot anyway, so we’re nearly out of the era of “guys who retired before I started”, and while it took a few years for me to start including the oldest players in the league and I missed some big names in that window, next year’s new candidates will be guys who last played in 2020, which was well after I started taking a more comprehensive approach.

At this point, it’s going to be difficult for an induction class to have not have someone who made this series at some point. Andruw Jones might go in next year and he retired after 2012, but he finished behind Carlos Beltrán (who made it onto that 2017 list with Ichiro) on this year’s ballot, and I don’t see any way the former makes it in next year while the latter misses out.

And that will be the case going forward… kind of indefinitely? Even if I just decided not to continue this series next year, the Hall will still be dealing with guys that I wrote about here for so long into the future that it’s kind of wild to think about. Like, just as an example, Manny Ramírez’s final year on the BBWAA ballot is next year, 2026, and he debuted as a 21-year-old back in 1993; using that as a reference, a 21-year-old that I cover this year could conceivably be on a hypothetical 2058 ballot, a year that only registers as “sci-fi setting” to me. The timescale that the Hall of Fame works at is just difficult to fathom, sometimes.