Félix Hernández’s Hall of Fame candidacy takes on a greater significance beyond whether a borderline candidate gains entry to Cooperstown.
No, the 15-year Seattle Mariners ace is among the first most notable tests to determine just what a Hall of Fame pitcher looks like in this ultramodern era.
Oh, the coming years will bring plenty of aces whose stuff and statistics would’ve played in any era. Longtime teammates Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are locks – if they ever stop pitching. Clayton Kershaw, the greatest left-hander of his time, has built a case not dissimilar to that of his predecessor as a Los Angeles Dodgers legend, Sandy Koufax.
Yet after they’ve given their speeches and accepted their plaques, what’s next?
The 200-inning season is on life support. The 4,000-inning career exited when Randy Johnson did. The sixth inning increasingly is deemed too treacherous for starting pitchers.
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While Hernández’s career partly predated those trends – or touched them at the very end – his run from 2005-2019 certainly spanned a period of time when pitcher evaluation greatly changed.
Now, his resume will get the ultimate scrutiny.
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The case for Félix Hernández
Hernández won the 2010 American League Cy Young Award and narrowly missed winning the previous year. That he won in the season he posted a 13-12 record and finished second when he went 19-7 – behind 16-8 Zack Greinke – speaks to the shifting evaluations.
Just 24, Hernández painted his masterpiece in 2010, setting career highs in innings (249 ⅔), WAR (7.2) and adjusted ERA (174). He was almost as good in 2014, posting career bests in ERA (2.14), strikeouts and strikeouts per nine innings (248, 9.5) in notching a second AL Cy runner-up finish, this time to Corey Kluber.
Hernández was a six-time All-Star and two-time AL ERA champion, both coming in his most dominant seven-season stretch from 2008-2014, when he posted a 2.82 ERA over 230 starts and 1,595 innings, with a 3.5 strikeout-walks ratio. His 1,533 strikeouts are most in baseball in that span, and his ERA and adjusted ERA (138) are second only to Kershaw (2.48, 151).
The case against
The notion that life begins at 30 certainly doesn’t apply to Hernández; he hit a physical and performance wall right around that time. He made his last All-Star appearance at 29, in 2015, and was a roughly league-average pitcher the following season.
Hernández made just 15 and 16 starts, respectively, in 2017 and ’19, and pitched to a 5.55 ERA over 28 starts in 2018. He was worth a combined -2.0 WAR in his final two years in Seattle before signing with Atlanta prior to the 2020 season. He opted out of the COVID year and spent spring training with the Orioles in 2021, but didn’t pitch in the majors again.
That leaves him with something of an incomplete resume. Hernández would be the only Hall of Fame pitcher in the modern era with an adjusted ERA as low as 117 and less than 3,000 innings pitched. While wins remain properly contextualized, they do him no favor here, either: His 169 wins and 3.42 ERA over 2,729 innings leave him short of the Hall by traditional metrics, while his adjusted ERA and 49.9 bWar put him squarely in a good-but-not-quite-enough neighborhood occupied by the likes of Roy Oswalt, Jamie Moyer and Mark Langston.
X factors
Cursed by a series of teams both middling and maddening, Hernández never pitched in a playoff game, as the Mariners won 86 to 89 games just five times in his 15-year career; that lack of exposure did no favors for a player located in the Pacific Northwest. Hernández did command the national zeitgeist when he pitched a perfect game in August 2012, to the delight of his King’s Court fan group at Safeco Field.
Voting trends
In Hernández’s first year on the ballot, he has received support on 24.6% of publicly revealed ballots, according to Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame tracker. That’s well short of the 75% necessary for induction but would represent a modest start to the 10 years in which Hernández is eligible for the ballot.
Bottom line
A classic borderline case, Hernández should only see his support grow as the years go on. For now, any strong verdict on his fate is an awful lot like his case for Cooperstown: Incomplete.