Jacob deGrom Is a Litmus Test for Hall of Fame Voters
Earlier this week, my colleague Jay Jaffe touched a bit on Jacob deGrom and his Hall of Fame case. Since the world can always use more sentences describing how awesome deGrom is, and because I’m fascinated by how his Hall of Fame case will look to voters sometime in the mid-2030s, I decided to dig a little more into his future candidacy and reasonable expectations for what the end of his career can add to his record. I also wanted to explore what deGrom’s case means for 2010s/2020s Hall of Fame starting pitcher representation more broadly.
This has been a concern of mine for a while, and I talked a bit about it last year in the context of Chris Sale’s marvelous comeback season. This piece has stuck with me as it was one of those rare articles in which the act of writing it changed my opinion somewhat. At the start, my thought process was “with a less than 50% chance of finishing with 200 wins, Sale probably won’t be in the Hall of Fame, and may be too borderline for even me.” But then I projected the rest of the league, and for the first time ever in ZiPS, not a single pitcher who hadn’t already passed 200 wins was projected to have a 50% chance of reaching that milestone. So, perhaps Sale should get to Cooperstown even if he falls short of that threshold, because if the writers don’t vote for him on the grounds that he didn’t get to 200 wins, how could we justifiably elect any future starting pitcher?
As of June 2024
| Player | W | Debut | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Justin Verlander | 260 | 2005 |
| 2 | Max Scherzer | 214 | 2008 |
| 3 | Clayton Kershaw | 210 | 2008 |
| 4 | Gerrit Cole | 145 | 2013 |
| 5 | Johnny Cueto | 144 | 2008 |
| 6 | Lance Lynn | 138 | 2011 |
| 7 | Charlie Morton | 133 | 2008 |
| 8 | Chris Sale | 128 | 2010 |
| 9 | Carlos Carrasco | 109 | 2009 |
| 10 | Kyle Gibson | 108 | 2013 |
| 11 | Wade Miley | 108 | 2011 |
| 12 | Yu Darvish | 107 | 2012 |
| 13 | Sonny Gray | 105 | 2013 |
| 14 | Dallas Keuchel | 103 | 2012 |
When I wrote last year’s piece, there were only 11 pitchers between 100 and 200 wins, a shockingly tiny number. And of those 11, only one is in a better position to win 200 games now than he was then: Sonny Gray, who has added 12 wins and is having a fairly typical season by his standards. As far as the other 10 are concerned… Gerrit Cole is out until well into 2026 due to elbow surgery, and Sale has missed a bunch of time this year from injuries. Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson have both since retired, Johnny Cueto has all but officially done the same, and Carlos Carrasco and Dallas Keuchel are in the minors and, for the purposes of this exercise, might as well be retired. Wade Miley has one win this season and is currently out with forearm pain in his comeback from Tommy John surgery. Yu Darvish, who didn’t make his season debut until July, has moved only two wins closer to 200 in his age-38 season. As a Baltimore native, I’m not psychologically prepared to talk about Charlie Morton’s progress.
The good news is eight new pitchers have joined the 100-win club this season, but none of them look to be on a path to 200 wins right now.
| Pitcher | Wins | Debut | Age | ZiPS Projected Final Wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jose Quintana | 112 | 2012 | 36 | 134 |
| Kevin Gausman | 110 | 2013 | 34 | 148 |
| Patrick Corbin | 109 | 2012 | 35 | 128 |
| Michael Wacha | 109 | 2013 | 34 | 146 |
| José Berríos | 108 | 2016 | 31 | 144 |
| Aaron Nola | 105 | 2015 | 32 | 152 |
| Kyle Hendricks | 103 | 2014 | 35 | 119 |
| Nathan Eovaldi | 102 | 2011 | 35 | 136 |
Of these eight, only Nola projects with a 50% chance to get to even 150 wins. While it’s theoretically possible for most of the eight to get to 200 wins, it would require an unusually robust late-career surge. During the Wild Card era, only 10 pitchers have amassed 90 wins after their age-34 season, and almost all of them were in the early part of the era; pitcher workloads have continued to drop, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever.
ZiPS projects only four other pitchers to have a 50% shot at reaching 150 wins: Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, George Kirby, and Paul Skenes.
Rewind ZiPS a decade, and it gave 17 active pitchers a 50% chance to win 200 games. Nine eventually did hit that milestone, and Cueto, the only member of the other eight who is still technically active, isn’t going to do it.
So, let’s run the ZiPS projections for the remainder of deGrom’s contract with the Rangers, beginning in 2026 and running through 2028 — assuming Texas picks up his club option for that season. ZiPS was really worried about his health entering the season, for very obvious reasons, and while he just missed his most recent scheduled start due to shoulder fatigue, the injury is not believed to be a long-term issue. His projected workloads in future seasons have increased now that he’s stayed mostly healthy in 2025.
| Year | W | L | ERA | G | GS | IP | H | ER | HR | BB | SO | ERA+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 8 | 5 | 3.50 | 26 | 26 | 138.7 | 117 | 54 | 19 | 31 | 149 | 116 | 2.7 |
| 2027 | 7 | 6 | 3.81 | 25 | 25 | 132.3 | 120 | 56 | 20 | 32 | 135 | 107 | 2.0 |
| 2028 | 6 | 6 | 4.20 | 23 | 23 | 122.0 | 117 | 57 | 20 | 32 | 119 | 97 | 1.4 |
Give deGrom the 21 projected wins for 2026-28 and a couple September wins this year, and that gets him to 123 for his career. In his piece, Jay brought up Sandy Koufax while discussing deGrom, and I think it’s an apt comparison.
| Pitcher | W | L | IP | K | ERA | ERA+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sandy Koufax (1961-1966) | 129 | 47 | 1632.7 | 1713 | 2.19 | 156 | 46.3 |
| Sandy Koufax (Career) | 165 | 87 | 2324.3 | 2396 | 2.69 | 131 | 54.5 |
| Jacob deGrom (Proj. Career) | 117 | 80 | 1928.3 | 2253 | 2.82 | 141 | 52.8 |
Koufax’s peak was more concentrated and more impactful in individual seasons than deGrom’s, but as I said about Johan Santana when he was on the Hall of Fame ballot, if your best years are being mentioned in conversation with those of Koufax, you must have been a dynamite pitcher. To me, from a pure dominance perspective, Peak deGrom isn’t that far behind Peak Koufax; certainly, the gap isn’t wide enough to keep deGrom out of Cooperstown considering pretty much everyone views Koufax as a no-doubt, inner-circle Hall of Famer.
Of course, it’s an inauspicious sign for deGrom that I’m using Santana as the other not-quite-Koufax comp, given that Santana went one-and-done on the ballot. But I’m hopeful that time is on deGrom’s side here. Santana was knocked off the ballot in the 2018 election, and the demographics of BBWAA members who stick around long enough to earn a Hall of Fame vote have changed a lot over the last decade. In fact, the BBWAA didn’t open up membership to internet-based writers — a group that tends to be more versed in analytics — until after the 2007 season, and many of these stathead members couldn’t vote when Santana was eligible. That will be different by the time deGrom hits the ballot in roughly eight or so years.
By then, it’ll be nearly 20 years of writers seeing starter workloads change, and maybe voters will have figured out how to account for the fact that the role of a starting pitcher is very different in the 2020s than it was in the 1990s, let alone in the days of Old Hoss Radbourn. The trio of former Cy Young winners in their 40s — Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Zack Greinke — will likely be in Cooperstown by the time deGrom hits the ballot. Clayton Kershaw is only three months older than deGrom, but considering the Dodgers icon debuted six years earlier, it feels all but guaranteed that he will be the first of the two to retire, meaning he will also enter the Hall before deGrom becomes eligible. If that happens, Kershaw will be the last of his kind to be voted in by the writers, setting the stage for a new standard for starters to make it to Cooperstown. That is, unless Kershaw is to be the last-to-debut Hall of Fame starting pitcher.
I can’t imagine that will be the case, but it is true that over the next decade, the BBWAA has some interesting philosophical questions to answer about the nature of starting pitcher greatness. I’m not sure what those answers will be, but I do know that deGrom will be instrumental in determining them.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
Thank you Dan, very cool!
I don’t know how the voting’s going to go, or even whether this argument ought to be persuasive or not, but for a pure-peak pitcher who has even fewer career IP than Koufax, the better comparison may be to elite relievers. According to this projection he’ll have like 50% more career IP than Mariano Rivera (who had a much better ERA-), or 80% more than Trevor Hoffman (with a comparable ERA-). Does the leverage difference make up that gap or not? IDK.
I mean DeGrom is obviously a better Hall of Fame candidate than Kenley Jansen. He has about the same ERA- and FIP- but over 50% more innings.
But I think the voters have already established they think relievers need a lower bar to get in. I don’t know how one convinces voters that in the 2010s every pitcher is a reliever so we can stop with the multiple standards.
Is 50% more innings enough to balance out the fact that you don’t get to pick the innings? I am genuinely unsure about this question and would want some kind of quantitative look at this ratio before voting, if I were voting. In the past the overwhelming IP difference between starters and relievers has made this a more convincing argument just on its face.
If de Grom is the future of “starters” in the Hall vote and not just a unicorn-like outlier — the latter I think is far more likely — then we need to figure the leverage question out better.
He’s got something like 50% more RE24 than Jansen, and he has nearly twice as much fWAR and RA9-WAR despite (I’m pretty sure about this) adjustments to leverage in WAR. So, yeah, I think it’s more than enough. Aside from saves, which are arguably an even more made-up stat than pitcher wins, deGrom has a massive advantage in almost everything except rate stats, where he’s roughly the same.
Sadtrombone not throwing shade at Jansen challenge
(impossible)
Comparing the ERA- of guys who pitch one inning at a time/60 innings per year to guys who go 6 innings at a time, 150+ per year seems like a bad idea.
Also, the leverage is baked into their WAR and DeGrom comes out comfortably ahead of Mariano and wayyyy ahead of Hoffman.
They’re probably going to have to come up with a new statistic to base a pitcher’s candidacy on, as I bet 200 wins becomes 150 wins becomes … what? Is 120 wins Hall of Fame worthy twenty years from now?
I’d argue for a recalibration of what constitutes a “win” – I have no idea what that looks like, to be fully clear, but something different than whatever currently makes a “win” (quotes for emphasis, not for detracting). Joe Posnanski has played around with some hypotheticals there that are at least fun to think about.
I’d love to see a hypothetical wins leaderboard if a “win” was determined by the pitcher on the winning team to accrue the most WPA in a single game, and a “loss” to be determined by the pitcher on the losing team to accrue the most negative WPA in a single game.
With a “tiny bit” of help, the splits leaderboards can get pretty close.
Fangraphs would have to add WPA to one of the tabs, add a notation indicating game 1/2 for double headers and the opponent would be nice.
Then it’d just be an export and some Excel/python/etc work 🙂
What’s the equivalent of a 5IP, 7ER “win” under this accounting? If anybody has too much free time, I’d be curious to know the single worst WPA ever to get a WPA-win.
A new statistic…one that accounts for both quality and quantity of pitched innings…one that perhaps accounts for fielding defense behind the pitcher but perhaps not.
Such a statistic warn’t be possible.
There’s a view on Baseball Savant that lets you break down defensive performance by pitcher!
Here’s 2025.
C’mon, FanGraphs! Give me a defense-adjusted RA9-WAR!!!
I think we should look into Cy Young voting shares. While not perfect, voters do a pretty good job of measuring the top pitchers in nay good year regardless of the standards of the time. I would love to see how such a measurement scale would line up with guys we think pass the eye test for who should be in and who should not…
Unless a) pitchers evolve to the point that their arms can withstand and can again begin compiling counting stats into later age, or b) pitchers stop throwing max effort all the time and hitters collectively agree to not tee off while lineup construction goes back to including more ‘dead spots’ with fewer potential threats to go yard, then c) there must be some kind of mindset shift or valuation of what a Hall of Fame starting pitcher looks like. I have no interest in a hall that doesn’t include the best of the best players at their position from a given era, and I simply don’t believe that there are zero hall of fame pitchers (beyond the three or four we can agree on) active in baseball today.
I’m increasingly agreeing with other conceptions (Mike Petriello is the one immediately coming to mind) some kind of rolling evaluation is needed to account for shorter careers (Jay talked about that in his Notebook update Wednesday). I would be very excited to have Sale, DeGrom, Wheeler, and Cole as a batch of starting pitchers who should get in. I think they’re all Hall of Famers, and would go to Cooperstown to see those plaques.
Otherwise, i’ll be old and gray before Paul Skenes gets inducted in like, what, twenty to twenty five years? (Ugh. I did the age calculation on that. Would not recommend.)
Alternatively, teams could push the fences back. Or MLB could deaden the ball somewhat.
The real question is whether there is a way to lessen the effectiveness of high velocity. I still attend a about a dozen games a year and the ballpark experience is sometimes tedious when the game evolves into a game of catch between the pitcher and the catcher. Hitters are never going to be able to make consistent contact against velocity that is only going to increase as more 6’5″ pitchers are developed. At the same time more pitches are being developed. The sweeper didn’t enter the lexicon until around 2020. I find the balance between pitcher and hitter to be far too slanted in favor of the pitcher. The obvious fact that a higher percentage of runs are scored on home runs exemplifies this all too clearly. There is a possible solution but it strikes at the heart of the game. Baseball is the only major sport that has done nothing of significance to help the hitters. Football has limited defenses and put skirts on the QB’s, basketball has widened the lane and added the 3-point line while hockey removed the center red line. Move the mound back to 62′. 1893 is a long time ago and it appears that, despite the hitters also getting much bigger and stronger, that the line at which the quickness of the human body can react to velocity has been reached. It is news when a hitter hits a home run off a 100 mph heater and those pitches are becoming more common every day. My question is if the distance to the plate was increased would maxing out for velocity lose its effective advantage and would pitchers then lessen their effort on every pitch and keep their arms attached more than is presently the case. If hitters were able to increase their contact rates then strikeouts would drop and averages would rise. Then home run rates would need to return to the level of previous eras to prevent the pendulum from swinging to far and a new balance could be achieved.
I think if you moved the mound back and deadened the ball, that might be interesting? If you just move the mound back, I think hitters will benefit too much.
And if you do both it really is saying to pitchers “you’re going to allow more contact but contact will not hurt as bad”.
The Atlantic League experiment with the mound moved back did not yield better offense.
ABS might push velocity down. I think more balls are called strikes than the other way. You could also just drop the top of the zone slightly, where the highest velocity is most effective.
The Atlantic League is hardly the place to measure the effectiveness of anything. The experiment was very brief and the quality of the players was not close to even the low level minors.
I haven’t researched it too deeply. But I’m a purist, I care about continuity, so I don’t like the idea of moving the mound back any more than I like the idea of changing the base paths, unless it becomes evident it’s the only solution that works. I thought moving the fences back might be a good compromise, because outfields were historically larger, and it reduces the risk of home runs, which in turn may incentivize pitchers to put the brakes on velocity a little. If the value of fielding outs can be increased such that strikeouts and velocity become less attractive run-prevention means at scale, it seems like a worthy trade off. Hitters would hopefully respond by hitting for contact more. But I’m open to hearing objections, this is thinking off the cuff. I guess it’s not obvious pitchers would willingly slow themselves down
Good article and I think he should be in.
Not to nitpick, but shouldn’t this be 117 (as per the table comparing him to Koufax) and not 123? He has 94 wins right now, so 123 would mean either you project him to win 8 games the rest of this year or to pitch after 2028.
“Give deGrom the 21 projected wins for 2026-28 and a couple September wins this year, and that gets him to 123 for his career.“
deGrom is so fascinating because he has good arguments for letting him in and not letting him in. I’m still leaning towards not because I don’t think his prime was long enough, but I think his next few years will have an impact on that. The trouble with co.paring him (or any modern player) to Koufax was that his short career was due to medical limitations. There’s obviously no guarantee that post-TJ Koufax would have been as dominant or even as good, but it’s almost certain that his career would have been prolonged. It feels different from guys today who just huck the ball as hard and twisty as possible until their arm.explodes and then don’t know how to pitch when they lose their velocity. I don’t think deGrom falls into that latter group, but it also makes it tough to figure out who is actually HOF worthy.
Degrom is not a hall of fame pitcher ,not getting in
Good job, good effort.
Can I hear what Chloe has to say? She may have a better take than her old man
Not nearly enough pitchers in the HOF.
Imo he’s probably not a hall of famer. Definitely a hall of very good and certainly a hall of what if? But he just doesn’t have the longevity or durability
Give him another couple healthy years and I think he makes it – gotta get that 7YP over 40 to get out of that Gooden/Guidry range…but he actually only has five 4-WAR seasons so far (by any reckoning) so he’s got plenty of space to goose it.
https://www.fangraphs.com/graphsw.aspx?players=10954,1007124&wg=1
Couldn’t be simpler… deGrom just has to add like 2 9-10 fWAR seasons and his WAR Graph will look pretty much just like Koufax (except deGrom would have a much stronger right half)
🙂
Interesting fact about Koufax: He made relief appearances in all but two of his major-league seasons. DeGrom has never made a relief appearance in his career. Doesn’t mean anything, I just thought it was interesting. Koufax was one of the last starting pitchers whose manager used him as an occasional “stopper.”
Randy Johnson with the Mariners. Not just the 95 playoff appearance, but he worked out of the pen in ’96 when he couldn’t start.
He also had one at the end of the 1997 season so that he could get his 20th win, despite being slated to start in the playoffs 4 days later.
The big problem with the “we have to adjust the pitcher bar for Hall of Famers because otherwise we won’t have any Hall of Fame pitchers after Kershaw / Verlander / Scherzer / Greinke” is that it’s being applied to contemporaries of probable / definite Hall of Fame pitchers. deGrom’s career looks like it’s going overlap to a considerable degree as Scherzer and Kershaw (although only from deGrom’s side) and Chris Sale, who I think has a decent chance of getting in. Gerrit Cole’s health could easily keep him out but his career will also overlap substantially with deGrom’s and he has a shot because he was very good before he got hurt and he’s already about 70% of the way there. And deGrom himself could have more years like this one if he stays healthy (don’t laugh!) and put himself in that conversation, or if more voters start caring more about peak instead of career padding (okay, you can laugh at that one).
It was even worse when people were trying to do this with Felix Hernandez. You can make a case for him but not when that case is “pitcher workloads have changed, so no one is going to get in anymore.” There are at least four starters who are going to get inducted after his career ended, with potential for more.
Proud member of teams “Save the Felix energy for Cole Hamels” and “Justice for Tim Hudson,” ahaha.
But I do think it’s worth noting in the “Peak” conversation that DeGrom’s only hit 4 WAR/15 RE24 five times.
Kid’s pitched 400 innings over the last 6 seasons.
There is also a valid point about the role of starting pitchers & how many should get in.
If the best are pitching 175 innings a year & only lasting 10-12 years, the cold reality is they’re NOT accruing the value that typically gets a player in the HOF. They’re not playing as much per year & not having long enough careers.
Do you lower the line to keep the same # flowing in? Make it like relievers where only the best of the best get in?
I don’t know the answers, but, I will say the NBA doesn’t induct the best 6th man in their HOF & the NFL doesn’t induct the best 3rd down RB or middle LB’s that don’t play on passing downs…but, they will put in true stars who are great for 5-6 years but get hurt & either retire or play with less effectiveness.
Maybe that allows a Wheeler type to get in?
Hey now – Hondo’s in the Hall!
You mean the guy who led the league in minutes twice and was under 30 minutes a game only in the first and third seasons of a 16 year career? That “sixth man”?
Yes.
That 6th man.
Do you not know what the term means?
He’s not a 6th man in the sense of what I meant. Really hard to find how many games he started because NBA stats weren’t good back in the day, but, he was over 35 minutes a game, including 5 straight years over 40, most of his career and averaged 36.6/game for his career.
He basically played a starters minutes even when he was a 6th man.
Oh, for sure – he was always finishing the game, even when he didn’t start.
Like Manu Ginobli (another Hall of Famer, who only started a third of his games).
As is Michael Cooper, who was more of a true Sixth Man than Havlicek..
Manu Ginobli, too!
Coop & Manu are the 2 true exceptions in 65+ years.
& they’re truly the exceptions- great players on dynasties that won 4-5 titles who probably would have started in the vast majority of situations, but, due to the teams they were on didn’t.
I think the article works better if we think of deGrom as a way into the discussion of what’s coming. deGrom comes up short on WAR totals/innings/etc because he got the late start and because of the many injuries. His two best years came in 2018 and 2019, seasons when a dozen or more pitchers (including him) threw over 200 innings. It also seems reasonable to think that if he had been healthy since then, he would have been allowed to throw around 200 IP per season, having demonstrated that he could handle the workload. This is how contemporaries like Cole, Wheeler, Nola, Scherzer, and Verlander were handled. Similarly, Sale’s injuries were what limited his innings from 2019 through 2023, and what caused the Braves to use him so carefully in 2024.
Even with the late start, a healthy deGrom probably puts up another 550-600 IP and 7ish WAR from 2021-2024, putting him over 2,000 IP and 50 WAR.
And even with all of that said, he’s still an interesting test case for the wins question. We will get to see how the voters had a guy who has so few wins but was so great.
Well said.
Really enjoyed the article.
I’m curious how many players have had their individual performances overshadowed by stats that are team based when it comes to making a HOF case. It feels like this is primarily a pitcher issue.
Take Degrom for example. He came up at 26 in 2014 and and was under team control through the 2020 season. In that time of team control outside of his control he had his insanely awesome 1.70 ERA, 9 war season. Though with 10 wins and 9 losses.
I feel like wins for pitchers at this point should be a bonus HOF category at this point. Because if a hitter ends up on a team that goes 77-85 and goes say .285/.450/.600 with 45 hrs, 110 RBIs, and 100 Runs the team record doesn’t seem to follow them when they make their HOF case.
I’ll start off by saying that I’ll take the under on him getting in via the BBWAA. I think it’s going to take them a while to adjust to the new reality.
And yeah, we’re testing the waters a bit right now with Felix (who I’ll admit did better in the first ballot than I thought he would). But Felix has 169 wins and 2700+ IP which I think is easier for the voters to wrap their minds around.
I also think he’ll suffer from the fact that he’s going to come onto the ballot shortly after Verlander, Scherzer, and Kershaw. While not a 100% contemporary of those 3, his career had a lot of overlap with theirs. Which won’t make him look good by comparison.
Finally, I’ll just say that I find the Koufax comparison a bit strained. He had two “Koufax-like” seasons. Which I don’t think is that unusual.
I think of “Koufax-like seasons” as a year where a pitcher has 8 or more wins using three different WAR systems. Just complete, unambiguous dominance. Koufax had three of those that I know of.
By that standard, deGrom has only one (I think fWAR, VORP, and RA9-WAR). But so do a lot of other all-time great pitchers. I’m pretty sure Roy Halladay, Zack Greinke, John Smoltz, Clayton Kershaw, and Justin Verlander only had one.
There’s a reason why Sandy Koufax is synonymous with dominant performances. He was the Pedro of his era.
That’s a fair and objective way of doing it. I was doing a quick and dirty and trying to give deGrom the benefit of the doubt. Either way, he clearly falls short of Koufax.
And while his two-year peak was amazing, there are plenty of pitchers who have similar two-year peaks (plus careers) who aren’t in the HOF and got very little consideration for it. And I can’t come up with a compelling reason why we should consider deGrom above those others. As we’ve both pointed out, the “Era argument” doesn’t really hold up.
Don’t think it is totally fair to compare by WAR figures when Koufax was pitching way way way more innings. Koufax’s 9 win seasons came in years he was starting 40 games and throwing 320ish innings. DeGrom’s 9 win season came in like 30 starts, 220 innings.
Though I don’t really understand why / how Koufax’s WAR isn’t even higher than it already is in his dominant years. DeGrom had a 62 FIP- in 2019 in 217 innings, good for 9 fWAR. In 1963, Koufax had a 62 FIP- in 311 innings and had only 9.2 fWAR. I don’t totally understand how that’s possible (I’m probably missing something obvious).
Park adjustments and iffb’s seem to be the likely culprits of the discrepancy in WAR/inning with equivalent FIP- numbers if I’m reading the glossary correctly. This was a fun question to ponder!
This really makes me wonder why we don’t use some kind of park adjusted AND league scaled stat like wRC+ for pitchers. I guess WAR/IP is that but I’d like WAR/IP minus scaled like FIP-
Excellent point, Scottbot. To get a complete picture, I average bWAR and fWAR (using only positive-WAR seasons, as negative-WAR seasons are best viewed as “minor-league seasons”). I then calculate the rate of WAR/(220 IP). DeGrom is currently second(!) since 1900 for starting pitchers (omitting the Negro Leagues), with a rate of 6.66 WAR/(220 IP). Pedro Martinez is first at 6.78, with Kershaw and Clemens 3rd and 4th at 6.18 and 6.09. Koufax is 16th at 5.24, right behind Verlander at 5.28.
What about Peak Rate performance in WAR/(220 IP)? I use a 5-year (non-consecutive) peak, as 7 yrs is just too broad for my understanding of the word “peak”. 5th thru 9th place on that Peak Rate list are Kershaw, DeGrom, Sale, Verlander, and Scherzer. Koufax is only 24th on that list, because he pitched so many innings to accumulate his WAR.
Sure, DeGrom has somewhat fewer total WAR than most HOF pitchers–but he’s achieved them in MUCH fewer innings than they have achieved theirs. Rates are, um, kind of important in evaluating baseball players! I have a formula that ranks all AL/NL starting pitchers since 1900, which combines total Peak WAR production, Peak Rate, total non-Peak WAR production, and total non-Peak rate into one final “HOF value”. This is somewhat similar to what JAWS does, except Jaffe won’t use fWAR info, or rate info–why, I don’t know).
By that formula, DeGrom is 48th best since 1900 (again, omitting Negro Leagues, about which I am not knowledgeable.) His 10 surrounding pitchers go, in order from best to worst: Saberhagen, Vance, Gooden, Marichal, Feller, DeGrom, Tiant, Hamels, Appier, Kaat, and Waddell.
IMHO all clearly belong in the actual HOF, and five are already in it.
My “personal HOF” desired temporal rate of admission is about .55 pitchers per year since 1900. I use a cutoff minimum for my formula at a point for admission that creates roughly that rate, giving me 72 “deserving” admittees so far. The lowest two are Buehrle and Hershiser. Koufax is 63rd, but would of course rank much higher had he not been injured. DeGrom doesn’t have quite the talent Koufax had, but he has had a better “actual” career, when rates are included, and absolutely deserves to be in any rational HOF. Of course, the actual HOF is far from rational… 🙂
See my response below. Basically, it’s easier to accumulate more WAR per inning if you’re pitching fewer innings since you can go all out. Koufax likely had to hold back more than deGrom, knowing he would be throwing 9 innings every 4 days.
There’s also something that I’ve never liked about how WAR is calculated. Relievers who pitch high-leverage innings get a leverage adjustment to their WAR (this happens for both BR and Fangraphs).
But a starter (e.g, Koufax) pitching those same high-leverage innings gets no leverage adjustment. Koufax was essentially serving as his own setup man and closer, but gets no credit for that.
BTW, here’s some potential support for what I’m saying. BR has splits by run support. Here are Koufax’s ERAs:
0-2 Runs: 2.17 ERA
3-5 Runs: 2.48 ERA
6+ Runs: 3.69 ERA
Here are deGrom’s
0-2 Runs: 2.86 ERA
3-5 Runs: 2.27 ERA
6+ Runs: 2.67 ERA
Obviously, I’m speculating but it seems like Koufax didn’t go all out when he had a big lead because he had to “take breaks” from time to time. Going all out all the time while pitching 300+ innings was simply impossible. deGrom didn’t have that issue with his lighter workload.
Hi, LoC,
No basic disagreement–but I think lower rates due to more IP are influenced less by “not going all out” than they are by simply being “tired” as the innings pile up, in both a game and a season. And in a game, also by hitters being more familiar with the pitcher each time thru the batting order. And in a career, by pitching in “early” and “decline” years, when he is simply not as good as in the middle years. Koufax had 6 early years where he was merely an average pitcher–DeGrom had none, starting in his prime at age 26.
But certainly, rates are not the whole story–Total production is good, too… 🙂 I have a simple way to mix the two: I set a “minimum” rate of WAR/(220 IP), only BEYOND which I give credit for positive value. For the 5 peak years, the minimum is 1.9 WAR per 220 IP, which is close to “average” for pitchers, at least these days. That is, I subtract 1.9 WAR for every 220 IP (proportionally) from the player’s Peak Total WAR. [For non-peak years, I use 1.2 as the subtracted rate. Playing below that min rate results in negative value–HOF’ers shouldn’t be too close to replacement level and still earn credit towards the HOF. 🙂 ]
This partially rewards total production, but the subtracted part increases with IP, hence more is subtracted when the rate is lower. By this measure, Koufax’s Peak score is 28.8, while DeGrom’s is only 22.4. So yes, Koufax was more valuable at his peak than DeGrom, due to greater production outweighing the lower rate, and by almost 30%.
But in non-peak years, above the min rate of 1.2 WAR per 220 IP, Koufax gets only 8.2, but DeGrom gets 12.2 (so far…)
Still, by pitching ALONE, in my overall system, Koufax is still better, 61.6 to 60.1. ( I weight non-peak to peak value at 40-60, and scale the result up after that.) BUT, as does JAWS, I include batting WAR as well, and there is a net difference of almost 7 WAR between DeGrom’s quite decent positive total, and Koufax’s pretty bad, even for a pitcher, negative total. That’s why DeGrom comes out ahead in my overall tally. But again, had Koufax not been injured at 30 yrs. old, he would certainly have finished ahead of deGrom. But that doesn’t mean DeGrom is not a quite deserving, solid HOF’er, at 48th best since 1900, IMHO.
As for leverage, I don’t use it. No relievers make my HOF except Rivera. So the issue of starters not getting credit for it in late innings doesn’t come up. I leave it to others how to put in relievers as they wish–if I had to opine, I’d say just put them in at some rough temporal rate, in order of their ranking by whatever system (for relievers) one likes, but don’t compare them to starters. Maybe put them in at a rate of one every 15 years or so since 1900? I don’t really care…
Honestly, I hate the Dodgers and have no love for Koufax. So I’m not happy defending him. And it’s definitely hard to compare across eras.
But I’ll just point out a couple of things. Koufax led the NL in FIP for 6 straight seasons. The list of pitchers who have done that is Koufax and Mathewson. Now we obviously wouldn’t expect that from deGrom since there are a lot more teams and it’s harder to lead the league in a category. But deGrom doesn’t even have 6 seasons in which he’s pitched enough innings to qualify to lead the league in FIP.
As for Koufax’s early struggles, he debuted in the majors at age 19. deGrom didn’t even debut in the minors till age 22. And as Bill James has pointed out some of Koufax’s early struggles were actually ballpark-related. Once the Dodgers moved to LA, he was in a ballpark that was horrible for him. His road ERAs were often much better than his home ones. The Dodgers then moved into Chavez Ravine in 1962, and his home ERAs were suddenly out of this world. So he probably wasn’t as bad as he appeared early in his career, and maybe not as good as he appeared later in his career. One of the challenges of disentangling performance from context.
Well, I’m not attacking Koufax! Incredible pitcher… Even if, due to his injury-shortened career, he didn’t qualify for my HOF “admissibility” minimum by my formula, I would put him in on “extra credit”: I think when players suffer major mid-career injuries, we should give a bit more consideration to rates and peaks, over total career production, than even my formula does…
But when deGrom has pitched, he’s been the second best pitcher since 1900 in terms of WAR/PA. That’s…also kind of incredible… 🙂 And he does already have about 46 WAR (avg. of bWAR and fWAR.) If he gets to 50, he’d be in the top 90 pitchers for Total Production as well. Combine all that with the 6th best 5-yr. Peak rate, and he’s a HOF’er in my book…
re Koufax’s early years and park context, I use only WAR to rank players, and as I understand it, both fWAR and bWAR adjust for park and league context. The whole point of WAR is to put players in neutral context. And as I’ve said, had Koufax not been injured, and had, say, 3 or 4 more years, even declining at a fairly typical early 30’s rate, he’d finish well ahead of deGrom. But my basic system only uses WAR (and rates of WAR/IP) that actually occurred. And deGrom does get 7 more net WAR for batting…leave that out, and Koufax is already better than deGrom for his actual career, let alone had he not been injured.
But everyone is welcome to use their own system, their own weighting of total Production. vs. Rate, and of non-peak vs. Peak value, their own Peak time period, their own desire for HOF size, etc. I think mine are pretty reasonable, but I would never dispute someone else’s ranking, IF they have a consistently applied quantitative method for all pitchers, in context, and without cherry-picking. My resulting HOF is big enough for both deGrom and Koufax… 🙂
The leverage adjustment is to account for the fact that fWAR values each inning from a starter at 4 times that of a reliever.
In theory I agree with you, but in practice it’s not like that era had a lot of Koufax-like seasons! Between 1955 and 1966 there were only five seasons where a pitcher had more than 8 fWAR. More than half of them was Koufax! It’s true, he threw more than most pitchers in that era but he also wasn’t a huge outlier on it either, and he cleared 8 fWAR so handily in those three years…it’s not like he was just scraping over that line.
It is a super high bar.
Sure but that means Koufax had to pace himself in a way deGrom didn’t have to. He probably had to hold back from time to time knowing he’d be pitching 9 innings every 4 days. Entirely possible that he could have put up 9 WAR in 220 innings pitching under the same conditions deGrom.
Exactly.
There is a story that in 1965 the Dodgers had Koufax throw 150 pitches…in a SPRING TRAINING game. He had hurt his elbow the year before & they wanted to know if he could still pitch 9 innings, since that is what they needed him to do.
Somehow devaluing what he did seems silly to me, since no one comes close to how Koufax was used today.
He averaged over 8 innings per start his last 4 years while starting every 4th day. Degrom has never even averaged 7 innings per start or had more than 32 starts.
degrom will be “a while” though. At minimum 2032 before hof eligible, and I would guess he pitches a couple more years after
And the other 3 likely will as well. Kershaw is the same age as deGrom. Verlander is on record as wanting to pitch till he’s 45. Not sure about Scherzer but hard to imagine him turning down. $5-10M if someone offers it to him.
I think Kershaw is going to retire. He’s been saying it for years, and is pitching fine now, wants to go out w a good year
For me, I really think we just need to wait and see. Okay, 300 wins will probably not happen again, maybe it’s 200. Maybe we need to ditch wins entirely. That’s fine by me, wins are a silly stat anyway.
But if Wheeler or Kershaw or Verlander retire this year, and he might not, we will have five years to see if any pitchers separate themselves from the rest before voting on his case. And probably another 3 years before all of them are in. What happens if Tarik Skubal or Paul Skenes puts up 6 wins a season for the next 6 or 7 years? It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And if they don’t but are still radically better than any of their contemporaries, then we will have a better idea of the adjustments we need to make.
These things are also cyclical. Part of the reason why we had a whole bunch of starters (Pedro, Big Unit, assorted Braves, etc) inducted in the mid-2000s is because if you proved your mettle in the steroid era you looked awesome. Right now pitching is ascendant, so it’s the very elite hitters who look shockingly good. At some point there will be some rule change that will advantage hitters and some pitchers will separate themselves from the pack.
Had never really thought about it in this light before, but that’s a great point.
Also #JusticeforKevinBrownevenifheskindofajerk
Kevin Brown’s issue at this point is less about being a jerk and more about being juiced to the gills.
His body of work thus far is greater then pretty much every reliever in the hall bar one.
This notion of separating relievers and starters is stupid as they are all pitchers and getting outs is your only job. I was and will always be against the induction of part time pitchers for the hall.
DeGrom, by the accepted notion of diminished pitching standards, is a HOFer.
I am not a quack.
Felix Hernandez is the current litmas test with 169 wins and +2500k . He got 20% of the vote to stay on the ballot. He just collapsed as soon as he hit 30. Also of note is how young he and Kershaw were when they debuted that allowed them to bank seasons at a time when most are in the minors.
If deGrom doesn’t get in, we can basically rule out pitchers ever getting in. Guys like Skenes and Skubal are so far away we can’t even pretend like they will make it. The game isn’t going back to finesse and innings pitched, zero shot unless there is drastic rule changes.
Koufax’s peak was substantially more valuable than deGrom’s due to far more innings pitched in those seasons. I just don’t see how a guy with only two 5+ fWAR seasons is Hall of Fame material.
Hey now – he’s got THREE 5+ rWAR seasons!!!
I want him to get to 45 JAWS, personally.
I am not reading through this: deGrom is not a Hall of Famer barring a MASSIVE late career resurgence like Randy Johnson. He has not pitched enough, and I’d be shocked if I will. I am tired of just accepting that starters will pitch minimal innings
Don’t we just slide over from pitching wins to WAR?
Also worth noting that Koufax is at 60 RA/9 WAR, while deGrom is at 48. So he’d have to gain 12 RA/9 WAR in the next several years to match Koufax.
Let them all in.
Even Charlie Morton.
It is a Career Service Award.
Plaques for All.
Dumb take is dumb
If it was under 100 wins we could argue Brandon Webb who has a CY and two second-place finishes but wasn’t fortunate enough to have Tommy John figure out a career-saving fix for shoulders.
Great article, with one maybe-oversight: shouldn’t Wheeler be on one of the active 100-win pitcher lists? Presently at 113.
He’ll be sitting just a little over 50WAR at the end of this contract by ZIPS at age 38… is he really a HOF?
Maybe its time we looked more at Cy Young voting shares than wins for our HOF starters…
Not that it changes things any, but Kyle Hendricks earned his 100th MLB win in his first start in June. He’s now all the way up to … 103.
He’s a soft-tosser, he can pitch til he’s about 57 anyway (years, or average fastball MPH)
For guys that mostly start, I think career War should be the state used. If a guy finishes over 60 career War then it is automatic. 50 to 60 then other factors matter. Less than 50 is no go!
I’ve been following the careers for starting pitchers for along time, and the one thing that is evident above all is the career win totals. To your point the chances of any current starters making the career 200 win list are slim.
It wasn’t that long ago that a starter had to reach the 300 win plateau to get penciled in. Well its been 18 years since that last happened (07Jun,2007/Johnson) and that’s not going to happen again. Then 250 wins became the de facto gold standard. (think the recent induction of CC Sabathia)
That leaves the current crop of Verlander/Kershaw and Scherzer as the ‘last’ of the 200+ club. Beyond them, as you indicated in your article, there is very little chance of any other pitcher reaching that number
The role of the starter has changed. They don’t go as deep since the pitch count era. Fewer qualify with a minimum of 162IP. The case is all too clear. ‘too much too soon’ the emphasis on velo and spin has increased the long term injury rate. The list is long for the highest potential starters failing to make the list. The problem won’t go away as the supply of up and coming pitchers is endless. Regardless, the chance of any one starter lasting long enough in a game or a career to be credited with 200 wins is slight.
So what does the future look like? More ‘openers’ more bulk relievers? Contracts are becoming to expensive to take a long term view on starting pitchers. My guess is that the rotation will centre around the more healthy starter that you can count on, and the rest become part timers until the next up and comer gets a chance. In other words the rotation becomes a rotating (revolving) door. We’re there now, and that won’t change anytime soon
Actually JV has 260 wins, so he’ll probably be the last of the “250” club.
When I read the title of your article, I immediately thought of Johan Santana. He’s a good comp but, as you say, is from a different era.
Anyhow, the problem with even hinting at a Koufax comp is that “peak DeGrom” is really just two years, 2018-19. If you take those two seasons out you get something close to John Lackey, who was a very good pitcher but not a great one. Meaning, is Lackey with two Koufax seasons a Hall of Famer? I’m not so sure. Maybe if you add them to what he did, but probably not if you bump up his two best to Cy Young level.
I think it is also useful to consider “anti-deGroms”: workhorse starters who were very good for a long time, but rarely great. You can contrast him with Andy Pettitte, who pretty much exemplifies this. Pettitte won 256 games with 68.2 fWAR, but isn’t in (yet); on the other hand, the similar Mike Mussina won 270 games with 81.2 fWAR is in the hall. Tom Glavine actually has a bit less WAR (66.7) but won 305 games. Greinke will almost certainly make it and doesn’t have clearly better numbers than Pettitte, but he does have one truly great Cy Young season. Pettitte was just very good for a long time, but never really great. Anyhow, do you vote in DeGrom but not Pettitte?
DeGrom needs to either cruise at his current level for a few years and earn another 10-15 WAR, which would make him a serious but not surefire HoF candidate, and/or have a Sale-esque bounce-back and take home a third Cy Young. If he wins a third CY, he’ll make the Hall, even if is next year and he retires while hoisting his trophy.
With Pettitte, I always thought it was the PED thing that kept him from getting more momentum on the ballot
The good news is, I think deGrom is going to make the decision very easy for people, one way or another.
I can’t think of a single player, who I expect their next three years to look less like their ZIPS projections.
I’m confident that he’ll either be broken, or if healthy, blows those numbers away. Probably not much in between.
If deGrom is healthy enough to pitch 420 innings over the next three years, I’d be almost anything that he blows 6.1 WAR away…
Well said – if he does that volume, he’s adding 10-15 WAR and reaching the 60 range.
That’s a hard no for me. Attendance is part of the grade.
Yeah. The best ability for a SP is availability.
For a group of statistics minded people, many of these takes are simply infuriating. Sandy Koufax obviously belongs in the Hall of Fame but any legitimate argument to compare him to these modern dominant pitchers without reversing the logic is insane. We clearly all love MLB but come on, there was not a legitimate level of leaguewide competition until the 70’s and that was just the bar for the ‘professional’ setting. It didn’t become actually competitive at the margins until the moneyball era. If you’re reading this and thinking ‘get off this guys lawn’ just go ahead and google statements like ‘when did MLB players stop needing second jobs?’
Pitchers didn’t just throw 300 innings back then because they were modern gods it was because they were literally throwing 100+ of those innings to pitchers, guys who hit .210 and bunted all the time and just a bunch of dudes who couldn’t crack a AA team today and found themselves in the majors.
If you were to boil down “MLB” caliber to nothing but genetic athletic potential and not a single other factor there were about 180 million people in the US in 1963, 20 teams and around 180k PAs in a season. Those numbers are around 320 million, 30 and 180k now representing a 50% overall increase in 50% in playing time vs a 78% increase of available talent pool. This also ignores the explosion of international talent available now vs the 1960s.
That type of supply side disparity would be enough alone to explain why the league is more competitive now than when Koufax was playing but it’s absurd to stop there. The professionalism, for better or worse, of today’s game is taking that outsized talent pool and stress testing it for at least a decade before anyone takes a major league at bat (or throws a major league pitch). I don’t know how to quantify it, but I’d estimate that 10 to 15% of the batters that Koufax and Marichal and Bunning were facing had literally never seen a single pitch of their caliber before in their lives. Now the average high school team has a guy throwing in the 90s.
It’s likely that Koufax and DeGrom are both the same number of standard deviations better at pitching than their peers. The biggest difference is that Koufax’s curve was wider and skewed left and DeGrom’s is narrower and most importantly, known.
This is already a long rambling post but the real work in comparing greatness across eras is going to need to center on the overall level of league competition to compare counting stats. Rate and fixed pie stats (like WAR) are already doing this by telling us DeGrom and Kaufax have similar careers when compared to their peers. But the counting stats are gone not because modern pitchers lack the ability to throw 300 innings but because they would get lit up in doing so because the typical 9 hole batter would have been a perennial MVP in 1960 with a time machine.