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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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