King to Cooperstown? HOF cases for, and against, Félix

Félix Hernández, eligible for the Hall of Fame for the first time this year, sits in the middle of an inflection point in baseball history.

With 169 wins, a 3.42 ERA, a single Cy Young win, and a career that was essentially finished by age 30, he doesn’t measure up by the old-school way of thinking about legendary pitchers. But with only 49.7 WAR (114th among starting pitchers), he may not have the support you’d expect from the new style of thinking, either. It’s a tricky spot, and one that Hall of Fame voters will have to consider for possibly the next decade, assuming that Hernández manages at least the 5% of the vote total that he’ll need to stick around each year.

There’s so, so much to like about Hernández’s career, and in a world where Sandy Koufax -- another pitcher who dominated in his twenties and then was done -- was a first-ballot Hall of Famer, you can’t rule out Hernández following the same track. Can you?

The case against …

There are actually two cases against, really; the traditional case and the advanced case. The traditional case is extremely easy to make, which is that he didn’t throw enough innings, didn’t win enough games, didn’t prevent enough runs. Over his career, Hernández won 169 games, and he threw 2,729 2/3 innings.

Among pitchers born after 1900, seven non-closing pitchers with fewer than 170 wins and 2,800 innings have made the Hall, which sounds promising, but it’s really not, because five of the seven spent most or all of their careers in the Negro Leagues, for which we know we do not have full statistical accounting. The other two were Dizzy Dean, a member of the 1930s “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals, and Koufax, a four-time World Series winner who threw four no-hitters and won three Cy Youngs.

Both Dean (131 ERA+) and Koufax (also a 131 ERA+) were better at run prevention than Hernández (117 ERA+); both Dean and Koufax won MVP awards; both starred in the World Series. That's a wildly unfair thing to put on Hernández -- it’s hardly his fault the Mariners never got there -- yet also won’t be a selling point for him in the minds of today’s voters. If the case is "well, Dean and Koufax did it," then Hernández still has distance to close between him and them, from the traditional view.

The traditional case for Hernández is: there is no traditional case.

He knew it, too, telling MLB.com during his short-lived 2021 attempt to make the Orioles that he figured he needed to reach 200 wins and 3,000 strikeouts.

But, as the game keeps evolving, the traditional case to evaluate starters grows less and less relevant. It’s not going to be about wins and innings, because it can’t be. It’s going to be about evaluating a pitcher compared to the contemporaries of his era, or else no starter is ever going to get in again.

So: What about the more advanced metrics? It’s easy to use those to hesitate including Hernández on the ballot, too. Let’s look at some ranks and contemporaries among starting pitchers, shall we?

• WAR. 49.7, 114th, similar to Jimmy Key and Jamie Moyer.
• JAWS. 44.1, 113th, similar to Frank Viola and Roy Oswalt.
• WAA. 24.4, 63rd, similar to Jimmy Key and Orel Hershiser.

(What’s “JAWS?” It’s a Hall of Fame-specific version of WAR created by Cooperstown expert and FanGraphs writer Jay Jaffe, which attempts to give more credit to a player’s seven-year peak -- thus boosting exactly the kind of Koufax/Hernández short-timers we’re discussing. WAA is Wins Above Average, which is very similar to Wins Above Replacement, except it compares to an average player, and isn’t that what a Hall of Famer should be -- much better than average, not just a fill-in?)

If you’re looking for an obvious case, the most prominent advanced stats aren’t going to help you on the surface, either. So what is the case in his favor?

The case for …

There has to be a case for, and there is -- a potentially good one, depending on how you view these things. Two of them, actually.

1. Because the peak was that good.

In January 2024, we looked at the changing ways in which Hall of Fame starting pitchers should be evaluated and came away with the idea that a good place to start would be in seeing how often the best pitcher in the sport across a seven-year span did or should get in, and it was satisfying: 16 of the last 20 leaders in WAR across seven-year spans are in already or clearly will be in (like Max Scherzer and Clayton Kershaw), and two of the ones who didn’t, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling, had obviously-worthy cases sidelined by off-field issues.

Hernández didn’t rank first in any seven-year span, though he was second from 2009-’15, and third from 2007-’13 and 2008-’14. Is being a clearly top-three starter across several years good enough? Maybe, but it’s also not the full story, because Hernández’s peak wasn’t seven years. It was nine, perhaps 10.

From 2007-’15, he was second in WAR only to Kershaw, meaning you could easily say Hernández was the best pitcher in the American League for basically a full decade. He was three outs shy of being tied for the most innings thrown, and only four pitchers -- one already a Hall of Famer, and two more likely to get there -- had a better ERA+ than he did, among those with 500 innings pitched.

That peak included the 2010 Cy Young, five years with down-ballot MVP placements and six All-Star appearances. So let’s expand that best-of-seven-years exercise to best-of-ten-years. If you’re the best pitcher across the sport for an entire decade, shouldn’t that be enough?

If we go back to 1950, there are nineteen pitchers who were the best pitcher in the sport across a 10-year span. Hernández is one of them.

• In the Hall of Fame (13): Robin Roberts, Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Jim Bunning, Don Drysdale, Juan Marichal, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, Phil Niekro, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, Roy Halladay

• Will clearly be inducted in the near future (2): Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw

• Not in (2): Dave Stieb, Ron Guidry

• Had a no-doubt-deserving on-field career (1): Roger Clemens

• Is Félix Hernández (1): Félix Hernández

That’s sixteen of the previous eighteen best-for-a-decade guys who are in, will be in, or missed only due to off-field problems. Between 2005-’14, Hernández was The Best Pitcher In Baseball. Even if that was a bit of a low point for being the best -- only Guidry’s 1978-’87 run as The Best was meaningfully lower -- it is still The Best.

Is being the best across an entire decade not good enough? If it’s not, it’s because ...

2. What did we really miss in his thirties?

The main strike against Hernández, if you can get past the lack of postseason heroics that had little to do with him anyway, is that he was finished as an above-average pitcher by 29, and finished entirely by 33, leading to those unimpressive innings, wins, and WAR totals.

Put it this way: again, looking at pitchers born after 1900, Hernández was the 12th-best pitcher of all-time through his age 29 season, with nine of the 11 ahead of him in the Hall and Clemens remaining a special case. From age 30 on, he was worth ... 0.0 WAR. He pitched, sometimes, and not well.

Hernández didn’t need to maintain ace-level performance, because he’d pitched so well that even merely average performance would have rounded out the case well enough. A good comparison point might be with CC Sabathia, a contemporary who is also on the ballot for the first time this year.

Through age 29, they were quite similar.

• Hernández: 49.9 WAR, 128 ERA+ in 2,268 IP, AL CY in 2010
• Sabathia: 43.4 WAR, 123 ERA+ in 2,127 IP, AL CY in 2007

Starting at age 30, they were ... extremely dissimilar.

• Hernández: 0.0 WAR, 84 ERA+ in 467 IP
• Sabathia: 18.5 WAR, 106 ERA+ in 1,450 IP

Sabathia had good years at 30 and 31, but spent the rest of his career with the Yankees as an average-ish, injury-prone decent mid-rotation starter, becoming the definition of leaving it all out on the field when he blew out his shoulder on his last-ever pitch.

In Sabathia’s thirties, he was roughly as valuable as Danny Duffy, Doug Fister and Hisashi Iwakauma, players who won’t ever come near a Hall of Fame ballot. Should throwing a handful of generally unmemorable seasons be the difference between a likely first-ballot selection and not being in at all?

On the other hand, because he wasn’t throwing those innings, someone else had to, and there's value in that, too. Imagine the 2021 Mariners, who finished two games out of the Wild Card, if they'd received average (2 WAR) performance from Hernández instead of, say, the 15 starts of minus-1.9 WAR they got out of Justus Sheffield. It all matters.

Again: Nothing about this case is a simple one.

All of which means …

He wants it, obviously. When asked back in 2021 why he was in Orioles camp trying to make the roster of a team that would go onto lose 110 games that year, he was quite clear about it.

"The Hall of Fame," Hernández said. "I think I have a shot, but I have a few numbers that need to tick up. If I get to those goals, I think I have a good shot at the Hall of Fame."

He never threw another pitch in the Majors. The traditional numbers are against him. Some of the most popular advanced stats are, too. As Jaffe, the Hall of Fame expert, posted while we were writing this piece, “I’ll vote for Sabathia on this ballot, [but] I’m not sure I can justify voting for Hernández.” It’s an uphill climb; you’ll note that Key appeared multiple times as a comparable above, and he received all of three votes in his lone year on the ballot.

The best case for him, really, might be about the knowledge that right now, we’re slowly changing the way we think about starting pitchers getting to the Hall, and that process is likely to accelerate over the next decade. It would be a shame if Hernández were the next Johan Santana or Lou Whitaker or Kenny Lofton, bounced from the ballot after just a single year, and forever considered a regretful miss.

Nothing about Hernández’s career will change over the next decade. The way we think about it just might.