The ever-changing landscape of Major League Baseball has rendered the 300-game winner a thing of the past. .
In 2005, Detroit called up a 22-year-old pitching prospect named Justin Verlander. He made two starts, but they did not go particularly well. The next season, he started a streak of nine years in a row with at least 30 starts. In December of 2009, the Tigers traded for another pitching prospect named Max Scherzer, who had just finished his first full season in the majors. From 2009 through 2023, they were two of the most prominent pitchers in baseball, and then last year happened, and an era ended. They were at the beginning of a new era when they started, though we did not know it yet, and now as their careers wind down, they are a story about what a modern starting pitcher is: lower innings, more strikeouts, and no shot at 300 wins.
This season was the first time Scherzer failed to throw over 100 innings in a full non-COVID season since his debut in 2008. His ability to stay healthy and productive over a 15-year span is incredible in a time when you just assume Tommy John surgery is coming for every pitcher at some point. Verlander has been nearly the same, though he did get TJ in 2020 and missed all of the 2021 season as a result. Otherwise, he also was on the mound every year throwing high inning totals. Both were consistently good through this entire time. Scherzer dipped down into the 2 fWAR range a couple of times but was mostly in the 4 to 7 wins above replacement area. Verlander never went below 3 fWAR after establishing that level in 2007, until 2024 that is. The 2024 season was the first time in a decade and a half that neither of these two pitchers really mattered because of injury and bad performance.
Over the last 15 years, they have collected many stats and accolades beyond merely WAR. Both of them have won three Cy Young awards. Verlander even got an MVP to go with one of his three. They have led the league many times in wins, starts, innings pitched, strikeouts, WHIP, etc. And both have accumulated more black and grey ink than the average pitcher in Cooperstown. They are slam dunks to go in on their first Hall of Fame ballot. Those sorts of pitchers used to be the ones that would get to that 300-win threshold, and yet, it is not going to happen. Actually, it is not even going to be all that close unless Verlander can hang on for several more years and be very productive.
Winning 300 games was always the gold standard for inner-circle Hall of Fame starters, but that standard is no longer viable. Only 24 pitchers have ever made it to the milestone, and the most recent was Randy Johnson in 2009, right when Max and Justin were starting to establish themselves. There are four HOF-worthy pitchers who have existed mostly in the post-Big Unit times: Verlander and Scherzer along with Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw. Verlander is the only one that got even close to the 300 mark, sitting at 262 currently and ranking 41st all time. The other three all got over 200, but not by much.
You can see that starting pitchers began getting pulled much earlier sometime around 2015, and since then we have gone from relievers throwing a little over 30% of the innings to 42% or so the last few years. The league is even looking into rules that might make starters go deeper into games. If you go back to the 1950s, the change is even starker. Back then, starters threw almost 80% of the innings most seasons. A lot of the best pitchers started nearly 40 games in a season too. The aforementioned Randy Johnson never started more than 35, and of our four best pitchers of this era, 34 is the highest for all but Kershaw, who topped out at 33. Winning 300 games is way harder if you are not pitching as many innings for two reasons.
The main reason starting pitchers no longer get as many wins is simply qualifying for one. If you are pulled before getting through five innings, no win can be given. That is generally not a problem for these high-caliber pitchers. Max Scherzer was not great in 2023, but he still managed to get through at least five frames in 22 of his 27 starts. Some percentage of those is then eroded because you made it through enough innings but left without your team having the lead even if you pitch really well. Then you have the second problem: the earlier you leave the game, the longer the bullpen has to blow it. Just simple math: if you average 6 innings per start over 30 starts, that means the bullpen is throwing 90 innings in those games. If they give up 3 runs/9 innings, that’s going to lead to an expected 30 runs being scored after a starter exits the game. That is for a good bullpen, so it is even more if that is a weakness of your team. In his Cy Young seasons, Scherzer gave up 75 or fewer runs, so 30 runs make a huge difference.
Scherzer and Verlander have led the league in innings pitched multiple times, but Max topped out at 228.2 and Justin at 251. If you throw out weird years like the strike-shortened 1994, 251 would not have been tops in either league more than once or twice over the entirety of the 1900s. Even the most recent 300-win pitchers racked up over 4,000 innings each, which pales in comparison to some of the earlier 300-club members. Our four that are coming up on retirement are all under 3,500, and Kershaw isn’t going to even get near 3,000.
None of this takes away from these guys. They are all great pitchers, and they should be in the Hall. It is just going to be the first group of the new starting pitchers, and the way we evaluate starters is going to have to change. They dominate older pitchers in terms of strikeout rates. Scherzer has a career 10.65 K/9 rate, which is more than a full strikeout better than Nolan Ryan. These modern top-end pitchers are still putting up huge seasons; it is just going to be easier to compare them using ERA+ or FIP- rather than raw wins and strikeouts. As baseball is currently constructed, it would take a very unusual pitcher to be the next 300-win candidate, assuming Verlander doesn’t turn back into a perennial Cy Young contender through the age of 45.
The next crop of great starters has a long, long way to go if they want to even sniff 300 wins. Gerrit Cole will be the active leader after these guys all retire. He is sitting at 153 wins. He is also 34 years old and has been pitching in the majors for 12 years. It is unlikely that he can go another 12 years at the same pace as before. The next guy on the list under the age of 35 is Aaron Nola with a paltry 104 wins. If he averages 20 per year for a decade, he can make it by his age 41 season, so not looking possible either. The first under-30 player is Shane Bieber at age 29 and just 62 wins. No one currently in the majors is going to get close. It is possible that only one or two can get to 200.
I am not sure this is a good or bad thing; it just is the current state of baseball. The league clearly sees it as a problem, though I have not seen a solution yet that does not feel at least a little ham-fisted. Do I miss epic starting matchups in the playoffs? Yeah, I do. It does not get better than Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. That just seems less feasible with as hard as players are throwing and the number of pitcher injuries that happen. So, I for one am waving good-bye to that past and I am looking at Scherzer and Verlander as the heralds of a new guard of starting pitcher greatness. A new era is upon us.
