The Zack Wheeler Ten

Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler is having another terrific season … and a season that might very well lead to him finishing second in the Cy Young voting again. Wheeler finished second in the Cy voting last year to Chris Sale, and he finished a super-close second to Corbin Burnes in 2021. While there’s still a touch more than half a season left, all signs point to him finishing second to the remarkable Paul Skenes this year.

I think about this because Wheeler turned 35 a few weeks ago, and that’s about the age when you start thinking about a ballplayer’s legacy. Wheeler emerged as a top starter in 2018 after some injury-plagued seasons, and — even if many haven’t noticed — he’s been the best starter in baseball since then. He leads in Baseball Reference AND Fangraphs WAR over those seven and a half seasons, and it isn’t even all that close (he’s four bWAR and six fWAR ahead of the field!).

And yet … will Zack Wheeler be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame? Should he be?

To the second question, my answer is unequivocal: Of course, he should be elected to the Hall of Fame. He’s been the best pitcher in baseball over a substantial period of time. I think anyone who has clearly been the best hitter or best pitcher over seven-plus years — I will emphasize the word “clearly” so that we don’t have a bunch of ties — is a Hall of Famer to me.

But will he be elected? I have no idea. The thing is: Unless he keeps going at peak until he’s 40 or 42 or something like that, he will not have particularly gaudy career numbers. Wheeler has only won 110 games in his career. His career WAR of 38 is a long way off from what we generally expect from Hall of Fame starters.

And, yeah, he might never win that Cy Young Award.

It’s possible to be elected to the Hall without winning a Cy Young Award … but it ain’t easy. They started giving out Cy Youngs to pitchers in both leagues in 1967, the year I was born. Twenty-two starting pitchers who pitched at least 2,000 innings in my lifetime have been elected to the Hall of Fame. Seven of them never won a Cy Young.

They are:

I don’t know that Wheeler really has a career trajectory that compares favorably to any of them. Most of these guys are 1970s types, when pitching was a very different racket.

Still, it’s interesting, right? I have put together a list of the 10 best pitchers of my lifetime who never won a Cy Young Award … and below you can tell me how many of them (if any) you think should be in the Hall of Fame.

I’m going to put them in alphabetical order so as not to influence your decision.

In Kevin Brown’s best season, 1998, he finished behind Hall of Famers Tom Glavine and Trevor Hoffman (his teammate) in the Cy Young voting, but looking back, it seems pretty clear that he was quite a bit better than either of them. In fact, I think that’s one of the most valuable seasons any pitcher has had in the last 50 years.

The Marlins traded him to San Diego before the 1998 season when they were in full-fledged salary-dump mode (a mode they’ve never quite gotten out of). The Padres had been pretty terrible for, well, forever. Brown pitched 257 extraordinary innings, striking out 257, walking 49, and allowing just eight home runs all season. EIGHT! And this was in 1998, when, you might recall, there were a few home runs being hit. The Padres went to the World Series. Brown led the way with a fantastic postseason.

Then he was off to Los Angeles on the first $100 million contract ever given a player — a deal that famously/infamously included 12 chartered flights for his family to come to LA from their home in Georgia. He had a couple of terrific seasons for the Dodgers, then began to decline, then came the Mitchell Report, and then came a virtual no-show on the Hall of Fame ballot.

I’ve written this before: I think Mark Buehrle is the ideal pitcher. I am using the word “ideal” to represent exactly what the early creators of baseball wanted from a pitcher. They didn’t want attention hogs who went for strikeouts and pitched around the best hitters. No, they wanted pitchers who worked fast and challenged hitters and relied on the team’s defense (and their own) to make it through.

That was Mark Buehrle. He did strike out almost 2,000 batters in his career, but that’s mostly because of the time when he pitched; you couldn’t HELP but strike out some batters in the free-swinging 21st century. Anyway, that was never really the point. Buehrle came at you with his best stuff, and on his best day he threw a perfect game, and on lots of other days he gave up a cavalcade of hits (he led the league in hits allowed four times), and he fielded everything hit up the middle, and he pitched almost 3,300 innings, most of them good ones. I wish there were a hundred pitchers just like him.

In 1993, Chuck Finley completed 13 games for the California Angels. Over the last 10 years, the Angels as a team have completed 13 games COMBINED.

Finley was listed at 6-foot-6, but he always seemed much bigger than that. It looked like he was just handing the ball to the catcher. Unlike fellow giant Randy Johnson, Finley didn’t throw that hard, but he had about 10 different speeds on his fastball, so you never really knew what you were going to get. It was always an uncomfortable at-bat facing Chuck Finley.

He won 200 games and struck out more than 2,600 batters over his career, but he spread all that out so completely — never won more than 18 games nor struck out more than 215 batters in a season — that he often seemed invisible. He didn’t seem to mind. When he was named the American League Player of the Week in 1996, he said: “That just goes to show you how this league has gone to hell.”

I understand why the BBWAA votes on its awards BEFORE the postseason. I do. It wouldn’t be fair to penalize great players having great seasons just because their team isn’t good enough to make the playoffs. I get it.

That said, who had a better 2008 season: Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum or no-Cy Young votes Cole Hamels?

Tommy John induced 604 double-play grounders in his remarkable career. Nobody else is even close. The next seven guys on the list — Jim Kaat, Gaylord Perry, Phil Niekro, Warren Spahn, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Steve Carlton — are all in the Hall of Fame. But none of them are within 100 double plays of John’s total.

He was a man who knew what he was about. Whether he was a 20-year-old prospect in Cleveland in 1963 or a 46-year-old graybeard in New York in 1989, he threw sinking fastballs. He threw sinking fastballs before having the surgery that bears his name, and he threw sinking fastballs after. He was charged by opponents many times with scuffing the baseball to get a little extra sink, and sure, he probably did. But he also spent a lifetime tinkering with his motion and his grip and his mechanics to get just a little bit more drop on the baseball.

The story of how Jerry Koosman became a Met is wonderful and hilarious. He was in the Army, trying to become a helicopter pilot, when he was talked into pitching for the team at Fort Bliss in El Paso. His catcher there was John Luchese, whose father was an usher for the just-founded New York Mets. John wrote to his father. His father passed along the tip to the minor league director. The minor-league director sent someone to El Paso to watch Jerry Koosman pitch. The Mets offered him a $2,000 signing bonus. He turned it down.

The Mets then offered him $1,900. He turned that down, too.

The Mets then offered him $1,600. He accepted because he didn’t like how this was going and didn’t want to end up paying the Mets to sign with them.

It was Jerry Koosman’s destiny to be overshadowed. He had a fantastic rookie season, but lost the Rookie of the Year Award to Johnny Bench. He was heroic for the 1969 Mets, but of course, that was Tom Seaver’s team. He was fabulous in 1976 but lost the Cy Young Award to another lefty, Randy Jones. He won 20 and led the league in bWAR for Minnesota in 1979, but finished a distant sixth in the Cy voting.

In all, Koosman won 220 games with 2,500 strikeouts and 30 shutouts — the only other pitcher with that combination who is not in the Hall of Fame is Roger Clemens.

Here’s what I wrote about Pettitte’s Hall of Fame chances way back in 2019:

If Andy Pettitte can stay on the ballot — no sure thing, but if he can — he might be someone who can gain Hall of Fame support in the years ahead. Let's ignore his HGH admission for the moment. He had a 60.7 career bWAR, which is at least in the Hall of Fame ballpark.

He won 256 games, which will look better and better as the years go along.

And then there's the postseason performance. He made 44 postseason starts, which is insane. He did have some downs (the 2001 World Series, for instance), but he had more ups (incredible in the 2003 World Series, won 2001 ALCS MVP, etc).

Plus, he built a modicum of fame. Yes, this was mostly because it would be impossible to be on the dominant Yankees teams of the 1990s and NOT become at least a little bit famous, but he also pitched brilliantly for the pennant-winning 2005 Astros.

And everyone remembers that pickoff move.

Rick Reuschel’s career seems custom-designed to be ignored. He played for mediocre teams pretty much his entire career, his won-loss record was typically meh, he and his brother Paul had bodies that sparked a million “How’s that guy a major leaguer?” barbs from kids pulling their baseball cards.

But Rick Reuschel was exactly the opposite of what he looked like. He was a fantastic fielder, a pretty good hitting pitcher, a ferocious competitor, and a remarkably consistent force over two decades, even though his career was interrupted by a tear in his rotator cuff. In 1977, he lost out on the Cy Young Award to Steve Carlton because everything in those days was wins and ERA, and Carlton had three more wins and a lower ERA. But Reuschel pitched in a big-time hitters’ park for an utterly mediocre Cubs team; he was probably the better pitcher that season.

I’m not going to rehash Schilling’s Hall of Fame history … you already know that sordid tale. Schilling had some high-level seasons with Philadelphia — including back-to-back 300-K seasons in 1997-98 — but it wasn’t until he paired up with Randy Johnson in Arizona and Pedro Martinez in Boston that he really came into his own. He has readily admitted that he was a knucklehead as a young pitcher; he had his three best seasons when he was 34, 35, and 37 years old.

What really stands out about Schilling, aside from all the things you are thinking about now, is that crazy strikeout-to-walk ratio. In 2002, he struck out 316 and walked just 33. It was the best strikeout-to-walk ratio for any pitcher who threw 200 innings in a season — ahead even of Pedro Martinez’s ludicrous 1999 and 2000 seasons or Greg Maddux’s 1997. Few have ever blended power and command like Schilling after he figured things out.

Stieb led the American League in bWAR in 1982, 1983, and 1984. In those three years, your Cy Young winners were:

I think the randomness of those pitchers winning Cy Young Awards during Stieb’s glory peak — they might just be the three most obscure Cy Young winners since the creation of the award — has bolstered the idea that Dave Stieb has always been massively underrated and deserving of Hall of Fame consideration. Stieb was indeed a fantastic pitcher for about a decade.

OK, now you vote: Pop over to this quick little poll and choose who you think belongs in the Hall of Fame. I’ll share the results — and my picks — soon. We’ll keep doing more of these, so vote early, vote often, and let’s have some fun with it.