I miss Mike Warren.

Glavine is probably going to retire after this season? That's news to me.

Of course, you will typically find more sure-fire Hall of Famers among the oldest group of active players than the next age group down. They're closer to retirement and have nearly closed the book on their careers.

Among Hall of Fame possibilities in their late twenties to mid thirties: Pedro Martinez, Roy Oswalt, Johan Santana, Roy Halladay, Andy Pettitte, Bary Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Buerhle, C.C. Sabathia, Ben Sheets, Josh Beckett, and Brandon Webb. I'm sure I've overlooked some, and a lot of these guys are in their late twenties rather than their thirties. So there may be some sort of small drought, but I doubt that's abnormal. If you look at the number of Hall of Famers per team each season, it resembles a sine wave - there are peaks and troughs periodically.

Glavine is probably going to retire after this season? That's news to me.

At this point, he's going to have to stick around for 2008 just to win 300 games

Pedro Martinez

Iron clad lock.

The peer group of 1970-1976 births is definitely disappointing.

Only 24 pitchers with 100 wins (a third with losing records), and after Pedro's 206 and Pettite's 190 the third highest is Brad Radke's 148 (although Bartolo Colon at 146 will pass him this year.)

Drilling down further, 1976 births in particular - a combined 1455-1742 (.456%). Highlights include Javier Vasquez (103-110), Jeff Weaver (86-107), Sidney Ponson (82-101), Kelvim Escobar (91-86), and Randy Wolf (77-65.) The typical Hall of Famer has around 165-180 wins at age 31.

A friend of mine noticed a few years ago that there seemed to be a large gap in quality starting pitching, with only Pedro in between the Maddux/Glavine age pitchers and the Oswalt/Halladay group. We noticed in our fantasy drafts that the old guys were commanding all of the high salaries. This was when Oswalt was just turning into a top-paid pitcher in our leagues.

Anyway, the discussion turned to the offensive explosion in the mid to late 90's and how much of it could be possibly be explained by the fact that while Glavine, Maddux, Johnson, Clemens, etc. were in their primes, but over the hump, there were no young studs behind them.

Is it just random fluctuation? In the early 90's the split-finger fastball was all the rage (I remember Jack McDowell specifically), but it has the reputation of causing elbow problems. Did MLB blow out a (mini-) generation of young arms?

Are Pedro's dominating years due to the fact that he basically had no peer group?