The second half of the Future Hall of Fame Starting Pitchers article (and conclusion to this year’s set of updates) is finally here! We’ll be picking up right where Part 1 left off, so you can catch up on that here if you missed it. Meanwhile, if you would like to go back and read the corresponding pieces for active position players, you can read Part 1 of that here, and Part 2 here.
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As I mentioned last time, we’ll be highlighting the leader in Baseball-Reference Wins Above Replacement for each age cohort, since so few modern starters are actually ahead of the Hall of Fame pace (however, those who are ahead of the game will be italicized as well). Before we start discussing specific pitchers, though, I’ll take a moment to go over the specific challenges that we’re seeing now when it comes to predicting the future of starting pitchers in Cooperstown, and how that will influence our discussions in the rest of this piece. ​
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​The Interlude​
Since I divide these articles by age group, with a range from 20 to (roughly) 40, I tend to think of age 30 as something of a dividing line. This generally works pretty neatly for hitters; you’ll get a few outliers, but guys who are 30 and under usually feel like they’re a little early for “serious” Hall discussion, while the 31-and-up guys are where I feel more comfortable speculating on actual Hall-worthiness and the specific path they might take there. And there are some more concrete details leaning this way, too. For example, the Median Hall Pace for position players really starts to cool off over the age of 30: it only contains three one-year WAR jumps that could even generously be considered “All-Star-level” (and only one of those tops 4.5 Wins). Or, if you take the median Hall of Fame Wins Above Replacement for a position player and split it into groups of “Age 30 and Below” and “31 and Up”, you usually get an almost-2:1 ratio (it shifts with new inductions, but as of this year, this balance sits at 40.0 Wins through Age 30, and 21.1 Wins for After 30).
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None of that is true for Starting Pitchers, though, and it throws off a lot of these more instinctual feelings. The Overall Hall Starting Pitcher WAR Median is actually about 5 Wins higher than it is for hitters (66.8 WAR), and that total is more evenly split between the 30-And-Under and After-30 years, at a roughly 55-45 rate. Not only does the theoretical median starter have more All-Star-level seasons in their 30s, the pace actually has two different years where it jumps by over 6 Wins, topping out at a 7.2-WAR leap for the Age 33 season. That’s closer to Cy Young-level than plain-old All-Star-level.
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It may seem implausible, but it probably helps to reframe it from “the median elected starting pitcher has a Cy Young-type season at age 33” to “by age 33, the median elected starting pitcher will have had three Cy Young-type seasons”. You could knock those out early and stay ahead of the pace for a while before falling back to the middle, but there are also a good number of pitchers in Cooperstown who were still having great seasons in their early 30s, allowing them to catch up to the ones who rocketed out of the gate. It’s also probably part of why the relatively-light number of young, on-pace starters feels a little less like an issue. We kind of expect them to be a little lighter on total innings and value, but a big part of making or breaking your case for Cooperstown as a hurler is staying great into your 30s, and we actually are seeing that still. Playing that sort of catch-up is still a big part of the process!
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