The Baseball Hall of Fame is, among other things, a celebration of the game's storied history. The annual discussions about which players should be inducted give us a chance to reflect on how recent players stack up with the best the game has ever seen and to try to put what we saw into historical context. The Hall allows us to look back and appreciate baseball's past in a remarkable way.
But while I look forward to celebrating the impending induction of past stars like Jeff Bagwell and (hopefully) Tim Raines, it is time to talk about the Hall of Fame's future. Because without a significant shift in how the electorate evaluates the standard of worthiness, we're headed toward a future in which we simply don't elect starting pitchers to the Hall of Fame anymore.
According to the Hall's own site, there are 77 pitchers in the Hall of Fame, representing 31 percent of the 246 total players with monuments in the Plaque Gallery. Of those 77, five were inducted mostly for what they did in relief, leaving us with 72 starting pitchers who have been enshrined in Cooperstown. But because of the tools which have long been used to evaluate a pitcher's worthiness for the Hall of Fame, almost all of those 72 starting pitchers plied their trade at a time when baseball was very different from the game that is played today.
In fact, 65 of the 72 starting pitchers in Cooperstown pitched their final game in the 1980s. Because we are now inducting players who retired after the 2011 season, we have a 23-year window of eligible starting pitchers -- from 1989 through 2011 -- in which only seven starters were deemed worthy of induction. And based on the early trends in the ballots that have been publicly revealed ahead of this year's announcement, it seems unlikely that is going to change this year, as Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina and Curt Schilling look once again likely to fall short of the necessary 75 percent threshold.
Barring a change of heart from the voters, it's difficult to see when we might next induct a starting pitcher. Johan Santana becomes eligible for the ballot next year, but as great as he was at his peak, he only has 139 career wins and 2,025 innings pitched, and the electorate has traditionally ignored starting pitchers with those kinds of totals. The only pitchers in the Hall with fewer wins than Santana are relievers (Bruce Sutter, Goose Gossage and Rollie Fingers) and Satchel Paige, who was inducted based on what he did in the Negro Leagues, having been kept out of Major League Baseball during his prime because of segregation.
Roy Halladay probably has the best shot among the upcoming additions to the ballot, though with just 203 wins and 2,749 innings, he falls well short of the average Hall of Fame pitcher's totals in those categories: 253 wins and 3,801 innings. Halladay will be an interesting test case for voters, forcing the electorate to consider whether they'll adjust the numbers used as selective criteria to fit a modern game in which starters simply don't pitch as often.
And, realistically, without a change in those criteria, modern pitchers will have no shot at election. Do you know how many active pitchers have thrown 3,000 innings -- a mark reached by 54 of the pitchers in the Hall of Fame -- in their career? Two: Bartolo Colon and CC Sabathia. Colon is a very unlikely Hall of Fame candidate, while Sabathia seems like a bubble guy at best, as his numbers are inferior to Mussina's across the board. If the electorate considers Mussina to not be clearly worthy of induction, it's very difficult to see how Sabathia would get in.
Among active pitchers with a real shot at Cooperstown, based on what they've done so far, you're probably looking at Clayton Kershaw (only 1,760 innings, but a 2.37 ERA, and still just 28), with Felix Hernandez (2,415 innings, 3.16 ERA) and Justin Verlander (2,339 innings, 3.47 ERA) hanging around as options if they can sustain quality performances for the next few years. For everyone else, the bar is simply set too high.
Even two-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer, who has developed into one of the best pitchers of his time, is a big long shot at this point. Already 32, he's only thrown 1,696 innings and has just 125 wins. He'd have to pitch until he's nearly 40 to rack up the kind of career totals that have been required for entry. Or, to put it another way, Scherzer isn't even halfway to Mussina's totals in wins or innings pitched, and if you adjust for the run environments of the times they pitched in, his relative run prevention (82 ERA-minus, or 18 percent better than league-average) he is exactly equal to Mussina's career mark.
Because of a variety of factors -- the five-man rotation, the expanding number of innings pitched by relievers and the increasing strikeout rate running up pitch counts -- modern starting pitchers simply have a different mandate than starters before them. It is almost impossible to imagine a modern starting pitcher throwing 4,000 innings these days. Sabathia, for instance threw 180 innings at age 20, which no team lets their young hurlers do anymore, and, despite being remarkably healthy in his career, he's still 832 innings shy of 4,000 by age 35.
Even 3,000 innings is now a pretty significant accomplishment, but that's on the low end of starting pitcher totals for enshrined Hall of Famers. It's going to take some kind of special case for pitchers to even match Mussina's 3,500 innings pitched, and he can't get in the door because enough voters have decided he wasn't quite dominant enough.
This "aces or nothing" standard, when combined with the desire for pitchers to throw 15 to 20 full seasons in order to accrue the counting stats voters look for, make the bar unreasonably high for the modern starting pitcher. Kershaw will probably get in, assuming his back problems don't derail his career the way they did for Santana, but every other active pitcher is unlikely to get elected under the current standards.
We're not holding players at any other position to this standard. We're electing outfielders and catchers, and even relief pitchers that ended up in their ninth inning role because they weren't good enough to start. We accept that modern players at every other position are Hall of Famers.
It's time to accept that modern starting pitchers are also worthy of enshrinement. The fact that the game has changed simply means that our methods and tools for evaluating worthy pitchers should also change, or else we're going to end up with a Hall of Famous Hitters and Closers.