Hey Pos, get ahold of Greinke and tell him to sign somewhere/anywhere and pitch a bit. Retiring with more than 3000 K makes him a trivia answer, while retiring with fewer makes him look like a disappointment.
I'm sure the voters will decide to elect the best starting pitchers the same way they've decided to elect the best closers and best managers.
But for me, the Hall of Fame should be about impact on the game, most of which is about helping your team win games. In general, I don't think relief pitchers belong in the Hall because they just don't pitch that many innings even if the 8th and 9th are often more important than the early innings. Likewise with managers; they don't matter very much. It's the same reason we don't elect the best baserunners or the best defensive 1B or the best set up men or LOOGY or PH.
As starting pitchers pitch less and less and we hit the point where the best get to 200 IP in a year and 2400 IP is a long career, the impact is lower and lower. To what Joe said, Johan Santana and Felix Hernandez (and Kevin Brown and Frank Tanana, etc.) aren't in the Hall because despite greatness or longevity, their overall impact wasn't enough. Inducting pitchers with much less impact than they had cheapens the Hall. It would be electing Harold Baines every year.
In the earliest days of baseball the pitcher was unimportant to the game. He was just the guy who served up the ball for hitting. Fans wanted to see hitters, so that is what they got. If they knew their pitcher's name it was usually for something incidental. Pitchers were not stars.
Today it is going almost full circle. Pitchers are not serving up the ball for hitters, but individual pitchers are becoming less important to the game. Teams have so many that most fans do not even know all the pitchers on their favorite team's roster on any given day. The individual pitcher doesn't matter as much.
In the past, baseball evolved in a way that turned pitchers into stars and team leaders with more importance. This trend reached a kind of equilibrium for several decades, but then it started turning with the rise of 9th inning closers, then 8th inning "setup guy" pitchers, then LOOGY (Left Handed One Out Guy) pitchers, and so on.
MLB is basically a business. If they think this trend is good for business they will keep it up, and pitchers will fade into the background. If MLB starts losing money on this they will tinker around to incentivize pitching again. In the meantime we are going to see a dip in pitching.
The HOF will go on recognizing whichever pitchers capture the moment of their time.
Here is my contrarian position: Pitchers are, by and large, paid to win (and save) games. Pure and simple -- much purer and simpler to evaluate than a hitter, because a hitter could be an RBI guy or a runs guy or an average guy and do well enough to get in the Hall. But a pitcher? A single metric: wins. You want it more complex? Wins minus losses. 22-10 is better than 26-18 because that 12-win difference helps the team more an eight-game difference when it comes down to a playoff position. That's why Jacob deGrom would never get my vote -- he averages eight wins and six losses a season. Difference of two games. Meh.
So a pitcher who goes 6 innings and allows 7 earned runs in a 9-7 win is better than a pitcher who allows 1 unearned run in 9 innings but loses 1-0 - because he got the W and the other guy got the L? That’s really how you evaluate pitchers? A pitcher’s job is to prevent runs. A hitter’s job is to create them. Period.
A pitcher who allows 7 runs in 6 innings gets the W but if that's his usual performance he won't stick around long enough to be considered for the HoF.
My OPINION (you have yours) is that the gauge of a good pitcher is the number of games he wins.
I said I was a contrarian! :0) But, in all transparency, I am a member of the Hall of Fame.
(Not an elected player, but one of the people who buys an annual membership to support the HoF. But it does allow me to say "I'm a member of the Hall of Fame." And I think I get in free when I travel to Cooperstown.)
A Porsche revving is way better than any insect. Also, Porsches aren’t particularly loud. They don’t need to be. When you are the best, you don’t need to scream about it.
The other possibility (honestly quite likely, given the high vote threshold to get in) is that the idea of a pitcher getting into HOF will become a relic of the past. And honestly, given that one of the main complaints about current pitcher usage is that it's just a parade of faceless, nameless automatons that no one has ever heard of, that path really meshes more with the "Fame" part of the HOF's name than redefining pitcher greatness.
Two of my favorite Mariner pitchers of all time really illustrate the HOF dilemma for starting pitchers going forward. Here are their career stats.
Pitcher A. WAR 49.8, 269-209, ERA 4.25, 2,441 SO WHIP 1.322, with 4th, 5th and 6th place CY seasons
Pitcher B. WAR 49.7, 169-136 ERA 3.42, 2,524 SO WHiP 1.206 with one CY, 3 second place finishes, a fourth, a seventh and an eighth, with MVP votes in 5 separate seasons
So who was better? WAR and W-L percentage are about a push as is total SO. Player B has a clear edge in ERA and WHIP, with a lot more love in voting for CY and MVP.
Pitcher A is Jamie Moyer, the poster boy for why wins should not be a big thing. He pitched for 25 years and his ERA+ for his career was roughly 101. It was 106 in the AL in 16 full/part seasons and 92 in 10 full/part seasons in the NL. He was a battler but never a dominant pitcher.
Pitcher B is Felix Hernandez, in my opinion a legitimate HOF candidate (several people mentioned this in response to Joe's blog whereas Moyer is not mentioned at all). He pitched for 15 years. He was truly a dominant pitcher and if he had played for a contender his win total would have been 200 or more. These days a starter who goes 6+ innings and gives up 3 runs or fewer is credited with a quality start. In 2014 Felix broke Tom Seavers record for CONSECUTIVE super-quality starts (7 innings or more giving up 2 runs or less) when Felix threw 14 such starts in a row. In his time in Seattle the question was not whether the Mariners could win the division, it was whether they could avoid finishing last. Moyer, on the other hand, played for some very good Mariner teams, including the 2001 team that won 116 games in the regular season. I'm hoping the HOF voters dig deep enough into the facts to realize just how special Felix was.
What constitutes a famous starter has obviously changed. Part of the reason starters are unknown to many fans is that they aren't building up enough stats to be noticed. We all know the issues with pitching wins, but it's probably fair to say that pitchers who get to 100 wins have probably been around long enough to become known to even casual fans. At the end of 2023, there were only 18 active pitchers with at least 100 wins. From 1969 through 2013, there were at least 30 active pitchers with at least 100 wins, with peaks as over 40 in 1997 and 1998. Between injuries and usage pattern changes, today's starters are becoming less visible to casual fans.
I was in London in 2019. I stopped at a bookstore, by chance it was the oldest bookstore in Britian Hatchards, right on Piccadilly Lane. At the time I didn't know anything about it's history, my 12 year old daughter just wanted to stop in and look for a book because she was almost done with the one she started on the plane ride from the US. I also had my 5 year old with me and even though she was a holy terrier at the time a young lady took her to a section and helped her pick out her own book. I don't know what book stores you are going to hit while you are in London but this is a great one.
There is also another added plus to Hatchards. In an alley behind Hatchards is a little pub called Chequers Tavern. I guess it is more of a side street but when you are traveling abroad with a 5 year old a tiny side street feels like an alley. Anyway Chequers had the best fish and chips we ate anywhere in Europe. We had A LOT of fish and chips that trip; I had three kids with me and it seemed like the whole time we were in Europe at least one of them got fish and chips every meal. Chequers was far and away the best, it blew all other fish and chips out of the water. Even now five years later if we go out to eat and fish and chips is on the menu, someone in my family is going to say, remember that restaurant in London with the fish and chips."
The baseball HOF has a counterproductive longevity bias, in my opinion. Guys like Jim Kaat and Don Sutton are fine, deserving HOFers. But these guys were never “Best Pitcher In Baseball!” tell-your-grandkids-about-them players.
Meanwhile, when I was coming of age, guys like Valenzuela and Hershiser and Gooden and Saberhagen were these type. The HOF would be a lot more fun and seem a lot less stuffy and staid if the voters were more open to voting for guys like this.
For more recent guys—Johan Santana was hands down the best pitcher in baseball over a five-year stretch. Felix was the face of an otherwise snakebitten franchise, a perennially Cy Young contender, and a perfect game thrower.
These were the stars of baseball—give them a bust in Cooperstown!
Halladay would not have been first ballot if he hadn't died. Very good pitcher, but he's basically the same model as Kevin Brown and David Cone, and where did that get them?
I assume that within the next few years they will get rid of the archaic rule that a starting pitcher has to go five innings to get the win. I also hope that teams will realize something ... if you're only asking starters to go five or six innings, they don't really need four days of rest between starts. Let's be real. It's just a matter of changing his throwing program between starts, but there's no reason a veteran pitcher can't work on three days rest and make 40 starts (or close to it) if you're only asking him for five innings or 100 pitches. So if we do that ... if guys start making more starts, and they can get wins with fewer than five innings, we might start seeing win totals go back up.
But yeah, there will come a point where we will see guys with 150 wins, but outstanding ERA and K-BB numbers, get into the Hall of Fame.
Cone and Brown, for one thing, deserve the Hall of Fame, statistically speaking (at least in my opinion, and that of many others).
Halladay was the league-leader in pitching WAR four times (Cone once, Brown twice).
Halladay finished second once (Brown also finished second once, Cone twice).
Halladay finished third twice (Brown twice, Cone once).
Halladay was the fourth-best pitcher in his league once (Brown and Cone never were).
So Halladay was one of his league's top four pitchers eight times (Brown five, Cone four). The reason they're not in the Hall of Fame (other than the Mitchell Report, in Brown's case) is that they simply weren't as good as Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, etc. Is that fair? I don't know. But Halladay was the BEST pitcher of his generation, and those two were not. Some part of Hall of Fame voting is not just raw numbers; it's how you stack up to your peers. Halladay stood above his; the others didn't stand out from the crowd.
(I'll say this for them, though: Kevin Brown was actually BETTER than those other '80s-00s pitchers for the five-year stretch 1996-2000 - other than Pedro, but he was on another planet at that time. Brown's five-year peak was worth 36.8 WAR, which is pretty historically awesome. Everyone with a peak like that is an inner-circle-type HOF player.
And as for David Cone, well, I think the best baseball poem ever was written about him, courtesy of Bill James:
No, they wouldn't do that. The change in rules wouldn't be an acknowledgement that the rule was wrong to begin with; it would be a response to changes in the game.
Even if they did, it may not change the totals all that much. If Grove or Feller or Roberts or Seaver or Maddux or any of those guys came out of a game early, they were probably getting shelled (an underrated old baseball term, I think).
I hear there is a statue to cicadas in France. I'm flying out today.
The 17-year and 13-year cicadas are even more special. I'm hoping to visit them when I return. Maybe in Chicago, maybe in NC?
On an unrelated note: what the heck is going on in NC?
Going to cooperstown next week just missed Joe. Maybe he will come here for the why we love football.
Penalize, no.
Just valuing a candle over a flare.
Hey Pos, get ahold of Greinke and tell him to sign somewhere/anywhere and pitch a bit. Retiring with more than 3000 K makes him a trivia answer, while retiring with fewer makes him look like a disappointment.
I'm sure the voters will decide to elect the best starting pitchers the same way they've decided to elect the best closers and best managers.
But for me, the Hall of Fame should be about impact on the game, most of which is about helping your team win games. In general, I don't think relief pitchers belong in the Hall because they just don't pitch that many innings even if the 8th and 9th are often more important than the early innings. Likewise with managers; they don't matter very much. It's the same reason we don't elect the best baserunners or the best defensive 1B or the best set up men or LOOGY or PH.
As starting pitchers pitch less and less and we hit the point where the best get to 200 IP in a year and 2400 IP is a long career, the impact is lower and lower. To what Joe said, Johan Santana and Felix Hernandez (and Kevin Brown and Frank Tanana, etc.) aren't in the Hall because despite greatness or longevity, their overall impact wasn't enough. Inducting pitchers with much less impact than they had cheapens the Hall. It would be electing Harold Baines every year.
In the earliest days of baseball the pitcher was unimportant to the game. He was just the guy who served up the ball for hitting. Fans wanted to see hitters, so that is what they got. If they knew their pitcher's name it was usually for something incidental. Pitchers were not stars.
Today it is going almost full circle. Pitchers are not serving up the ball for hitters, but individual pitchers are becoming less important to the game. Teams have so many that most fans do not even know all the pitchers on their favorite team's roster on any given day. The individual pitcher doesn't matter as much.
In the past, baseball evolved in a way that turned pitchers into stars and team leaders with more importance. This trend reached a kind of equilibrium for several decades, but then it started turning with the rise of 9th inning closers, then 8th inning "setup guy" pitchers, then LOOGY (Left Handed One Out Guy) pitchers, and so on.
MLB is basically a business. If they think this trend is good for business they will keep it up, and pitchers will fade into the background. If MLB starts losing money on this they will tinker around to incentivize pitching again. In the meantime we are going to see a dip in pitching.
The HOF will go on recognizing whichever pitchers capture the moment of their time.
Here is my contrarian position: Pitchers are, by and large, paid to win (and save) games. Pure and simple -- much purer and simpler to evaluate than a hitter, because a hitter could be an RBI guy or a runs guy or an average guy and do well enough to get in the Hall. But a pitcher? A single metric: wins. You want it more complex? Wins minus losses. 22-10 is better than 26-18 because that 12-win difference helps the team more an eight-game difference when it comes down to a playoff position. That's why Jacob deGrom would never get my vote -- he averages eight wins and six losses a season. Difference of two games. Meh.
So a pitcher who goes 6 innings and allows 7 earned runs in a 9-7 win is better than a pitcher who allows 1 unearned run in 9 innings but loses 1-0 - because he got the W and the other guy got the L? That’s really how you evaluate pitchers? A pitcher’s job is to prevent runs. A hitter’s job is to create them. Period.
A pitcher who allows 7 runs in 6 innings gets the W but if that's his usual performance he won't stick around long enough to be considered for the HoF.
My OPINION (you have yours) is that the gauge of a good pitcher is the number of games he wins.
In my opinion, Jupiter is closer to the sun than Mercury. See the problem with that?
Well, there are opinions and there are facts...... :o)
I really hope that you don’t have a vote!
I said I was a contrarian! :0) But, in all transparency, I am a member of the Hall of Fame.
(Not an elected player, but one of the people who buys an annual membership to support the HoF. But it does allow me to say "I'm a member of the Hall of Fame." And I think I get in free when I travel to Cooperstown.)
A Porsche revving is way better than any insect. Also, Porsches aren’t particularly loud. They don’t need to be. When you are the best, you don’t need to scream about it.
I love the sound of cicadas…like an ocean wave.
Northern Durham (NC) County. Cicadas sound like constant highway noise. Like an interstate about a half-mile away with constant traffic.
I work in North Durham. The buzzing is remarkably loud and the trees are swarming with cicadas.
The other possibility (honestly quite likely, given the high vote threshold to get in) is that the idea of a pitcher getting into HOF will become a relic of the past. And honestly, given that one of the main complaints about current pitcher usage is that it's just a parade of faceless, nameless automatons that no one has ever heard of, that path really meshes more with the "Fame" part of the HOF's name than redefining pitcher greatness.
Two of my favorite Mariner pitchers of all time really illustrate the HOF dilemma for starting pitchers going forward. Here are their career stats.
Pitcher A. WAR 49.8, 269-209, ERA 4.25, 2,441 SO WHIP 1.322, with 4th, 5th and 6th place CY seasons
Pitcher B. WAR 49.7, 169-136 ERA 3.42, 2,524 SO WHiP 1.206 with one CY, 3 second place finishes, a fourth, a seventh and an eighth, with MVP votes in 5 separate seasons
So who was better? WAR and W-L percentage are about a push as is total SO. Player B has a clear edge in ERA and WHIP, with a lot more love in voting for CY and MVP.
Pitcher A is Jamie Moyer, the poster boy for why wins should not be a big thing. He pitched for 25 years and his ERA+ for his career was roughly 101. It was 106 in the AL in 16 full/part seasons and 92 in 10 full/part seasons in the NL. He was a battler but never a dominant pitcher.
Pitcher B is Felix Hernandez, in my opinion a legitimate HOF candidate (several people mentioned this in response to Joe's blog whereas Moyer is not mentioned at all). He pitched for 15 years. He was truly a dominant pitcher and if he had played for a contender his win total would have been 200 or more. These days a starter who goes 6+ innings and gives up 3 runs or fewer is credited with a quality start. In 2014 Felix broke Tom Seavers record for CONSECUTIVE super-quality starts (7 innings or more giving up 2 runs or less) when Felix threw 14 such starts in a row. In his time in Seattle the question was not whether the Mariners could win the division, it was whether they could avoid finishing last. Moyer, on the other hand, played for some very good Mariner teams, including the 2001 team that won 116 games in the regular season. I'm hoping the HOF voters dig deep enough into the facts to realize just how special Felix was.
What constitutes a famous starter has obviously changed. Part of the reason starters are unknown to many fans is that they aren't building up enough stats to be noticed. We all know the issues with pitching wins, but it's probably fair to say that pitchers who get to 100 wins have probably been around long enough to become known to even casual fans. At the end of 2023, there were only 18 active pitchers with at least 100 wins. From 1969 through 2013, there were at least 30 active pitchers with at least 100 wins, with peaks as over 40 in 1997 and 1998. Between injuries and usage pattern changes, today's starters are becoming less visible to casual fans.
For my home team, I have a good idea who the pitchers are and how they stack up. For the visitors, it's like, "Who's the pitcher?" (Exactly.)
I was in London in 2019. I stopped at a bookstore, by chance it was the oldest bookstore in Britian Hatchards, right on Piccadilly Lane. At the time I didn't know anything about it's history, my 12 year old daughter just wanted to stop in and look for a book because she was almost done with the one she started on the plane ride from the US. I also had my 5 year old with me and even though she was a holy terrier at the time a young lady took her to a section and helped her pick out her own book. I don't know what book stores you are going to hit while you are in London but this is a great one.
There is also another added plus to Hatchards. In an alley behind Hatchards is a little pub called Chequers Tavern. I guess it is more of a side street but when you are traveling abroad with a 5 year old a tiny side street feels like an alley. Anyway Chequers had the best fish and chips we ate anywhere in Europe. We had A LOT of fish and chips that trip; I had three kids with me and it seemed like the whole time we were in Europe at least one of them got fish and chips every meal. Chequers was far and away the best, it blew all other fish and chips out of the water. Even now five years later if we go out to eat and fish and chips is on the menu, someone in my family is going to say, remember that restaurant in London with the fish and chips."
Holy terrier? A sainted dog not named Bernard?
The baseball HOF has a counterproductive longevity bias, in my opinion. Guys like Jim Kaat and Don Sutton are fine, deserving HOFers. But these guys were never “Best Pitcher In Baseball!” tell-your-grandkids-about-them players.
Meanwhile, when I was coming of age, guys like Valenzuela and Hershiser and Gooden and Saberhagen were these type. The HOF would be a lot more fun and seem a lot less stuffy and staid if the voters were more open to voting for guys like this.
For more recent guys—Johan Santana was hands down the best pitcher in baseball over a five-year stretch. Felix was the face of an otherwise snakebitten franchise, a perennially Cy Young contender, and a perfect game thrower.
These were the stars of baseball—give them a bust in Cooperstown!
Absolutely.
100% agree with this post.
Halladay would not have been first ballot if he hadn't died. Very good pitcher, but he's basically the same model as Kevin Brown and David Cone, and where did that get them?
I assume that within the next few years they will get rid of the archaic rule that a starting pitcher has to go five innings to get the win. I also hope that teams will realize something ... if you're only asking starters to go five or six innings, they don't really need four days of rest between starts. Let's be real. It's just a matter of changing his throwing program between starts, but there's no reason a veteran pitcher can't work on three days rest and make 40 starts (or close to it) if you're only asking him for five innings or 100 pitches. So if we do that ... if guys start making more starts, and they can get wins with fewer than five innings, we might start seeing win totals go back up.
But yeah, there will come a point where we will see guys with 150 wins, but outstanding ERA and K-BB numbers, get into the Hall of Fame.
To your points about Halladay vs. Cone and Brown:
Cone and Brown, for one thing, deserve the Hall of Fame, statistically speaking (at least in my opinion, and that of many others).
Halladay was the league-leader in pitching WAR four times (Cone once, Brown twice).
Halladay finished second once (Brown also finished second once, Cone twice).
Halladay finished third twice (Brown twice, Cone once).
Halladay was the fourth-best pitcher in his league once (Brown and Cone never were).
So Halladay was one of his league's top four pitchers eight times (Brown five, Cone four). The reason they're not in the Hall of Fame (other than the Mitchell Report, in Brown's case) is that they simply weren't as good as Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, etc. Is that fair? I don't know. But Halladay was the BEST pitcher of his generation, and those two were not. Some part of Hall of Fame voting is not just raw numbers; it's how you stack up to your peers. Halladay stood above his; the others didn't stand out from the crowd.
(I'll say this for them, though: Kevin Brown was actually BETTER than those other '80s-00s pitchers for the five-year stretch 1996-2000 - other than Pedro, but he was on another planet at that time. Brown's five-year peak was worth 36.8 WAR, which is pretty historically awesome. Everyone with a peak like that is an inner-circle-type HOF player.
And as for David Cone, well, I think the best baseball poem ever was written about him, courtesy of Bill James:
"David Cone,
staff ace on loan.")
If they change the rules for earning a win, wouldn’t they go back historically and recalculate win totals?
No, they wouldn't do that. The change in rules wouldn't be an acknowledgement that the rule was wrong to begin with; it would be a response to changes in the game.
Even if they did, it may not change the totals all that much. If Grove or Feller or Roberts or Seaver or Maddux or any of those guys came out of a game early, they were probably getting shelled (an underrated old baseball term, I think).
No?