Félix Hernández’s Hall of Fame Case Will Require a New Perspective
#FélixHoF
On Tuesday, the Baseball Writers Association of America elected Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, and Billy Wagner into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Ichiro’s election was a foregone conclusion ahead of the official announcement — he was included on every single publicly revealed ballot and ultimately missed a unanimous selection by a single vote — and his singular career stood out as an easy inclusion into the inner circle of the sport’s greatest players.
And while Ichiro deserves to bask in every honor and celebration, I can’t help but look towards the future and the other former Mariner on the ballot: Félix Hernández. The King debuted with 20.6% of the vote share — he was tracking at 24.1% in the Ballot Tracker prior to the announcement — a strong showing for a fringe case like his and a good start to his campaign. But the difference between the public votes and his final vote share shows just how much work there’s left to do to convince the electorate of his worthiness.
For some context, Mike Mussina debuted on the ballot with just 20% of the vote in 2014 and took six years to cross the 75% election threshold. Wagner, who debuted in 2015, received just 10.5% in his first year on the ballot and took 10 years to be elected. Edgar Martinez, who enjoyed a spirited Hall of Fame campaign from this very blog, debuted with 36% of the vote and took nine years to be elected. In each of those cases, the electorate had to change the way they thought about the specific positions those players played. As the game has changed and evolved over the years, the role of the designated hitter and relief pitcher have grown in ways that defy comparison to the past, and our standards to evaluate those positions necessarily needed to change and evolve with the game. Mussina’s case was a first step towards reevaluating how we think about starting pitching, but many of his traditional numbers were good enough to earn him election anyway.
If Félix is going to ever get enough support to be elected, it will require a pretty dramatic shift in how we think about and celebrate modern starting pitching. For so long, pitchers have largely been evaluated by hitting milestones in wins, innings pitched, and strikeouts. But those metrics and milestones have largely gone by the wayside as teams have changed the way they deploy starters, limiting their workloads and maximizing the smaller number of innings they’re pitching.
It’s also pretty clear that the rate of starters being elected isn’t keeping up with the number of starters playing in the game these days. Sabathia became the first starter elected since Roy Halladay in 2019 and pitchers like Andy Pettitte and Mark Buehrle have been languishing on the ballot for years. The electorate has been pretty stubborn to change their thinking, and the Hall of Fame cases for players like Johan Santana, Tim Hudson, Pettitte, and Buehrle have suffered as a result.
Increasingly, the electorate will have to start evaluating pitchers within the context in which they played, against their contemporaries who pitched at the same time. Historical comparison just won’t be a useful avenue to think about starting pitching anymore, just like it’s not a useful avenue to think about relief pitchers. That’s where the core of Hernández’s case lies. He had three seven-year spans where he was ranked at least third in baseball in bWAR and had a ten-year peak, from 2007–’15, where he was second in bWAR behind Clayton Kershaw. He was also the 12th-best pitcher of all-time through his age 30 season by fWAR and his Hall of Fame trajectory was only derailed by overuse and the breakdown of his throwing arm.
Among his peers, both during his peak and by age cohort, Hernández was clearly one of the best pitchers in baseball. When looking at who he’s going to be compared to on future Hall of Fame ballots, I think things get a little more optimistic. Over the next four years, the notable starting pitchers who will be eligible for the Hall of Fame include Cole Hamels on the 2026 ballot, Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester on the 2027 ballot, David Price and Stephen Strasburg on the 2028 ballot, and Corey Kluber and Adam Wainwright on the 2029 ballot. Hernández stacks up very favorably against all of those contemporaries.
These are the guys who the writers will be comparing Hernández against and his case looks increasingly stronger once you look closer at the competition. Pettitte gained a pretty sizable vote share on this year’s ballot but his PED connections have always given a particular subset of voters pause. Despite both winning Cy Young awards, Porcello and Arrieta simply didn’t have high enough peaks or long enough careers to compare favorably. The same could probably be said for Strasburg and Kluber, though the latter has two awards to his name. Lester and Price fall short of Hernández in a number of key metrics, while Hamels and Wainwright look like pretty good comps for Félix. If you think any of the other names on this list are Hall of Fame worthy, then King Félix deserves your attention too.
We’re going to come to an inflection point in the next few years where there simply won’t be any pitchers who will come close to any of the traditional milestones starters have been judged by, and will have increasingly shorter peaks in their careers to prevent them from accumulating impressive advanced metrics as well. The voters will have to reexamine how they evaluate pitchers and I believe King Félix is going to be the poster child for that shift. The standards by which we evaluate Hall of Fame caliber players must change with the game, and as more and more modern pitchers reach the ballot in the coming years, people will start to realize just how much Hernández stands out among his peers.