The Top 10 Starting Pitchers in Baseball's Hall of Fame

There are some great pitchers in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Of course there are some who arguably don’t even belong there.

I recently finished doing a series on the Top 10 (at each position) Players Not in the Hall of Fame, so I thought it would be appropriate to list the Top 10 at each position who are already in the HOF.

There are different schools of thought on compiling such a list, basically because several of the “Mayflower Boys” have well over 40 wins in a season, sometimes more than once. I have always been of the opinion that you cannot diminish what the old folks have accomplished.

The statistics I used are nothing that would make a mathematician salivate. I used the total number of wins, number of 20 win seasons (I counted 30-40-50 win seasons as 20), wins/starts, avg. wins per 162 games, era, era+, shutouts, whip, hr/9, k/w, k/9, triple crowns, total titles won.

A word of explanation is necessary at this juncture. I thought it unfair to modern day players to allow bonus points for 30, 40 or 50 games won in a season, therefore I called them all 20 games with the same weight. The wins/starts is my own thing. I couldn’t find the statistics anywhere so I may have invented it. Just the total wins divided by the total starts. The total titles won statistic includes the categories wins, era, era+, cg, sho, so,

Furthermore, I didn’t use MVP, CYA, ROY, All-star or postseason stats. I felt that would give a severe disadvantage to the Mayflower Boys. All-star games weren’t in vogue until 1933. Cy Young Awards were not given out until 1956, and until 1966 was given to just one in the major leagues. The reason I decided to use triple crowns is that the information is readily available, and although not recognized during the pilgrim days the statistics are there notwithstanding.

When a cite a pitcher’s career stats they will be in this format:
W/162-AV/20W/W-S/ERA/ERA+/SHO/WHIP/HR9/K-W/K9/TC/TITLES

So having bored you with the guts of the system, let us move on to the rankings.