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Bradford Doolittle
The Baseball Hall of Fame must evolve with the ever-changing game it celebrates. In the case of starting pitchers, it’s not evolving quickly enough.
The 2026 balloting results announced Tuesday confirmed what many had anticipated: another year without a hurler getting the call to Cooperstown. With pitchers getting shut out this year, CC Sabathia remains the only starting pitcher voted into the Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America this decade.
The Hall’s starting pitcher problem has snuck up quickly as the position has been revolutionized over the past few years. In just the past decade — the 2010s — we saw a spate of starters enshrined, a group composed largely of the last of the greats who were used in a more or less traditional fashion. These pitchers — Randy Johnson, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Mike Mussina et al — enjoyed careers with usage patterns and durability records that led to big lifetime win totals. That’s not the only reason they got in, but it helped. The BBWAA voted in eight starters in the decade, matching the high-water mark set in the 1990s.
The results of the most recent round of voting were encouraging because of the solid first-year support for Cole Hamels and the big leap in support for Felix Hernandez. But if that support were to flatline, there wouldn’t be another likely Hall of Fame starter until, possibly, 2029, when Zack Greinke becomes eligible. We’ll get at least three in the 2030s — Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander — but beyond that trio of no-brainers, who else gets in? Anyone?
It’s a question not just about those on the ballot now or nearing Hall consideration, but for current veteran pitchers not among those no-brainers, such as Chris Sale or Jacob deGrom, and the younger stars still a long way away from that part of their baseball life. What will the eventual career numbers of Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal look like? How do we judge them and their contemporaries for membership in Cooperstown, even if their statistics take a very different shape than their predecessors, especially those like Kershaw with whom they overlapped?
The Hall of Fame’s starting pitcher problem
Only three pitchers in total have been enshrined in Cooperstown in the 2020s. Starter Jim Kaat, who pitched from 1959 to 1983, was elected by the Golden Days Era Committee as part of the Class of 2022. Sabathia and reliever Billy Wagner were both elected by the BBWAA in 2025.
For now, we’ll set aside relievers. The problem of establishing standards for firemen has been much discussed in recent years as the importance of bullpens has sharply risen. Those standards remain a work in progress. Wagner was the ninth pitcher selected predominantly for his work in relief. The other 70 pitchers in the Hall are starters, and that position presents a whole other growing set of problems.
Max Fried, Corbin Burnes, Blake Snell, Dylan Cease and Ranger Suarez. Framber Valdez is surely soon to follow.
At the same time, the job responsibilities of starters continue to iterate. In terms of innings and starts, the numbers are dropping. Per-inning dominance is favored over durability. Long-standing key categories for starters — wins, complete games, shutouts — have all but slipped into obsolescence. As top veteran starters tend to find their way to contending teams, some of those pitchers have their workloads suppressed in an effort to keep them upright for October. So far, only the Los Angeles Dodgers clearly seem to be executing the slow-walking-of-pitchers strategy, but it worked for them, so it would be not at all surprising if other teams followed suit, if they can afford it.
This only further complicates the Hall of Fame standards for starters, which have always been murky to define. Three hundred career wins? That punches your ticket, for the most part, but we might never see a 300-game winner again, barring some kind of rules-based intervention aimed at restoring the traditional job description of the starting pitcher. So, do we simply lower the bar for wins? With the loss of credence given the traditional win stat, that surely won’t help.
Redefining pitcher wins
Relatively short bursts of dominance used to be enough to get baseball’s best pitchers into the Hall if their brilliant careers were cut short because of injury or illness: Addie Joss, Dizzy Dean and Sandy Koufax among them.
Those greats didn’t last long enough to approach 300 career wins, but they did compile a lot of wins in a short period of time. Each of the aforementioned trio rolled up single-season win totals of 27 or more, with Dean and Koufax doing it multiple times. Dean’s biggest Hall selling point was winning 30 games in 1934. Career victory totals be damned; the wins were still the thing for those dominant hurlers. That simply is not going to be the case going forward.
Last June, I looked at a different way to define pitcher wins based on assigning a win and a loss to every starter in every game based on who pitched better. The criteria I used for determining that was a modified version of Bill James’ game score formula that I applied to a database of pitcher starts going back to 1901.
Using that database, updated through the end of 2025, we can make some observations about how to ensure starting pitchers continue to have representation in Cooperstown, one proportional to their importance in the game.
I started by creating a sorting metric for the career totals generated by the game score database, rating each starter’s career based on four criteria:
1. Total game score points
2. Average game score per start
3. Fibonacci win points (FWB), which is a Jamesian method for combining the won-lost record of each pitcher, as determined by game score, into one number
4. FWB per start
Each of those four categories was given equal weight in the final ranking index, which does a pretty good job of filtering out the differences between eras. The top 20, going back to 1901:
1. Walter Johnson
2. Roger Clemens
3. Christy Mathewson
4. Randy Johnson
5. Nolan Ryan
6. Pete Alexander
7. Clayton Kershaw
8. Pedro Martinez
9. Greg Maddux
10. Tom Seaver
11. Max Scherzer
12. Justin Verlander
13. Steve Carlton
14. Warren Spahn
15. Eddie Plank
16. Don Sutton
17. Bob Gibson
18. Lefty Grove
19. Juan Marichal
20. Ferguson Jenkins
All of these pitchers purely by performance standards are, will be or should be in the Hall of Fame. We’re not going to get into the vagaries of the Clemens case, but this is a good list of baseball’s all-time great starters, and although there will always be quibbles, we can see that the sorting metric is functioning as it should.
In the database, there are 2,123 starters who made at least 50 starts. That is the group we’re going to parse, with the cutoff for the 90th percentile at 213. Why the 90th? It’s a subjective cutoff but one that allows you to capture nearly every pitcher who might merit consideration, while filtering out those without a case.
Thus, those 213 pitchers are the elite starters — the top 10% — of the modern era. So far, 64 of them are already in the Hall of Fame, which is right at 30%. Here’s a breakdown, by decade of birth, of the percentage of 90th percentile hurlers who have gotten in, plus some leading representatives of those eras:
Gerrit Cole, Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Fried, Shane Bieber); Trevor Bauer, who hasn’t pitched in the majors since being suspended in 2022; and, tragically, the late Jose Fernandez, who died during his fourth big league season.
With a rating in the 98th percentile by my sorting metric, Cole appears like a no-brainer already, as he looks to add to his résumé this year during his return from injury. His traditional career record is 153-80, with a 3.18 ERA and 2,251 strikeouts. How do those familiar-looking numbers compare with current standards? What are the current standards?
To get there, it’s illustrative to look at birth year groupings by decade from our 90th percentile class, using only the traditional statistics.
Kyle Hendricks et al) who have already retired or whose careers are probably over, but the numbers are close enough.
Kiley McDaniel »
At any given time, we want to stay focused on the top of the active group; I like the 90th percentile as it casts a wide enough net historically to capture nearly all the Hall of Famers but still filters out the majority. You can set the bar where you like.
My active top 10%, sorted by FWB per start: Scherzer, Sale, Skenes, Cole, deGrom, Bieber, Fried, Verlander, Wheeler and Valdez. Skenes is there in just two seasons. Verlander is there after 20. At least half of these pitchers, if not more, are on a Hall of Fame trajectory. When they come up on the ballot, we need to be ready for them.
As the role of the starting pitcher continues to evolve, our duty is to make sure it’s clear what the standards are at any given time, how current players compare with those standards, who comprises the elite class, and capture how it all fits into the complex history of an institution whose membership traces back more than 150 years.
Right now, perhaps the position is simply mired in a voting slump and, as time passes, new benchmarks will become clear. Maybe some future version of WAR will clarify matters. Maybe the jump in support for King Felix will open things up. Whatever happens, we must stay in touch with fundamental realities: Starting pitchers remain an essential part of baseball’s fabric, and the best of them, at any given duration of some reasonable length of time, are by definition Hall of Fame worthy.
If we’re not putting starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame, we’re doing it wrong.
