Leading up to the Baseball Hall of Fame class announcement on Jan. 21, we’ll be examining the cases of notable candidates every Thursday. Félix Hernández got us started; below is an analysis of another first-time nominee who made a career of mowing down American League hitters.
It’s not unprecedented for the Baseball Writers Association of America—a fickle, ever-changing beast—to go years without inducting a starting pitcher into the Baseball Hall of Fame. For instance, no pitcher who was primarily a starter made the Hall by that method from 1999 (Nolan Ryan) to 2011 (Bert Blyleven).
However, the fact that the BBWAA hasn’t elected a starting pitcher the last six years in this era—an era in which death-of-the-starting-pitcher thinkpieces regularly grace our social media feeds—raises eyebrows. Mike Mussina, in 2019, was the last one to be enshrined in Cooperstown. Beyond the obvious 2010s-era stalwarts—Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke—is there anyone coming down the pipe who can end this drought?
If there’s one starter who can get elected before Greinke becomes eligible in 2029, it’s CC Sabathia.
This is Year 1 on the ballot for Sabathia, who retired in 2019 after 19 seasons. He spent 7 1/2 seasons with Cleveland, a half-season with the Milwaukee Brewers and 11 with the New York Yankees. Since retiring, he has maintained a consistent media presence, hosting a podcast alongside announcer Ryan Ruocco until 2023 among other ventures.
Sabathia’s career can be chopped neatly into four parts. First, from 2001 to ’05 with Cleveland, he was an up-and-comer who won a lot of games in spite of shaky ERAs and peripheral numbers. In his first five seasons, he won 69 games and made two All-Star teams. His 107+ ERA placed him a bit above league average.
Then, from 2006 to ’08, he morphed into something else entirely. Sabathia became one of the best pitchers in baseball—he hit career lows in FIP every year, and his strikeouts climbed from 172 to 209 to 251. In ’07, he won his only Cy Young award. In ’08, after Cleveland traded him to the Brewers, he went 11–2 with a 1.65 ERA, making several starts on short rest to help Milwaukee clinch its first playoff berth in 26 years and cement himself as one of the all-time great trade deadline acquisitions.
Sabathia pitches during his 2007 Cy Young campaign for Cleveland. / John Biever/Sports Illustrated
After signing with the Yankees in free agency, he remained dominant for four more years. He struck out exactly 197 batters in three of those four years, adding three more All-Star teams and three more top-five Cy Young finishes to his resume in addition to a 2009 World Series title (New York won four of his five postseason starts that year as he recorded a 1.98 ERA across 36 1/3 innings).
Finally, Sabathia transitioned into an elder statesman role. He opened up about his alcoholism, having checked into rehab late in the 2015 season. On the field, his dependable-if-not-spectacular presence helped New York transition to a new generation; he won 14 games as late as ’17, when current star outfielder Aaron Judge was a rookie.
The Vallejo, Calif., native lived a full baseball life—thoroughly modern, but also something of a throwback. His 251 wins—tied for 47th all time with HOFers Bob Gibson and Al Spalding—leap off his Baseball Reference page. No active pitcher, not even Verlander, has eclipsed his 3,577 1/3 career innings pitched. The man hurled 10 complete games in his heroic ’08 campaign.
Sabathia is going to have his loyalists for nostalgic reasons, as a successful straddler of multiple eras. He’ll get a bump for having played and won a championship in New York, and for his amiable public image. He’s already won the political election.
But how does Sabathia look when it comes to the statistical portion of the election? That’s a different question entirely.
Of the nine Hall of Fame measurements provided on Sabathia’s Baseball Reference page, he is better than average on just one—Bill James’s Hall of Fame Monitor. The Monitor, which measures how likely a player is to make the Hall rather than how deserving, privileges the kinds of concrete achievements that Sabathia produced in spades—winning 15 games in a season (he did that eight times), striking out 3,000 batters (he K’ed 3,093), and winning playoff games (he won 10). That paints an encouraging picture—as does Ryan Thibodeaux’s Hall of Fame ballot tracker, which shows Sabathia has been named on 15 of 16 ballots revealed thus far. That 93.8% approval rate puts him on track to surpass the 75% of votes needed, albeit in a small sample size. (385 BBWAA voters cast their ballots last year.)
Sabathia’s WAR metrics, which have been increasingly used by voters in recent years, are a bit gnarlier. He doesn’t meet the average starting pitcher threshold in career WAR, seven-year peak WAR, or former Sports Illustrated writer Jay Jaffe’s JAWS system. Let’s take a look at who’s directly above him and who’s directly below him.
CAREER WAR: Hal Newhouser (HOF), Mickey Welch (HOF) and David Cone are above Sabathia; Stan Coveleski (HOF), Tommy John and Bullet Rogan (HOF) are below him.
SEVEN-YEAR PEAK WAR: Addie Joss (HOF), Chuck Finley and Guy Hecker are above him; Carl Mays, Bill Hutchison and Dwight Gooden are below him.
JAWS: Eddie Cicotte, Bret Saberhagen and Three Finger Brown (HOF) are above him; Dave Stieb, Don Sutton (HOF) and Silver King are below him.
It’s a healthy mix of Hall of Famers and non-Hall of Famers, but a clarifying one in terms of cutting to the heart of who Sabathia was. He was not a comet—this is a pitcher who was good to great for nearly two decades. That’s why the totality of his career paints him in a much better light than his peak.
Sabathia during the playoffs in 2009, when the Yankees won the World Series in his first series with the team. / John Iacono/Sports Illustrated
Fortunately for Sabathia, his peak was pretty darn good in its own right. That’s what’s expected to get him over the hump to Cooperstown—possibly on the first ballot. Let’s revisit that seven-year peak WAR again—39.4, 102nd all time. Great, but not necessarily amazing on the surface.
What happens to that 39.4 when you measure it against demonstrably similar players to Sabathia, though? Andy Pettitte—the most similar player to Sabathia on Baseball Reference’s similarity score by a healthy margin—posted a 34.1 WAR in his seven best seasons. Pettitte has been on the ballot for six years, topping out at 17% in part because of his admitted use of human growth hormone. The second- and fourth-most similar players to Sabathia are Mike Mussina (44.5), a Hall of Famer, and Verlander (50.1), who’s surely on his way. The third-most similar player, Bartolo Colon, put up 35.5. (Colon fell off the ballot after getting just 1.3% of the vote last year. His chances were hurt by a positive PED test in 2012, though he would’ve had long odds of induction regardless.)
There’s Sabathia in an nutshell. He can’t be boxed in as a flash in the pan; he was way too good for way too long. You can’t credibly call him a compiler, either—when he was on, especially from 2006 to ’11, he was on in a way few pitchers have been this century.
Sabathia was a both/and pitcher. He had both moment magnitude and staying power; he has a good case in terms of both traditional and advanced statistics. And after going into the Cleveland Guardians’ Hall of Fame this past summer, he will likely enter the Baseball Hall of Fame as well—if not this year, then comfortably before another starting pitcher who matches his credentials is up for election.