We’re back with Part 2 of the Starting Pitchers section of the Future Hall of Fame Series. We’ll once again be picking up right where Part 1 left off; if you missed that one or need to refresh your memory on the methodology, you can find it here. And for that matter, if you missed the Position Players portion of this update, you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
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I’m going to try and get one more piece (focusing on closers) finished for this year’s update, hopefully by the end of the week. You will of course be getting an email update on that once it's ready; thank you again for subscribing to this list!!!
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​Age 29: 31.7 WAR Median; 38.78% of all players at this mark elected
Active Leader: Shane Bieber (17.7 WAR) ​
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We have a couple of former Cy Young winners at the top of this group in Shane Bieber and Corbin Burnes (17.1 WAR). Both of them are pretty far off from Hall pace, in spite of those high peaks. Again, some of that is due to the specific quirks of bWAR, but only a bit; Fangraphs has both of them a little higher, but still only in the low 20s rather than high teens.
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Since we’re at the end of the 20s, this seems like as good a place as any to talk about how the difference in quantity for modern pitchers really starts to add up. There are nearly 200 Liveball-era pitchers who have reached the 20 career WAR mark before their age 30 season, so way more than just the best of the best. Like I said earlier, part of the difference is that teams are more hesitant about calling up young arms than they used to be; there are a lot of debuts at Age 20 and 21 and even some 19s in that set of 200ish names, and 23s and later are harder to come by. But even among the pitchers who debuted at 23 (the same age that Bieber and Burnes got called up), you see a big difference. Just to give you a random mix of guys: Charles Nagy (debuted in 1990) got up to 1127.0 innings by this age, David Cone (1986) was at 1267.0, Andy Pettitte (1995) had 1449.2, Tim Lincecum (2007) was at 1411.2, Roy Oswalt (2001) sat at 1413.1, Jered Weaver (2006) was at 1320.1, Jose Quintana (2012) reached 1314.0, Jordan Zimmermann (2009) landed at 1094.0…
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In comparison, Bieber is at 843.0, and Burnes is at 903.2. It’s not shocking that guys in the ‘80s and ‘90s threw more, but even seeing guys from a decade or two ago several hundred innings ahead is kind of shocking. Granted, some of that is external factors, like Bieber’s injury history, or Burnes taking several years to really stick in the majors… but that is part of the issue, right? Pitchers take longer to adjust to the modern game and aren’t trusted at young ages, they’re expected to go all out and wear themselves down more quickly, batters will adjust their entire games around driving up pitch counts and taking starters out of the game sooner… It all adds up in the aggregate. Looking at stuff like this is the kind of thing that makes me think future Hall voters will need a big shift how they think about these things.
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​Shohei Ohtani is also here with 15.0 WAR, but I already covered him back in the Hitters article.
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