The Crux of the Matter
There is an army of Blyleven Backers deployed across the internet armed with three and four letter statistical acronyms - RSAA, WARP, RCAP - designed to demonstrate that Blyleven would have been a consistent big winner if only he'd played for better teams and received better run support. They purport to prove that Bert would have won 313 games with better run support, or that his mediocre .537 career win percentage would have been .570, or that he'd have won 20 games in a season more than once if only he had been backed by elite teams rather than also-rans. They have an explanation for everything, a rationalization for every glaring deficiency in Bert's Hall of Fame qualifications.
But there's one thing - one really big thing - that they just can't seem to explain: why wasn't Bert a consistent big winner when he actually played for good teams that gave him solid offensive support? Because it is a fact that Blyleven pitched for some very good teams that gave him very good support, and Bert still couldn't put up Hall of Fame numbers.
By my count Bert pitched eight seasons for teams that either won 90 or more games, were serious contenders for division titles, or both. These teams won two World Series, three division titles and finished 2nd three other times. They had a cumulative .562 winning percentage. Bert made 261 starts over these eight seasons and pitched more than 1800 innings. Here's his record for these eight seasons:
100-83, .546 win percentage, 3.55 ERA.
The simple fact is that Bert averaged 12.5 wins per season for these eight years and had a lower winning percentage - .546 - than the .562 winning percentage posted by his teams. But Bert's battalions tell us we should ignore what actually happened when Bert pitched for good teams and instead believe what they tell us Bert would have done if those mediocre Twins and Indians teams had been powerhouses.
Here are the eight seasons:
Let's begin with 1970. OK, it was Bert's rookie season, and the Twins didn't give Bert very good run support.But in 1977 the Texas Rangers won 94 games and scored 4.93 runs/game in Bert's 30 starts - .4 runs/game better than the league average and .2 runs/game better than Texas' 4.73 runs/game average that year. Bert was 14-12 in 30 starts - a .538 win percentage for a .580 team.
In 1978 Bert moved to Pittsburgh. The Pirates won 88 games that year and finished 2nd in the A.L. East. Bert was backed with 4.24 runs/game - precisely average for the Pirates; the league averaged 3.99 r/g that year. Bert went 14-10.
In 1979 the Pirates won 98 games and won the World Series. They scored 4.36 r/g for Bert - higher than the league average of 4.21 that year but lower than the Pirates average of 4.72 r/g. Bert won 12 games in 37 starts. Bert would have lost substantially more games that year except the Pirates took him off the hook by coming back to tie or take the lead in an astounding 13 games in which Bert left the game in a position to take the loss (just to give you some context, Guidry was similarly bailed out only 20 times in his entire career and Bert was never bailed out more than 4 times in any other season in his career).
In 1980 Bert went 8-13 for a Pirates team that had a two game division lead when Bert took the mound on August 21. But Bert went 1-5 in his last 8 starts with a 4.38 ERA and the Pirates collapsed to finish 8 games back. Bert had poor run support in '80 - just 3.3 r/g - but Bert was hardly any better than his offense, finishing with a worse than league average 3.82 ERA.
In 1987 Bert pitched for another Series winner. The Twins lavished 5.15 r/g on Bert in his starts. The Twins averaged 4.85 r/g that year and the league average was 4.9 r/g. Bert went 15-12. Frank Viola received .7 r/g fewer than Bert did that year, but went 17-10.
In 1988 the Twins won 91 games. Bert went 10-17 with a terrible ERA of 5.43. The offensive support wasn't great for Bert, but it was better than Allan Anderson got from the Twins that year, and Anderson went 16-9.
In 1989 Bert finally came through for a winning team, going 17-5 for an Angels teams that won 91 games and scored 4.8 r/g for Bert, about .5 r/g more than the league average. Good for Bert. Chuck Finley, by contrast, received only 3.9 r/g from the Angels - far below the league average and nearly a run less per game than Bert - but still managed to go 16-9.
Why wasn't Bert able to do what Finley did in '89, i.e., muddle through when receiving less than average support? Why couldn't Bert do what Jim Kaat did in '74 and '75, when he put together back-to-back 20 win seasons for a White Sox team that was sub-.500 over these two seasons and gave him less than average run support? It's true Bert averaged 18 wins a season from '72 to '74 for the Twins, but his winning percentage was only .514, just a shade better than the Twins .502 winning percentage over those years. By contrast, Kaat had a .603 winning percentage in '74-'75 for teams that had a .483 winning percentage.
Why couldn't Bert do what Tommy John did from '77 to '80 when John averaged 20 wins per year for good teams? Granted, John's Dodger and Yankee teams had a .594 winning percentage compared to the .561 compiled by the good teams Bert pitched for in the eight seasons we've examined, but does that explain the difference between John's 20 wins per season and Bert's 12.5 wins, or John's .696 winning percentage during this period and Bert's .546?
This is the crux of the matter. Bert couldn't establish himself as a consistent winner even when pitching for good teams; he couldn't do what elite pitchers are supposed to do - significantly improve upon their team's usual performance. True, he had very good ERA's for many mediocre teams, but compiled won-loss records that were too often no better than mediocre pitchers who received even less run support than Bert did. And when Bert pitched for good teams, he continued to compile mediocre won-loss records. This is the problem for Bert's army of backers and their arsenal of esoteric statistics. They can't explain why Bert didn't win consistently for good teams. They can't explain how Bert could receive better run support than Twin pitchers like Joe Decker and Jim Hughes and Dick Woodson and compile records no better than these mediocre pitchers.
Here's the task for the Bert Backers. Explain how this putative Hall of Fame pitcher could receive an average of 4.39 runs/game from these good teams, whose overall scoring average was 4.34 runs/game over these eight seasons, and yet have a lower winning percentage than his teams? The average pitcher on these teams received slightly less run support than Bert and yet had a higher winning percentage - was the average pitcher on these Pirate, Twin and Angel teams a Hall of Famer?
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