2025 Baseball HOF preview: King Félix will be test case for modern pitchers

With the Baseball Hall of Fame's class of 2025 announcement approaching, it's time to review this year's ballot. Today, we break down the most intriguing first-ballot candidate's long-term chances. Once among the best in the business, he's now hoping to take the long road to Cooperstown.

Note: All WAR figures from Baseball Reference unless otherwise noted.

Félix Hernández

Position: SP
Years: 2005-2019
Teams: Mariners
S-JAWS: 44.1 (98th at SP)
WAR: 49.7 (114th)
Year on ballot: 1st

When Hernández pitched, it often felt like you were watching a Hall of Famer. He was utterly dominant in his prime, and that dominance is what made his rapid decline so tough to watch. Hernández's short but brilliant peak is now on the ballot, and it presents a fascinating case study for modern starters and the Hall.

Hernández's talents were flagged by scouts during his teenage years in Venezuela, leading to a fight for his services. He ultimately chose the Mariners, taking their $710,000 bonus over higher offers from other teams in 2002. By age 19, he was the top-ranked pitching prospect in baseball.

Seattle summoned Hernández to the majors Aug. 4, 2005, making him the youngest pitcher to that point (19 years, 118 days old) to debut in the wild-card era. He began his full ascension in '07; by 2009, he'd broken out as an ace, finishing second in AL Cy Young voting to Zack Greinke.

The Mariners' attempts to get him help flopped - Seattle lost 101 games in 2010 - but King Félix rose above the mess to capture the AL Cy Young. He did so despite a 13-12 record that marked the lowest number of wins for a Cy Young-winning starter at the time. His 2.27 ERA led the majors, and he topped AL pitchers in WAR (7.2), innings (249.2), and starts (34) while placing second in strikeouts and WHIP and throwing six complete games.

From 2009-15, Hernández dominated, going 104-65 with a 2.83 ERA (136 ERA+), 2.99 FIP, and 1.11 WHIP while earning All-Star berths and Cy Young votes in six of those seasons. On Aug. 15, 2012, King Félix threw the 23rd perfect game in MLB history, striking out 12 on 113 pitches.

Despite the Mariners' inability to field a winner, Hernández was loyal, signing a five-year extension in 2013. Seattle finally turned it around the following year, missing the playoffs by one game, and much of that 2014 success was thanks to Seattle's king, who won his second career ERA title (2.14) and led the AL in WHIP (0.92) along with a career-high 248 strikeouts.

Nobody knew at the time that 2014 would be Hernández's last great campaign. He finished seventh in Cy Young voting in 2015 despite a huge spike in ERA (3.53) and WHIP (1.18). In 2016, Hernández's fastball and sinker velocities dipped considerably. At just 30 years old, his years of heavy workloads were rapidly catching up to him.

Hernández's spiral continued into 2017, when shoulder woes limited him to 16 starts and a 4.36 ERA (96 ERA+). The bottom fell out in 2018, when he went 8-14 with a 5.55 ERA, 5.18 FIP, and 1.40 WHIP over 155 2/3 innings. His velocity was gone.

Still, Seattle showed lots of love for its king. In his final big-league start on Sept. 26, 2019, he slogged through 5 1/3 innings before leaving the T-Mobile Park mound to an emotional ovation.

Hernández was added to the Mariners Hall of Fame in 2023, and the team hasn't issued No. 34 since he left. Cooperstown, however, is another story. Because his career ended at age 33, Hernández fell short of numerous important counting milestones, meaning he needs to be compared to other short-peak, high-value pitchers to gauge his worthiness.

By S-JAWS, Jay Jaffe's adjusted JAWS metric designed to offset larger totals from bygone eras of pitching, he fares well. Hernández is 98th in S-JAWS, respectable given he threw his final pitch at age 33, and sits a hair back of the ultimate short-peak Hall of Famer, Sandy Koufax. Hernández actually has Koufax beat in career WAR (49.7 to 48.9). He's also ahead of Jacob deGrom, who will have his own fascinating Cooperstown case in a few years, but well back of Johan Santana, another incredible short-peak pitcher who's on the outside.

The Koufax comparisons don't extend beyond WAR, though. Hernández's seven-year peak WAR (a player's seven best seasons) of 38.5 is well behind the Dodgers icon and several other short-peak HOFers such as Dizzy Dean. Regular JAWS pushes Hernández back even further to 113th place. His ERA+ (117) would rank 23rd among Hall of Fame pitchers with less than 3,000 innings, ahead of only dead-ball era hurler Jack Chesbro - one of the weakest HOF inductees.

When the cut-off is shortened to 21st-century pitchers with at least 2,000 innings, he places 10th in ERA and K/9, ninth in HR/9, 11th in FIP, and 13th in WHIP. By WAR, he's tied with Roy Oswalt for 13th since 2000 (with no innings cutoff). Those are very good spots to be, but they're also a bit further back than one might expect of a pitcher whose peak years were otherworldly. This only adds to the conundrum of Hernández's case. In so many ways, he seems to fall short. But if we view him through a contemporary lens, under the new norms of starting pitching in 2025, he might actually measure up.

Outside of a few select names, it's becoming incredibly difficult to determine what a modern Hall of Fame pitcher looks like. It makes Hernández's case that much harder to judge. The fact that he's all but assured of a second year on the ballot - he's at 25% in the tracker - means that the writers clearly want some more time to think this over. What's fascinating is that they're going to give him this shot after all but ignoring Santana, Oswalt, Tim Hudson, and Mark Buehrle - all of whom had higher WAR than Hernández.

Active pitchers such as deGrom, Chris Sale, and Gerrit Cole will surely be paying close attention to Hernández's ballot journey. So will his contemporaries who were quickly booted from, or are in danger of falling off, the writers' ballot. Hernández is now the test case for the new breed of pitcher, and over the next decade he'll help redefine what a Hall of Fame pitcher is - even if he never becomes one himself.