Jacob DeGrom is a touchstone test for Hall of Fame voters

Earlier this week, my colleague Jay Jaffe was a little moved by Jacob Degrom and his Hall of Fame case. Since the world can always use more sentences to describe DeGrom’s awesomeness, and because I’m looking at voters sometime in the mid-2030s, I decided to be more interested in his future candidacy and reasonable expectations. I also want to explore what DeGrom’s case means more broadly for the 2010/2020s Hall of Fame.

This has been my focus for some time and I talked about some issues last year during Chris Sale’s excellent comeback season. This piece has been bothering me because it is one of those rare articles in which the behavior of writing changes my view. At the beginning, my thinking process was “Get less than 50% of the chance with a 200 win, sales probably won’t be in the Hall of Fame, and it might be too marginal for me.” But then I projected the rest of the league, for the first time ever in Zips, and not a single pitcher who hasn’t yet won 200 games is expected to have a 50% chance of reaching this milestone. So maybe the sales should also reach Cooperstown, even if he doesn’t meet that threshold, because the writer didn’t vote for him on the grounds that he didn’t win 200, how can we reasonably pick any future starter pitcher?

When I wrote last year’s work, there were only 100 to 200 wins pitchers, which was a shocking decimal. Of these 11, only one better position than he was at the time to win 200 games: Sonny Gray, who added 12 wins and won a fairly typical season by his standards. For the other 10, Gerrit Cole was on the way to 2026 due to elbow surgery, and Sale missed a lot of time due to injury. Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson have almost officially done this since retirement, with Carlos Carrasco and Dallas Keuchel both among minors and may also retire for the purposes of this exercise. Wade Miley has won a win this season and is currently back in Tommy John’s surgery for forearm pain. Yu Darvish didn’t debut his season until July, winning only nearly 200 victories in his 38-year-old season. As a Baltimore native, I’m not going to talk about the progress of Charlie Morton.

The good news is that eight new pitchers have joined the 100-win club this season, but none of them have entered 200 wins now.

In these eight, only 50% of the Nora program got a 150 win chance. In theory, most of the eight can score 200 wins, but that requires an unusually strong late-stage emergence. In the wildcard era, only 10 pitchers accumulated 90 victories after their 34-year-old season, and almost all pitchers were in the early days of the era. The pitcher workload continues to decline, with fewer pitchers first than ever before.

Zips shot only four other pitchers, earning 50% of the field goal percentage: Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, George Kirby and Paul Skenes.

Over the past decade, it offers 50% chances to win 200 games for 17 active pitchers. Nine did eventually reach this milestone, and eight other members, who are still technically active, won’t do that.

So let’s make a Zips prediction for the rest of DeGrom with the Rangers, starting in 2026 and continuing until 2028 – assuming Texas got his club options that season. Zips is really worried about his health entering the season for very obvious reasons, and although he just missed his recent booking start due to shoulder fatigue, the injury is not a long-term issue. Now that he remains healthy in 2025, his expected workload is increasing in the coming season.

Giving DeGrom an estimated 21 wins in 2026-28, several wins this September, bringing his career to 123. Jay proposed Sandy Koufax in his work while discussing Degrom, which I think is an appropriate comparison.

Koufax’s peak is more concentrated and influential than Degrom’s peak in individual seasons, but as I said about Johan Santana’s vote in the Hall of Fame, if the best years are mentioned in a conversation with Koufax, you must be an explosive pitcher. For me, from a pure dominant point of view, the peak is not That Far behind the Kufax Peak; of course, considering that almost everyone thinks Koufax is an unquestionable, inherent Hall of Fame member, the gap isn’t enough to keep DeGrom away from Cooperstown.

Of course, given that Santana did it once and for all on the ballot, this is an unlucky sign of my use of Santana as another unfamiliar koufax comp degrom. But I hope to be on Degrom’s side at that time. Santana was eliminated in the 2018 general election, and over the past decade, the population of BBWAA members persisted long enough to win a Hall of Fame vote has changed a lot. In fact, BBWAA did not open membership to Internet-based writers until after the 2007 season, the group tended to be more proficient in analytics, and many of these Stathead members were unable to vote when Santana qualifies. This will be different when DeGrom votes in about eight years or so.

By then, nearly 20 years of writers saw the workload of starters change, and perhaps voters would figure out how to illustrate the fact that the role of the starter pitcher in the 2020s was very different from that of the 1990s, not to mention in the days of Hoss Radbourn. The three former Cy Young champions in their 40s – Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and Zack Greinke may be in Cooperstown when the vote is held in Degrom. Clayton Kershaw is only three months older than Degrom, but considering the Dodgers Icon debut six years ago, it almost guarantees that he will be the first of both to retire, meaning he will also enter the hall before DeGrom qualifies. If that happens, Kershaw will be the last item the writer will vote for him, laying the foundation for the new standard to make it the new standard in Cooperstown. That said, unless Kershaw becomes the last Hall of Fame starting pitcher.

I can’t imagine this, but over the next decade, the BBWAA has some interesting philosophical questions to answer interesting philosophical questions about the nature of starting a pitcher. I’m not sure what these answers are, but I do know that DeGrom will play a role in determining them.