Which Active Starting Pitchers are on a Hall of Fame Pace in 2025?
Before Opening Day arrives, let’s continue our trip around the league and see what starting pitchers might be on pace for Cooperstown in what’s looking like a transitional era for the role
With our first part looking at position players taken care of, we can now move on to the next focus in the 2025 update to the Future Hall of Fame Series: the starting pitching. And this year’s entry is especially exciting, because it represents something of a full circle moment here.
Last year’s Future Pitchers article was the most dire entry since I started this series, with almost no active pitchers projecting as “on a Hall of Fame pace” and little sign that things would be turning around in the near future. Because of that, I turned my attention towards finding out what got us into this mess, as well as rethinking how the Hall of Fame could evaluate pitchers, with the end result being a pretty in-depth series on the subject.
How the Hall arrived at this point is a multi-faceted issue, but a generalized summary (check those articles out if you’d like to know more) would be “Cooperstown voters have been inflexible at evaluating pitchers, but usually the massive changes that the role was seeing cancelled each other out to some extent, so the Hall could always find some pitchers to induct”.
Something about this seemed to change in the 1990s, though: a string of pitchers with 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts hit the ballot in rapid succession, and writers seemed to respond to this by taking it as a sign that these clubs should be prerequisites for induction, rather than special distinctions for the absolute cream of the crop.
