Wheeler isn't just an ace, he might be a Hall of Famer

When the results of the NL Cy Young Award balloting are released on Wednesday, Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler is highly likely to find himself with a top-two finish. Regardless of whether he wins, take a moment to ask yourself a surprising, big-picture question: Might Wheeler be a future Hall of Famer? Are we witnessing greatness in real time?

By every traditional metric, the answer is ... no. At 34 years old, he’s won only 103 games, never topping the 16 he just won this past season. He’s made only two All-Star teams. If he finishes second in the Cy voting to the Braves' Chris Sale, as expected, it will be just the second time he’s finished in the top five. His closest comparable, in terms of similar wins, innings and ERA, is 1950s lefty Don Mossi -- probably not a name you know.

If the measure of a Hall of Famer is whether he was appreciated in his time, then Wheeler probably falls short. If the measure is whether his stats match up with the all-time legends at his position, then Wheeler definitely falls short.

But as we dove into last year, it’s not really appropriate to compare present-day starting pitchers to those of decades ago. If your measuring stick for any potential future Hall starting pitcher is if he won as many games or pitched as many innings as Bob Gibson, Walter Johnson, or Nolan Ryan, then the result is: We will never, ever, ever induct another starting pitcher again after Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer get elected in the next six-to-eight years, or possibly Gerrit Cole some time after that.

That’s obviously not what is going to happen, of course. Starting pitchers will still get Hall of Fame plaques. We’ll just need to reevaluate how we think of them.

One way, as we laid out in January, was looking at the best pitcher of each seven-year stretch, as defined by Wins Above Replacement. We agree, fully, that WAR is not infallible -- but when exactly were pitcher wins the perfect metric, either?

What we found at the time was that dating back to the end of World War II, of the 20 different pitchers who were the best in WAR across a seven-year span, 16 of them are either already in or will obviously get in, like Verlander and Kershaw. Of the remaining four, two were clearly deserving but had serious off-field issues that impacted their candidacies (Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling), and the other two are routinely considered among the biggest misses in recent Hall voting (Dave Stieb, Johan Santana). Santana would probably already be in had he captured a third Cy Young in 2005 -- an award that was denied him, ironically, because of pitcher wins.

Even though this was often decades before WAR was even considered, in retrospect, this method did a strong job of capturing the best of the best -- names like Gibson, Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson and Sandy Koufax were all the best across a seven-year-span. It’s a pretty good way to get to who the best pitchers of a given timeframe were.

The best pitchers of the last seven seasons, then? Via FanGraphs, look who’s No. 1.

2018-24 Pitching WAR

1. 33.5 Wheeler
2. 30.6 Gerrit Cole
3. 28.6 Aaron Nola
4. 28.4 Max Scherzer
5. 27.6 Jacob deGrom
6. 23.9 Kevin Gausman
7. 23.0 Justin Verlander

(Baseball-Reference WAR also has Wheeler atop the list, with slightly different numbers.)

Even if WAR isn’t really your interest, the counting stats tell most of the same story.

Since 2018, Wheeler is second in innings pitched (1,207) behind only Nola; he’s third in strikeouts (1,273) behind Cole and Nola; he’s got the fifth-lowest HR/9 rate (0.81) of any pitcher with 500 innings. He’s been excellent in the playoffs, too, adding 70 1/3 innings of 2.18 ERA ball, which is the third-lowest of any pitcher with 10 postseason starts, right between Madison Bumgarner and Schilling, two of the more decorated October pitchers in history. Wheeler is even a Gold Glover, winning in 2023.

By any measure, Wheeler has been one of the truly elite starting pitchers of his time.

Which, for at least one living legend, might just be enough.

“I like the [best player in a] decade thing,” Verlander told Yahoo in 2020, when asked about how starting pitchers might end up getting into Cooperstown. “If you’re the best player or one of the best of your time, you should be in.”

Wheeler will, by any modern metric as well as reputation, be one of the best of his time. He’ll also end his career with less than half the 3,884 1/3 innings that Gibson threw, and roughly half of Gibson’s 251 wins. Again, if that’s the standard, then he won’t reach that. It’s likely no one will again, just like Gibson couldn’t come near the 417 wins and 5,914 1/3 innings Walter Johnson threw in the early part of the 20th century, just like Johnson couldn’t come near the 511 wins and 7,356 innings Cy Young himself threw before that.

If there’s an issue here, it’s the myth that too many players already get into the Hall, that adding a player like Wheeler would water down the legend in some way. If anything, it’s the opposite; the induction rate is not nearly enough to keep up with historic rates of induction. If Wheeler or someone like him doesn’t match up with how you feel about Gibson, Seaver, and Koufax, that’s perfectly understandable. But if not him, then who? When?

We’ve already had to go through this reckoning before, remember. To this day, there’s only one BBWAA-elected starting pitcher (Burt Blyleven) who made his debut between Seaver (1967) and Greg Maddux (1986), and it’s not because no good pitchers reached the Majors in that span of nearly two decades.

Instead, it’s because in the 1970s, the then-popular four-man rotation became the five-man rotation. That decreased starts, innings, and win totals, which were considered vitally important when that generation reached the ballot in the 1980s and 1990s, and made that group’s stats seem inferior to their predecessors. They’re not, today, not really. An entire generation of starters was lost, Cooperstown-wise, while the electorate reconfigured its approach and started electing pitchers who came up in the late 1980s and 1990s. That approach is going to have to change again.

Wheeler might not be there just yet, but he’s also not done yet. Assuming a few more years of accumulating value – and there’s no reason to think he can’t do that – he might just be the first real test case some day. Think about it.