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.
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For most of the game’s existence, starting pitchers have held sway as some of the biggest stars in baseball, if not all of sports. That’s still true in perhaps the most obvious way: economics. You can see that from the large long-term free agent contracts handed out just over the past couple of years to standout starters such as 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 Johnson2. Roger Clemens3. Christy Mathewson4. Randy Johnson5. Nolan Ryan6. Pete Alexander7. Clayton Kershaw8. Pedro Martinez9. Greg Maddux10. Tom Seaver11. Max Scherzer12. Justin Verlander13. Steve Carlton14. Warren Spahn15. Eddie Plank16. Don Sutton17. Bob Gibson18. Lefty Grove19. Juan Marichal20. 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:
Birth decadeHOF %Leading representatives1800s44Cy Young, Walter Johnson1900s42Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell1910s29Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller1920s70Whitey Ford, Warren Spahn1930s73Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson1940s29Fergie Jenkins, Tom Seaver1950s18Bert Blyleven, Jack Morris1960s17Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson1970s13Roy Halladay, Pedro Martinez1980s4CC Sabathia, Chris Sale1990s0Gerrit Cole, Zack Wheeler
The struggle is real.
Before we get into what it means for the players still playing today, you can see just how far that percentage has dropped over the decades since starting pitchers ruled the sport’s landscape in the first half of the 20th century.
Although we will never see numbers like that again for several reasons, including an improved and more expansive talent pool, the rise of bullpen use, and the effort-based prevalence of pitching-related injuries, a representative Hall of Fame would continue to include a percentage similar to what it was a half century ago, when expansion and rotation sizes started to stabilize.
Obviously a number of pitchers born in the 1980s and later still have a shot. Many are still playing; others are not yet eligible. However, given what has happened (or not happened) in the voting this decade, we have to keep an eye out for worrisome trends.
Sabathia, born in 1980, is the most recently born Hall of Fame pitcher. So far, he’s the only one of 25 pitchers in the 90th percentile group among those born in the 1980s to make it. Others will join him, including Kershaw, Scherzer, Verlander and, probably, Greinke.
When that happens, the 1980s should be fairly represented historically, though each era defines its own cutoff line, so maybe more should be in than the five mentioned in the previous paragraph. Each of that quintet straddled eras, a divide that might eventually be delineated by the advent of Statcast-style tracking metrics in the middle of past decade, which has contributed to the further erosion of starting pitcher workloads.
Thus, although the game transformed during the Kershaw/Verlander era, many of the old standards still worked for them and their contemporaries. In any event, their induction will get us up to at least 20% of the 90th percentile group for 1980s-born pitchers, in line with post-1950s patterns. So, we’re not in crisis mode yet. However, it’s not hard to imagine a crisis looming around the corner.
Why? Consider this list of the average number of pitchers to qualify for the ERA title each season by decade, a compilation that doesn’t even take into account the gradually growing number of franchises since 1960. It’s not just that big win totals have gone by the wayside, so too have big innings totals. (The two things go hand in hand, of course.)
1870s: 13.01880s: 21.21890s: 41.01900s: 34.41910s: 34.81920s: 35.11930s: 33.01940s: 30.71950s: 28.51960s: 34.51970s: 42.41980s: 43.01990s: 42.12000s: 43.12010s: 38.52020s: 23.2
Given this downward trend in usage, how do we keep a respectable level of representation for starters in the Hall, as we look ahead to someday assessing pitchers born in the 1990s and later? And, not for nothing, how about reconsidering the cases of those already on the ballot, such as Hernandez and Hamels, and others with similar careers who fell short? Such pitchers had bursts of brilliance in the vein of Koufax, Dean, Joss and their like, but without the gaudy victory totals that dominated the past. Are they really any less prominent in baseball history?
We must have these ever-changing standards at the forefront of the mind. Don’t blame King Felix for not compiling wins at the rate of Iron Joe McGinnity. Worry about how King Felix did compared with those he competed against.
What the new numbers can tell us
As mentioned, through the manipulation of my game score-based suite of measures, I’ve pegged a set of 213 pitchers who constitute the top 10% of starting pitchers, at the career level, in games started since 1901. Using the birth years of those in that group, here’s their count by decade:
Pre-1900: 551900s: 121910s: 71920s: 101930s: 111940s: 241950s: 171960s: 291970s: 161980s: 251990s: 7
The old days are probably overrepresented, but at least we already have seven pitchers born in the 1990s who have entered that elite tier. Those include five active pitchers (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.
DecadeWPCTCGSO%SO-BB%ERA1800s184.57822910.4%3.9%2.761900s204.57821710.3%2.9%3.481910s144.60513012.0%3.7%3.281920s206.58118712.8%5.0%3.331930s205.54715915.3%8.3%3.271940s205.55314116.1%8.2%3.271950s167.5578615.1%7.7%3.601960s193.5805418.3%10.6%3.671970s176.5862719.3%12.2%3.761980s146.5841322.9%15.8%3.551990s82.597426.5%19.0%3.47
You can see how the position has changed so dramatically over time. A typical 90th percentile pitcher born in the 1930s, to pick one decade, ended up at 205 career wins, tossed 159 complete games and compiled a 15.3% strikeout rate with a 3.27 ERA. He wasn’t much different from pitchers born in the 1920s and 1940s.
As we move into the 21st century, you can see how the responsibilities of starters have shifted. There are some pitchers born in the 1980s still adding to their win totals — Sale, for one, was born in 1989 — but that number of 146 isn’t likely to rise all that much. And it’s going to go down for pitchers born in the 1990s and later.
Meanwhile, the ERAs for elite starters remain in line with historic norms. Their win-loss percentage has ticked up (fewer late-inning blown leads that saddle them with losses, with those defeats now landing in the lap of relievers). Complete games have gone all but extinct, but strikeout rates and dominance measures have soared.
One example: Cole, born in 1990, blows away the standards of his birth decade, which are a work in progress, and he surpasses those of the 1980s. His résumé of traditional, back-of-the-baseball-card numbers (153-80, 3.18 ERA) merits a deeper dive. We know this because we know what the standards of his era actually are.
Then we’re ready to dive into the next-level numbers with which we now have to work. In my game-score system, his ranking puts him in the 98th percentile of those who have made starts in at least eight seasons since 1901. His fWAR (42.6) ranks sixth since he arrived in the majors (2013) even though he missed the entire 2025 season. Cole is, in short, in the midst of building a very solid Hall of Fame case, even if he ends up short of 200 career wins. (His game score record, in case you’re wondering, is 207-110.)
Another example: Hernandez, a 1980s-born pitcher still under BBWAA consideration, is perhaps a better example of someone lost in the murk of change. Here are his traditional numbers against the standards of his birth decade:
Wins: 169 (decade standard, 146)
Win%: .554 (.584)
SO%: 22.4% (22.9%)
SO-BB%: 15.3% (15.8%)
ERA: 3.52 (3.55)
It is by no means a no-brainer case, but Hernandez has hit enough key targets to suggest we have to look deeper. Which is all we’re trying to do: create groups of elite pitchers with a careful sorting out of performance in the context of the era in which they pitched.
We have more tools than ever to do this. By my sorting metric, Hernandez rates in the 95th percentile in the database, which makes him a borderline case. Turning to fWAR, during his career (2005-19), Hernandez’s 49.9 WAR ranked sixth among all pitchers. That seems to me like the overall portrait of a Hall of Fame pitcher, circa the 21st century.
Today’s pitchers, tomorrow’s Hall of Famers?
As we chronicle the game from historical and statistical standpoints, we can start strumming these chords now. Identify players on a Hall of Fame track and keep tabs on them as they progress.
There are currently 227 pitchers in my database still flagged as active who have made at least 50 career starts. This includes a few (Kershaw, Kyle Hendricks et al) who have already retired or whose careers are probably over, but the numbers are close enough.
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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.
