The Worst Starts To Hall Of Fame Careers

137 G, 77 GS, 516.2 IP, 28-27,
486 K, 305 BB, 4.16 ERA, ERA+ 100

I was watching a documentary this morning, which was talking about Sandy Koufax and how, at the start of his career, he wasn't anything special, infected with a wildness that made him likely to walk batters as strike them out. It was only half a dozen years into his career that a lightbulb went on, he stopped trying to throw as hard as possible, and developed the pin-point control that would bring him three Cy Youngs and six consecutive All-Star appearances, before retiring at the top of his game after the 1966 season.

The line on top are Koufax's stats through his first five major-league seasons, and there's nothing there to indicate he would end up being inducted into the Hall of Fame. It got me wondering, did any other inductees get off to a slow start on their journey to Cooperstown?

Let's start off with the pitchers. Here are the list of players in the modern (i.e. post-19th century) period, who had an ERA+ of 100 or less over the first five seasons of their major-league careers, with a minimum of 100 innings of work.

There are some striking names on that list, but the thing which stands out immediately is that most of these started their career at a very young age. Daron Sutton's father, Don, is the only one to debut after his 21st birthday, and he managed that by less than two weeks. To some extent, that's a result of the era before free agency. Now, teams want their six years of control to be a player's peak years; then, you didn't have to worry about that, The last season more than a handful of pitchers aged 20 or younger were seen in the majors was 1991.

Contrast that with the early sixties; every year from 1961-67, there were a dozen or more youngsters, peaking in 1963, with no less than 24. A couple of years later, there were 22, and three of them would go on to Cooperstown - as well as Catfish Hunter, Steve Carlton and Jim Palmer were among young pitchers in that class of '65. The following year saw Nolan Ryan in the same group, another arm that struggled early in his career, though in his defense Ryan was never really about ERA (his career ERA+ was a surprisingly-average 112). His sixth season, he led the league in K's, the first of eleven times he did so, and his modern-era record of 383 may never be matched.

Herb Pennock is another interesting case, simply because his early problems were so terrible. To put that 70 ERA+ into context, if he was playing today, he'd be tied with JoJo Reyes for the worst active pitcher with 300 IP. Much as with TV shows, one imagines that less patience would likely be shown with a struggling creation these days, though again Pennock was a very early arrival in the majors, making his debut three months after his eighteenth birthday, He was a true late bloomer. Through age 28 - his 11th year! - he had an ERA+ of 92, then over the next six years went 115-57 with a 133 ERA+. Maybe there's hope for JoJo yet...

Let's do the same for hitters now, though we have to be a little more cautious, because there are a number of names who made it to Cooperstown as managers, rather than on the strength of their playing days. Even if we draw the cutoff at a thousand PAs, top of the list would still be Leo Durocher, who managed a feeble 60 OPS+ in his first five seasons. We also have to take fielding into account, otherwise the list would include Ozzie Smith, who managed a 69 OPS+ early on, but whose value with the glove was likely far more than that with the bat. So we'll use bWAR as our measure here.