The June 1976 SI article was published shortly after Bert's first appearance with the Rangers, in which Bert and Mark "The Bird" Fidrych each went 11 innings, with the Tigers prevailing, 3-2. Including Bert's last two starts with the Twins, this made the third consecutive start where Bert had pitched well and been tied going into the late innings but lost. But the SI article wasn't a product of Bert's disappointing results in tight games over the preceding few weeks. The SI article was prompted by two conspicuous aspects of Bert's record that had persisted for years. First, Bert's W-L record never seemed to match the rest of his record - the superior ERAs, the shutouts, the complete games and the strikeouts. Second, Bert had a propensity to lose a lot of close games in the late innings.

Bert's fanatical supporters always have two deceptively simple explanations at the ready for Bert's mediocre W-L records in the '70s: he received poor run support, and he was unlucky. Each of these two rationalizations offered by Bert's backers fail completely to explain Bert's relatively poor W-L records, and each are particularly absurd for having been offered by people who purport to possess some degree of sophistication in statistical analysis. Each can be dismissed quickly and definitively.

Run Support. Bert's run support was slightly below average for much of the '70s. In this respect, Bert's backers are correct. But Bert's run support in the '70s was enough so that a pitcher with Bert's record of stinginess in allowing runs should have had a W-L percentage of approximately .600!

Bert had completed six seasons in the major leagues when the SI article appeared in June 1976, and had allowed an average of 3.16 runs/game while receiving approximately 4.0 runs/game from the Twins. Plug those two figures into the so-called Pythagorean Theorem with which any of Bert's statistically inclined supporters is familiar and you receive a projected winning percentage of approximately .615. Bert's actual winning percentage from 1970 to 1975 was .528. The Pythagorean Theorem suggests Bert should have been able to compile his .528 winning percentage while receiving only 3.35 runs/game from the Twins.

This disparity between Bert's actual record and his projected Pythagorean record persisted for the remainder of the '70s. At the end of the decade, Bert's winning percentage was .536. The Pythagorean Theorem says Bert should have had a winning percentage of .602.

To put it another way, if Bert's run support in the '70s had been 3.3 runs/game, Bert's backers would have a point about poor run support accounting for Bert's poor W-L record. But Bert's run support was approximately 4.0 runs/game during the decade, approximately 20% higher than the 3.3 runs/game that might have explained Bert's .536 winning percentage.

Bad Luck. It is particularly curious that Bert's backers would resort to this argument, one borne of superstition and anti-rationalism rather than the rigorous statistical analysis Bert's backers purport to favor. It is a wholly unworthy argument - even silly - for two simple reasons. First, the suggestion that Bert's "bad luck" could persist for a solid decade, across 350 starts and more than 2600 innings, following Bert from Minnesota to Texas to Pittsburgh, is pure nonsense as a statistical matter. Second, it is particularly nonsensical given the abundance of statistical evidence demonstrating that Bert had an astoundingly bad record in tight, low-scoring games and that this record was attributable to Bert's unusually poor performance in the late innings of tight games.

The rap on Blyleven, as expressed in the SI article, was that you could get to him in the late innings, and the statistics bear out that reputation. The following table shows Bert's performance in "late and close" situations (i.e., plate appearances against Bert in the 7th inning or later with the batting team tied, ahead by one, or the tying run at least on deck).

The pertinent numbers here are in the last two columns - the tOPS+ (Bert's OPS+ in late and close situations relative to his general OPS+ for the season) and the sOPS+ (Bert's OPS+ in late and close situations relative to the general league-wide OPS+, which by definition is 100 each year). Throughout the '70s Bert suffered declines in performance in late and close situations greater than any other elite pitcher of the era - his tOPS+ for the decade was 119. From 1980 to the end of his career the more mature Bert compiled a very good 86 tOPS+. Not coincidentally, Bert's winning percentage of .533 after 1979 almost exactly matches his projected Pythagorean winning percentage of .530, a stark contrast to the huge disparity between Bert's actual and Pythagorean winning percentages in the '70s.

Bert's improved performance in late and close situations from '80 to the end of his career coincided with a dramatic drop in the number of plate appearances against Bert in late and close situations. During the '70's approximately 14% of the plate appearances against Blyleven came in late and close situations. This figure dropped to less than 9% after 1979. This change is explained primarily by the fact that Bert was pulled from the game earlier in the '80's when he got in trouble in late and close situations, which contributed greatly to Bert's improved late and close performances later in his career. Consequently, Bert faced on average more than 8 batters per late and close game in the '70s, but just over 6 batters from '80 to the end of his career. This trend started in '79, when plate appearances against Bert in late and close situations dropped dramatically as a result of Chuck Tanner's decision to pull Bert at the first sign of trouble. The strategy worked spectacularly for the Pirates, who won 23 of Bert's 37 starts that year (a .622 winning percentage) despite the fact that in the great majority of Bert's 20 no-decisions he left the game either tied or behind.

The late and close statistics reveal that in the seven seasons preceding Tanner's '79 "quick hook" strategy, Bert had five seasons in which his tOPS+ was greater than 130 and his sOPS+ was 100 or greater. During these seven seasons Bert's tOPS+ was 128. No other elite pitcher of the era comes close to this record of performance decline in late and close situations over such an extended period.  Bert's sOPS+ was 105, meaning that in these five seasons Bert was an average or below average pitcher in late and close situations. Of the other premier pitchers of the era who, like Bert, had a dozen or more seasons in which they faced 100 or more batters in late and close situations, no other pitcher had more than three seasons in which their tOPS+ was greater than 130 and the sOPS+ was greater than 100. Steve Carlton and Gaylord Perry each had three such seasons and a fourth season that nearly qualified, but these were spread over careers more than 20 years long. The occurrence of five such seasons in a period of seven years during the peak of Blyleven's career explains to a significant degree the striking discrepancy between his actual W-L record and the kinds of W-L records projected by the Pythagorean Theorem.

Of all the commentary in the aftermath of the HOF voting results I was most struck by the following comments by Thomas Boswell during the course of an online chat at the Washington Post website:

"The push for Blyleven drives me crazy. I follwed his whole career. His reputation was that, more than any other top stuff pitcher, he would find a way to lose or not to win. He's just not a HOFer, in my book. He only won 20 games one time and more than 17 only twice! And he pitched in the era when top starters got 4-5 more starts a year and 20 wins was easier. BB had nine seasons with 36-to-40 starts and averaged 38 in those years. When Chuck Tanner got him in Pittsburgh the word went around that Chuck had decided, over BB's protestations, to take him out of late-and-close games because he'd never had the stomach for it. 'Take him out before he can lose.' Tanner never said it in public. But BB's winning opercentage gets better."

Photo Left: Thomas Boswell

Well, we'll never know what was in Chuck Tanner's head, and Chuck is a classy guy and he ain't sayin'. But we do know the following: Boswell is absolutely correct regarding Blyleven's reputation, and Chuck Tanner did indeed resort to a quick hook with Blyleven beginning in the 1979 season, a strategy that succeeded wildly and was a critical part of the Bucs' march to the World Series that year.

I get the impression a lot of Bert Backers are too young to have closely followed the game back in the '70s, but Bert's reputation as a guy who lost the close ones and stumbled in the late innings of tight games is simply a fact, and also a matter of record. That was Bert's reputation; Boswell remembers it correctly. I remember it, too, and anyone else who followed the game back then would also remember it. Of course, reputations aren't always earned, and reputations in baseball are sometimes born unfairly out of an incident or two, or out of nothing at all.

However, if the issue is whether Bert actually had the reputation claimed by Boswell, we don't have to rely on Boswell's recollection. Bert's reputation for "finding a way to lose", as Boswell put it, was the subject of a Sports Illustrated article in 1976 published shortly after Bert's trade from the Twins to the Rangers, entitled "The Stuff, and No Nonsense: As a Texas Ranger He is Richer, But Will He Pay Attention?"

After recounting the rather ugly facts regarding Bert's infamous exit from Minnesota (i.e., Bert's heated salary dispute with Twins owner Clark Griffith and his flip-off to Twins fans after Bert's last appearance for the Twins) and offering a comic tableau of Bert losing a battle of concentration with a resin bag, the article shifted to the crux of the matter: "However, what was really at issue was not Blyleven's bad manners or the size of his paycheck, but whether he might now become the big winner so many think he ought to be." The following two paragraphs of the SI article neatly capture the gist of the matter.

When Blyleven does lose, his downfalls seem to occur in the late innings. For this he has blamed the Twins' relievers. Given a better bullpen, he claims "I would have 40 more career victories."

But many baseball people believe his late-inning reversals have been mostly his own doing. "Bert throws basically two pitches," says Bonds, "a hard fastball and a hard curveball. Everything comes in at the same speed, so sooner or later you can get your timing down. It takes a few innings and by then maybe Bert's lost a bit off his fastball. It starts to flatten out. And maybe in later innings his curveball will hang every so often."

Bert's problems in late and close situations were common knowledge in baseball, although the theories for the problem varied. (None of the theories, however, focused on the Twins bullpen; notwithstanding Bert's claim of 40 lost victories, Bert lost only 11 wins to bullpen malfunctions between '70 and '76, fewer than Niekro, Kaat, Hunter, Ken Holtzman, Joe Coleman, Andy Messersmith, Carl Morton, Fritz Peterson and Dave McNally, among others.)

The SI article used virtually the precise language used by Boswell in recollecting Bert's reputation as a pitcher who pitched just well enough to lose.

If Blyleven's parts have seemed greater than the whole, he attributes it to his struggles with a mediocre team. But as Dick Williams, the manager of the Angels, says, "I've seen a lot of pitchers who never had Blyleven's stuff win 20 games with teams a lot worse. Some pitchers pitch just good enough to win, whether it's 1-0 or 9-8, and others always seem to pitch just good enough to lose."

Dick Williams didn't name his "20 wins for bad teams" all-star team, but he wouldn't have had any problem filling out the rotation. Randy Jones won 20 for a Padres team in '75 that won only 71 games and 22 for a 73-win Padres team in '76; Steve Busby won 22 games for a Royals team that was 16 games under .500 when Busby wasn't the pitcher of record; and Jim Colborn won 20 games in '73 for a Brewers team that won only 74 games. And then there were pitchers who seemed to specialize in winning 20 games a season for mediocre teams, like Ferguson Jenkins, Mel Stottlemyre and Wilbur Wood, each of whom won 20 games three times for teams that were either .500 or below or would have been had their ace pitcher's W-L records been subtracted from their teams' record.

Perhaps the most glaring example of a pitcher who won 20 games without benefit of Bert's stuff and for teams worse than Bert's teams was Jim Kaat. Kaat was rebounding from arm problems when the Twins traded him to the White Sox in '73 and he no longer had the stuff he'd had for the Twins in the 60's. But Kaat put together back-to-back 20 win seasons for White Sox teams that finished behind the Twins in the AL West in '74 and '75. Bert, meanwhile, was winning 17 and 15 games, respectively, in '74 and '75.

The SI article from June 1976 is pretty compelling evidence that Boswell's recollection is correct: Bert had the reputation, fairly or unfairly, as a pitcher who pitched just well enough to lose, a pitcher who didn't produce results worthy of his nasty stuff, and a pitcher who seemed to sag in the late innings of tight games. Bert Backers can contest the fairness of this reputation but they cannot deny the existence of the reputation. I'm fairly certain that won't stop them from attacking Pat Jordan, the celebrated SI writer who wrote the article, or those the article quoted, like Bobby Bonds, Jim Palmer, Dick Williams and Gene Mauch. But they might consider that the source for Bert's alleged tendency to lose his concentration in tight spots was Bert himself, and that Bert's shabby attempt to blame the Twins bullpen for his troubles, absurdly blaming his teammates for costing him more wins than Bert's total number of no-decisions in that period, suggests that Bert was aware of his reputation and rather defensive about it.

I distinctly recall that this SI article was not the only notice the media took of Bert's reputation, but few publications maintain archives of 43 year old articles. I also recall, as apparently Boswell does, that Bert's unwanted reputation only grew after this article, as his late inning troubles in '77 for the Rangers and '78 for the Pirates exceeded his Minnesota woes and became a source of contention with Pittsburgh manager Chuck Tanner.

I believe anyone who reads the SI article will agree that Boswell is owed an apology by those Bert Backers who accused him of fabricating his claim regarding Bert's reputation. Boswell's recollection is correct. The reputation existed. I'll examine in a subsequent post whether the reputation was deserved.