An Era-Adjusted Hall of Fame Case for Félix Hernández
Before I start this article, I want to give credit to Wilytic on YouTube for making a video using era-adjusted stats to build a HOF case for King Felix, as well as FanGraphs' Jay Jaffe for his excellent write-up on Félix Hernández's career, building a HOF case for him.
The date is August 15, 2012. The Seattle Mariners are playing at home against the Tampa Bay Rays, with the Safeco Field (now T-Mobile Park) crowd not even at half capacity. And for good reason; entering today’s game, the Mariners are 54-64, solidly in last place in the AL West, 7.5 games behind the second-to-last place Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Franchise icon Ichiro Suzuki was traded just over 3 weeks ago to the New York Yankees due to his desire to play for a contending team.
The only thing really going for the Mariners in this season, and pretty much every season between 2005 and 2019? Félix Hernández. No matter how poor the roster was around him, no matter how much managerial turmoil there was (Hernández played under 8 Mariners managers in his 15-year MLB tenure), you could almost always count on King Felix to shove.
Even today, on August 15, 2012, the Mariners offense was uninspiring, posting only 1 run on 5 hits. But that didn’t matter, because Félix Hernández performed a feat that had only happened 22 times before him in MLB history (23 if you count Armando Galarraga’s “28-out” outing), and only one time since. Félix Hernández pitched a perfect game.
King Felix’s perfect game really encapsulates his whole career. He had laughably poor run support. In 2012, he had an average of 3.48 runs per 27 outs in games he started. In his 2010 Cy Young season, the Mariners offense put up an average of only 3.07 runs per 27 outs in his starts. He had an interesting career trajectory, accruing a relatively small 15 years of MLB service time, but his prime from 2007 to 2015 saw him being arguably one of the best pitchers in MLB history, winning the AL Cy Young award in 2010, logging 6 All-Star game appearances, 6 seasons finishing top-10 in Cy Young voting (including his 2010 win), and a handful of AL MVP votes.
Despite his short prime and relatively short career, he still put up elite numbers, posting a career 3.42 ERA and 2,730 strikeouts in 2,730 innings pitched, tallying him an impressive 54.4 FanGraphs WAR. Per the Hardball Times, the "average" Hall of Famer typically posts between 50 and 70 WAR in his career, so looking at these numbers you’d think that Hernández has a fringe case to get into the Hall of Fame, but looking at his era-adjusted stats tells a completely different picture.
Reframing King Felix’s career from an era-neutral standpoint
Baseball, particularly in the case of Hall of Fame voting, has a “primacy bias” issue, in that voters’ perceptions of what makes a Hall of Fame-caliber player is skewed by the otherworldly numbers put up by players from older eras. For example, Cy Young logged an impressive 131.5 fWAR but pitched 7,356(!!!!) innings, a number that hasn’t even been close to being replicated. The only other modern-era Hall of Fame pitchers that have even sniffed Cy Young’s innings pitched are Nolan Ryan (5,386 innings pitched) and Phil Niekro (5,404 innings pitched) and they had careers that spanned well over 20 years.
If we look at an era-adjusted Hall of Fame threshold, however, we see far more obtainable numbers. The average innings pitched for Hall of Fame pitchers drops from 3,399.3 regular innings pitched to 2,914.9 era-adjusted innings pitched. Looking at Cy Young again, his innings pitched drops down to 4,932 eIP; still a ridiculous number but far more realistic when looking at baseball across all eras. The table below shows the difference in regular stats vs. era-adjusted stats for Hall of Fame pitchers, and when you compare King Felix’s statline to the era-adjusted mean and median Hall of Fame numbers, you start to see just how dominant he was in an era-neutral environment.
It is important to note this number is a little skewed because it also invites relief pitchers into the mix, but we can still see that Hernández’s eIP and eSO stand out compared to both the mean and median Hall of Fame pitcher. Furthermore, if we run principal-component analysis summarizing eIP, eSO, eERA, and efWAR for all pitchers (min 1,000 eIP), we see just how well King Felix stacks up against other elite and Hall of Fame pitchers.
Félix Hernández is in elite company, located just around Hall of Fame pitcher Roy Halladay, and near other elite pitchers like Adam Wainwright, Jon Lester, and Cole Hamels. Hamels is also currently on the Hall of Fame ballot and has a similarly interesting case with his short elite prime but long overall career. Looking at this PCA score chart also helps us see that Hernández lies in an interesting category. He wasn’t necessarily as world-beating as other Hall of Fame pitchers, likely due to his short prime and relatively short career, but was definitely better than the majority of MLB pitchers in an era-adjusted view.
If we run PCA analysis on single pitcher seasons, using the same criteria as before and filtering pitchers out to a minimum 150 era-adjusted innings pitched, we also see something interesting:
This chart is a little more cluttered, but we can see that Hernández’s best 4 seasons lie well beyond the bulk of all starting pitchers’ individual seasons. His 2010 Cy Young season where he racked up a 2.35 eERA and 225 eSO on 284 eIP stands out in line with Greg Maddux’s 1995 Cy Young season. Let’s zoom in on the closest peers to Hernández’s 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014 seasons:
Again, we can see he’s in elite company. Multiple Cy Young and Cy Young runner-up seasons of Hall of Famers and elite pitchers light up the table. Cristopher Sánchez’s 2025 Cy Young runner-up season, Yu Darvish’s 2013 Cy Young runner-up season, Hall of Famer Roy Halladay’s 2009 season, 2010 Cy Young runner-up season, and 2012 Cy Young season, and Hall of Famer Greg Maddux’s 1992 Cy Young season are all near comparisons to King Felix’s most dominant seasons, showing us that at his prime, King Felix was really one of the more dominant pitchers in MLB history.
Short Careers ≠ Bad Careers
One of the biggest arguments against Félix Hernández making the Hall of Fame is his short career. Yes, he was a world-beater during his prime, but ultimately his prime “only” lasted 7-8 seasons. We can also see this to be true if we look at the all time efWAR leaderboard, minimum 1000 IP; Félix Hernández’s 63.4 efWAR lies at 39th all time, below recent Hall of Fame inductees CC Sabathia (27th place, 73.3 efWAR) and Mike Mussina (19th place, 79.3 efWAR).
Due to his relatively low WAR/era-adjusted WAR, people like to lump Hernández into the Johan Santana, David Cone, Dwight Gooden category of “super dominant for a bit, but just doesn’t have the counting stats to get into the Hall” (although to be fair, Dwight Gooden probably won’t make the hall moreso because of his, and the 1986 Mets as a whole, famous excessive use of cocaine). But if we view King Felix’s career through an era-adjusted lens, it’s easy to see how he separates himself from this group.
If we look at an efWAR curve per season with short-prime pitchers and some Hall of Fame pitchers, Hernández immediately stands out from the traditional short prime group. Interestingly, through his age-27/28 season, he outpaces most of our selected Hall of Fame pitchers besides Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux, as well as most of our selected short prime pitchers including Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax. David Cone is an interesting look as he started his career later than Hernández but accumulated efWAR at a similar pace as him, but even then ultimately Hernández significantly picked up the pace around his age-24 2010 Cy Young season and finished his career with higher efWAR than Cone.
If you want more proof, we can look at era-adjusted Jaffe Wins Above Replacement Score (JAWS), a measure of WAR that provides more weight to a player’s best 7 seasons (developed by Jay Jaffe specifically to provide more credit to players with short dominant primes, read more about it here). Even with this additional weight, Hernández stands out from other short prime pitchers besides Dwight Gooden and Sandy Koufax who both received a significant ranking boost with the JAWS considerations.
All this data really shows how dominant Félix Hernández was when you look at his stats in an era-neutral lens. If we look at Hernández’s regular fJAWS, he lies at 47.4, which falls just below the typically accepted Hall of Fame threshold of 50 JAWS. Looking at era-adjusted fWAR and fJAWS, however, paints a more accurate pitcher on how Hernández stacks up in MLB history and among his short-prime pitching peers.
It’s not Hernández’s fault that he pitched in an era just before pitch count and pitcher load management were emphasized among major-league ballclubs, and he certainly shouldn’t be knocked in Hall of Fame voting because of it.
Quick aside: Another common argument used to knock Félix Hernández’s HOF chances is that he doesn’t have any postseason/World Series experience (in comparison to short prime pitcher Sandy Koufax who was lights out in the postseason and World Series). That’s an extremely unfair argument to use for any player let alone King Felix. I doubt even Shohei Ohtani could’ve carried any of the Hernández-era Mariners teams to the playoffs; just look at how the Angels performed when both him and Mike Trout were on the team and playing at an elite level.
The Clutch Factor
Moving away from era-adjusted statistics, there is one thing that separates Félix Hernández from any other modern-era pitcher, including current and future Hall of Famers like CC Sabathia, Clayton Kershaw, and Max Scherzer. He was ridiculously clutch on a consistently terrible team.
Let’s go back to his perfect game. The Mariners scored 1 run in the third inning and barely generated any offense outside of that. It’s one thing to throw a perfect game, but it’s another to do it when you’re pitching to protect a one-run lead when every batter up represents the game-tying run. And King Felix did this nearly every night.
The numbers prove this to be the case as well. Throughout his career, 2005-2019, Félix Hernández ranked 7th in Win Probability Added at 22.65, behind Hall of Famer Roy Halladay, future HOFers Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, and Max Scherzer, and elite pitchers/fringe HOFers in Zack Greinke and Cole Hamels.
Furthermore, let’s look at Win Probability Added over Leverage Index (WPA/LI), which represents a context-neutral win probability environment by measuring how many wins a pitcher contributed to regardless of game situation. King Felix’s WPA/LI of 17.83 ranks top 12 among starting pitchers in the time span 2005-2019. Looking at his WPA in conjunction with his WPA/LI gives us a differential of +4.82, showing that he consistently delivered in high-leverage moments. This is an invaluable trait for any pitcher, let alone for a pitcher in Hernández’s situation where he was forced to put a middling Mariners squad on his back every 5 games over his entire career.
Final Thoughts
Félix Hernández’s overall career, on the surface, may not necessarily seem elite. He was an dominant pitcher with a short prime wasted on a middling team, a story we’ve seen multiple times before and since Hernández’s career (e.g. Jacob deGrom’s time with the Mets). However, when we look at his stats both through an era-adjusted lens and from a win probability standpoint, we can see just how elite he was and how Hall of Fame-worthy he is.
It seems like Hall of Fame voters are starting to appreciate his career more, with King Felix having the highest single-season rise in Hall of Fame voting since 1967 this year, rising to 46.1% from 20.6%. A majority of this voting rise came from first-time HOF voters, named on around 75% of new voters’ ballots. The new era of BBWAA voters understand that the pitching landscape in MLB has changed significantly from the “traditional” idea of an elite pitcher, and hopefully more voters will follow suit and we’ll finally see Félix Hernández in the Hall of Fame.