Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame, 2023 Edition Bonus Update: Closers

A few years ago, I decided to take a crack at applying my Future Hall of Fame methodology to Closers. Unlike with starting pitchers or position players, Wins Above Replacement traditionally doesn’t seem to line up with how Hall views relief pitchers. However, I found that Win Probability Added does a pretty good job of matching the voters, and went with that instead. For those who aren’t as familiar, Win Probability Added (WPA) is a context-sensitive value stat. A home run will basically count the same in WAR whether it happens in the first or ninth inning, but WPA is based on the real-time in-game probability of a team winning, and credits or debits the player with how much each of their actions swings those odds in their team’s favor.

With Billy Wagner looking like a strong bet to make the Hall in 2024 or 2025, I thought this offseason might be an interesting time to revisit my closer predictions. You know, maybe take a look at which relievers could be following in his footsteps, especially since the role seems to be in a period of transition at the moment.

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It was supposed to be a pretty easy process; there hasn’t been a new closer inducted since the last time I did this in 2019 (following the inductions of Lee Smith and Mariano Rivera), so I shouldn’t need to do that much to update it. But after checking my results from last time I ran into some issues… I really don’t know how to explain it, but my numbers were just wrong. I have no idea how it happened, but the numbers don’t seem to line-up with anything. I tried a few things, referring to my notes and even reaching out to Baseball-Reference to see if they had changed anything in their site’s calculations, but I couldn’t recreate the results despite several attempts.

Weirdly, though, the methodology was still right? I tried it again after re-calculating every number, and I was basically getting the same players in the same order, with relatively strong correlations to Hall voting. It was just… the WPA totals and Hall odds were different from what I had last time. I suppose I could just wait until Wagner gets inducted, since that would require a total re-calculation anyway, but I wanted to publish the corrected numbers at least once before then.

I’m using the same basic framework as my Hitters and Starting Pitchers article, here: looking at the WPA for Hall of Fame closers by age to build a median trendline, then looking at how players above that line at each age have fared in eventual Hall elections. If you need a more detailed explanation, you can check out either of those examples and such.

However, one big difference that I would like to expand on here: there just isn’t a large sample size of closers in the Hall to work off of, which is a big deal since this method is built off of precedence. There are currently 8 pitchers who qualify here, so each one has an outsized impact on our results.

Like, a quarter of our cases are Hoyt Wilhelm (a knuckleballer who didn’t debut until age 29 but pitched for 21 seasons) and Dennis Eckerlsey (who spent the first decade of his career as a starter), each of whom is extremely unique. Each additional electee is going to significantly shift our standard here, and given the ways the role has changed so radically in its short lifespan, it is important not to get too attached to these numbers, and to remain flexible in your considerations of what a Hall Closer looks like. This method just isn’t as strong as the one for Position Players or Starting Pitchers.

For similar reasons, I’m going to be going in a slightly different order for this one. I usually like to start with younger stars and end with the older ones, because that way keeps the more interesting and unusual names at the top of the discussion but allows me to end on longer write-ups of stronger candidates who will be facing the ballot sooner.

In comparison, everything about closers feels less certain; stars regularly appear out of nowhere or suddenly flame out, the standard progression is kind of ridiculous and barely feels like a realistic guideline (more on that later), and to top it all off, we barely even know what Hall voters want beyond “A lot of saves, most of the time”. So instead, I’ll just start with the most veteran names and kind of work backward. There really aren’t any overwhelming favorites here anyway, so we might as well start with the most interesting discussions.

Also, as a note, when I refer to a player’s age, I’m generally referring to last season; if I’m instead using their 2023 age, I’ll try to make it obvious. Now then, let’s queue up that entrance music and see what we’ve got!

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers, 2023 Edition (Tenth Anniversary, Part 2!)

In the ten years and eleven sets of articles that I’ve been looking at Future Hall of Fame odds for starting pitchers, there’s been a clear downward trend. In my piece last year, I even talked about the decline in the number of starting pitchers who were passing the median Wins Above Replacement for their ages and speculated about the causes.

Returning to the issue this year, things don’t look substantially better; we’re still pretty devoid of players who hit those marks, but looking at it once again, it definitely looks to me like it’s due to teams putting stricter workload limits on young pitchers. Compare things even to a decade ago: we had one pitcher in the league at all under the age of 22 last season, compared with nearly a dozen in 2012. The number of under-23 pitchers basically halved, the under-24s dropped, and so on.

I went and picked some other years from the 1990s and 2000s, and 2022 fell under basically all of them. There did seem to be something of a ceiling here, surprising; there weren’t uniformly more 22-year-olds throwing in 1990 compared to even 2012 (when discussion of innings limits were certainly more wide-spread). If anything, there seemed to be kind of a hard limit, and the quantity from year-to-year would vary below that; I suppose at a certain point, it’s difficult to justify throwing out more young arms than that soft limit just on a talent level. But the overall number of young pitchers went down, and the innings they were being given certainly went down. Sure, innings counts are down on the whole and I’m not positive if the effect is equal across ages, but the end results is still that there are definitely fewer young pitchers racking up 100 or even 200 innings in a season.

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Will it work at reducing injuries? I suppose there’s not really a way to tell other than waiting and seeing, but I will say, going back and looking at 22 year olds who threw 150-to-200 innings in a year sure does turn up a lot of non-famous names that ring a bell, either because they were supposed to be good but never stayed healthy or who were good for a bit but suddenly fell out of the game after 8 or 9 seasons, so… I don’t know, maybe the old methods weren’t working out so great.

Pitching in general just seems to be more in flux than hitting, even beyond just the immediate scope. But that makes it difficult to use a system like this, which is entirely based around precedent. And given that WAR is a counting stat, and young pitchers are playing less, it’s an immediate disadvantage that they basically spend their careers coming back from; it’s a big part of why “being successful in your 30s” has become basically a necessity for pitchers making it to Cooperstown (not even getting into how modern Hall voters are mostly ignoring all but the most obvious candidates). Of course, innings totals have been dropping at the top too, which might make putting up a big season and making up ground even harder too…

I’ll do my best to work to combat all of this, listing some of the major leaders in each age group even if they aren’t especially close to the Hall median line. Take the values then as more of a guide for what they need to do to reach the Hall, like “how long do they have to keep this up” or “how good do they need to be to stay in the discussion”.

As a reminder for how my methodology in this series works: first, I take every Hall of Fame starting player (so anyone who’s started in 10% or more of their appearances, and limited to just the post-1920 Liveball pitchers since the Deadball era was even more unrecognizable), and look at all of their career Wins Above Replacement totals* (Baseball-Reference version) at each age. Then, I take the median for each year, to form a sort of “Median Hall of Famer Pace” to follow. From there, I look at how many starting pitchers (with the same 10% limit) in history have been above the pace at each age, Hall member or not. I get the percentages for each age from just doing a simple calculation, (Number of Hall of Famers above the median pace) divided by (Total number of players above the median pace).

*Also, for pitchers, I only use their Pitching WAR, since their value as batters hasn’t typically factored into their Hall chances even before considering the new universal DH.

So (to make up an example with fake numbers), if there were 100 Hall of Famers, and their median WAR at age 30 was 40.0 Wins, then I’d look at how many players in history had 40.0+ WAR by the same age. Say it was 100 players total, with 50 of them being in the Hall, we’d say players with over 40.0 WAR at that age have a 50% chance of induction. Also, I group players by their listed age the previous season, so players in the age 20 group will be playing in their age 21 season in 2023.

With that all out of the way, let’s start looking at players:

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2023 Edition (Tenth Anniversary!)

Once again, we’re at the point in the offseason where I predict active players’ chances at making the Hall of Fame. And even more notably, this year marks the tenth anniversary of my first entry in the series, from all the way back in 2013! It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but it has.

And I guess part of the reason it doesn’t feel that long is that the Hall of Fame kind of moves at a glacial pace. For example, the youngest stars I wrote about back in 2013? They’re entering their age 30 season this year (and they’ve posted a remarkable track record in that time, but more on that later!). In fact, very few of the players from my first article have even reached a Hall ballot, since I only covered players 30 and under in that entry.

A number of those players have retired, sure (not all of them, though!), but it kind of serves as a real-time demonstration of how dramatically slow the Hall’s process is; you need to play for at least ten seasons (so even the 2013 thirty-year-olds likely needed a few more years to be eligible), then you need to wait five seasons after retiring, then you can finally be considered in that sixth year. I think the only names from those first articles to appear on the BBWAA ballot so far are Prince Fielder and Carl Crawford; how long has it been since you’ve thought about either of them?* You get a few more if you expand it the 2014 article, since I raised the bar to 35 that year, but on the other hand, that one also included Albert Pujols, who was of course so young that he was an All-Star as recently as last year!

*Side note that I just had to drop somewhere: I casually glanced at Crawford’s Wikipedia page to see what he’d been doing since retirement, and it is a lot to take in. The high points include things like his son going in the first round of the draft last year, and the record label he founded signing hip-hop superstar Megan Thee Stallion. The low points include a lot of violence and getting sued by Megan over that contract. I was expecting maybe one or two small notes, not all of that. Fielder didn’t even get a post-career section on his page, and he had a cooking show!

Anyway, with all of the sentimental stuff out of the way, let’s do a quick refresher of the method I use here. First, I take every Hall of Fame position player, and look at all of their career Wins Above Replacement totals (Baseball-Reference version) at each age. Then, I take the median for each year, to form a sort of “Median Hall of Famer Pace” to follow. From there, I look at how many players in history have been above the pace at each age, Hall member or not. I get the percentages for each age from just doing a simple calculation, (Number of Hall of Famers above the median pace) divided by (Total number of players above the median pace).

So (to make up an example with fake numbers), if there were 100 Hall of Famers, and their median WAR at age 30 was 40.0 Wins, then I’d look at how many players in history had 40.0+ WAR by the same age. Say it was 100 players total, with 50 of them being in the Hall, we’d say players with over 40.0 WAR at that age have a 50% chance of induction. Also, I group players by their listed age the previous season, so players in the age 20 group will be playing in their age 21 season in 2023.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. Otherwise, let’s jump right in:

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Age 20: 0.4 WAR Median; 23.91% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players:
None

There just really weren’t that many 20-year-old position players in the league last year. Only Francisco Álvarez and Ezequiel Tovar saw any playing time at all, totalling just 14 games and 49 plate appearances between them. That might sound normal, but it’s actually a little surprising, since the low WAR total helps offset the small player pool; in fact, 2022 is the first full season (so excluding 2020) since 2017 that we haven’t had an active 20-year-old who made it to the Hall median for the age!

Age 21: 2.0 WAR Median; 35.76% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players:
Julio Rodriguez (6.2 WAR)
Wander Franco (6.1 WAR)
Michael Harris II (5.3 WAR)

In contrast with the Age 20 bracket, Age 21 is already packed with over-the-line players. We of course have our two reigning Rookies of the Year in Rodriguez and Harris, plus Franco, who makes it despite really only having two half-seasons under his belt so far. And even that set is only scratching the surface here.

After them, you also have a pair of former first-round picks in Riley Greene and Corbin Carrol, who made it over halfway to 2.0 Wins in under 100 games (1.4 and 1.2, respectively), plus Gunnar Henderson (0.9) and Vaughn Grissom (0.8) just missing the halfway point despite neither hitting a major league roster until August (in fact, Henderson still maintains his Rookie status for 2023!). Given that the median bar is still fairly low for age-22 players, don’t be surprised if this age group has five or six names over the line when the next edition of the series rolls around.