Lost In Translation
Not surprisingly, an analysis of Bert's prime years of '70 to '79 demonstrates that despite his superlative ERAs he didn't significantly improve his team when he was on the mound. Yes, Bert didn't get good run support from his teams, who scored .35 runs/game fewer for Bert than they did for other starting pitchers. It is also true that in measuring Bert's performance against his teams' Bert was competing against some pretty good pitchers. For the entire decade, Bert pitched on staffs that were slightly above average even without Bert's contribution, and the staffs on his '70, '72, '77 and '79 teams were among the very best in their leagues. But the Team Relative analysis controls for these factors, of course.
Even after increasing Bert's run support to team average, and adjusting his team's W-L record downward to reflect what it would have been with an average pitching staff, Bert still only outperformed his team's W-L record by 10.2%. That's down in Drysdale territory. As I've previously noted, Bert hugely underperformed his Pythagorean projection during those ten years, compiling a .536 winning percentage as compared to a .599 PythPro. If Bert had been able to perform to his PythPro he wouldn't be such a hot topic today because he would have been inducted into the Hall years ago.
Bert's run support distribution was more conventional in '76 to '79, although his average run support in '76 was terrible - only 2.75 runs/game. But remember, the Team Relative analysis controls for poor average run support*; it doesn't control for poor run support distribution. In '77, '78 and '79, Bert's run support was almost precisely team average. After controlling for Bert's run support for the '76 to '79 period, a period during which his run support distribution was more conventional and his ERA+ was a very good 125.5, he still only managed to outperform his team by 13.9%. And since we've acknowledged Bert's poor run distribution in the period '72 to '75, we should also acknowledge that Bert's Team Relative performance in the period '76 to '79 was skewed by his W-L record in the '79 season, when the Pirates' bullpen and bats bailed out Bert an extraordinary 13 times after Bert left the game in a position to lose. To give you some idea of how extraordinary this "bailout" total is, consider that Bert was similarly bailed out only 18 times in the preceding nine years. Bert's 12-5 record in '79 is extremely misleading, and if not for his good fortune and the Bucs late-inning dramatics for Bert in '79 his record would have been something like 12-15, which more than eliminates the improvement we see in Bert's Team Relative performance in the late '70s.
I've not modeled Bert's projected record from '72 to '75 assuming a more optimal distribution of run support. It could be done using a system that generates a random distribution of run support and Bert's projected W-L record using such a system would no doubt benefit. There's also no doubt, however, that any benefit to Bert from a more conventional distribution of run support from '72 to '75 would be largely offset by his '79 season, when Bert easily could have lost an additional 10 games and his 12-5 and .706 winning percentage was not reflective of his performance: he had a 109 ERA+, a LevERA+ of 99, and won only 12 of his 37 starts for a World Series championship team.
Again, this Team Relative analysis is limited to Bert's peak decade of '70 to '79. As the Bert Backers would no doubt argue, Bert had some great seasons outside this period, primarily '84 and '89. But the '70 to '79 period forms the overwhelming bulk of Bert's argument for the Hall. For the balance of his career he had a .533 winning percentage and 108 ERA+, and despite the excellent '84 and '89 seasons the 80's were an exceedingly erratic period for Bert, a period in which poor seasons ('80 and '88) and injury limited seasons ('82 and '83) detract from his case for the Hall. The argument of the Bert Backers is almost exclusively based on the '70s, during which he posted his best ERA+ figures, almost 2/3s of his shutouts and six of his eight 200 strikeout seasons. But the fact is that for all of Bert's statistical achievements in the '70s, they didn't translate into a commensurate win total and W-L record and Bert didn't improve his team as much as he should have. And the problem wasn't run support.
__________________________
* For example, Bert posted a 13-16 record in '76, worse than his team's 79-83 record. But the Team Relative analysis has Bert outperforming his team by 32% after adjusting for his run support.
BlyLeverage
Bill James did a piece a few years ago on Bert Blyleven in which he addressed the great mystery surrounding Blyleven's conspicuously mediocre W-L record. While conceding that Bert's critics make some good points - "Blyleven did not do an A+ job of matching his effort to the runs he had to work with" - he ultimately concluded that Bert's biggest problem was his lack of run support, not his failure to pitch better in critical situations. Bill attributed roughly two-thirds of Bert's relatively poor record to lack of run support and one-third to Bert's tendency to pitch relatively poorly in tight games.
Bill's analysis was disappointing in certain respects, however. First, he didn't note that Bert's relatively poor career W-L record is almost purely a function of his performance in the first nine years of his career ('70 to '78). Had Bert compiled a W-L record commensurate with his ERAs and run support in the '70s Bert would already be in the Hall and Bill James and I wouldn't be writing about him. Second, Bill didn't discuss Bert's pertinent statistics from this period that likely explain the disparity between Bert's excellent ERAs during that period and his pedestrian W-L record. As I've previously noted, Bert had terrible record in "late and close situations" in that period, far worse than any premier pitcher of that era that I've examined, and lost a disproportionate number of close games. While it strikes me as reasonable and logical to infer that a pitcher who performs poorly in the late innings of tight games will lose a disproportionate number of close games, I thought I'd look at the records of various pitchers in one-run games and attempt to determine if there is any significant correlation between a pitcher's performance in close games and his record in one-run games.
I began by identifying pitchers who either distinctly improved their performance in high-leverage situations or exhibited a distinct decline in performance in high-leverage situations.* I then compiled their records in relatively low-scoring one-run games in which they started and pitched at least 5 innings, reasoning that higher-scoring one-run games and games in which they pitched fewer than five innings are less a function of their performance and more a function of other factors. Accordingly, I looked at one-run games with scores of 4-3, 3-2, 2-1 and 1-0. A comparison of these one-run games to Bill James's data on all one-run games pitched by the pitchers referenced in his Blyleven article indicated no significant differences, meaning that none of the pitchers performed materially differently in higher-scoring one-run games.
Here are the pitchers in the two categories:
Now, to the analysis. The six pitchers who improved in HL situations improved by an average of 7.5%, ranging from Guidry at 3% to Palmer at 13%. The nine pitchers who declined in HL situations did so by an average of 7.44%, ranging from Gibson at 2% to Rogers at 18% (I probably should have excluded Gibson, the only pitcher whose performance varied by less than 3%, but I left him in to make the point that this analysis is not intended to be any kind of dispositive argument about clutchness). The six improvers had a winning percentage of .614 in one-run games in which they started and pitched at least five innings. The six decliners had a winning percentage of .520 in such games. The correlation coefficient between performance in HL situations and one-run game winning percentage was a fairly strong .69.
There were outliers in each category. Ford improved by 6% in HL situations but had only a 32-29 record in one-run games (but, as with Gibson and Hunter, you can't tell me Whitey wasn't clutch). On the other end, Carlton and Sutton each declined by 12% but had winning percentages of .566 and .545, respectively. The best record in one-run games was Koufax, who had a winning percentage of .682 (and improved in HL situations by 6%). The worst record in one-run games was Blyleven, who had a winning percentage of .432 (and declined in HL situations by 6%).
This is obviously a very small sample set. There are more pitchers in the "decline" category than the "improve" category simply because that category seemed to fill out faster (primarily because I began by looking at pitchers referenced in James's Blyleven article and most of them just happened to exhibit performance declines in HL situations). I'm considering adding more pitchers to the analysis but compiling the records of one-run games is a fairly tedious exercise. If I can bring myself to pore through the game logs I'll update this analysis.
_______________________
* I opted to go with the high-leverage statistics at Baseball-Reference.com rather than the "late and close" statistics for various reasons but principally because the "late and close" statistics are just too narrow for this purpose, excluding anything before the sixth inning and even many situations in the late innings in which the difference in the score is only two runs. Additionally, "late and close" statistics have become increasingly less relevant over the last 30 years, as pitchers accumulate very few innings beyond the sixth inning. Whereas the "late and close situation" typically constituted between 15% and 20% of a pitcher's innings in the '60s and '70s, they generally constitute less than 10% of a contemporary pitcher's innings.
Demythologizing Bert's Famous "Bad Luck"
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.
Boswell on Blyleven (or, "Bert Backers Bash Boswell")
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."
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.
Sutton, Niekro and Blyleven
My purpose here is to promote Ron Guidry's candidacy for the Hall of Fame, not deride Bert Blyleven's candidacy or anyone else's. I've raised the subject of Bert Blyleven in two posts for one very simple reason: Blyleven perfectly illustrates the difference between my conception of the Hall of Fame and the conception of those who focus almost exclusively on the accumulation of gaudy career statistics. In my view, the other camp is missing the forest for the trees. The best way to demonstrate the basic differences between the pro-Bert and anti-Bert camps (and, by so doing, describe how the two camps view the Hall of Fame differently) is to compare Bert once again to two pitchers whom Bert-Backers love to cite: Don Sutton and Phil Neikro.
The Bert Backers argue that Bert is essentially the same as Sutton and Neikro but with two important qualifications: Bert fell just short of the essentially arbitrary 300 win threshold, and Bert had materially better ERAs (in fact, Bert's advantage over Neikro in ERA+ is really not very significant - 118 to 115). These are fair and compelling arguments. Blyleven's statistics generally compare quite favorably to Sutton's and Niekro's.
We've already looked at Bert's performance with teams that either won 90 or more games or were serious contenders for a division title (i.e., the years '71, '77 to '80 and '87 to '89) and learned that Bert's winning percentage in these years was actually lower than that of his teams. Now let's look at Bert's early peak years from '71 to '75, a period during which he would win more games and have lower ERAs than in any other comparable stretch in his career.
Bert had poor run support in both '71 but managed a 16-15 record for a 74-86 Twins team. That's what we'd expect a good pitcher to do - outperform his team even with inferior run support. But from '72 through '75 Bert received average run support from the Twins (the Twins averaged 4.18 r/g generally and 4.19 r/g for Bert) and went 69-61 for a winning percentage of .531. The Twins record in games in which Blyleven was not the pitcher of record was 316-321 for a .496 winning percentage. In other words, Bert performed approximately 7% better than the average Twins pitcher while receiving the same run support. And the average Twins pitcher against whom we're comparing Bert wasn't very good during this period - aside from 1972, when the Twins had a very good staff, the Twins team ERA+'s without Blyleven's contribution were below league average.
The contrast with Sutton and Niekro couldn't be more striking. From '71 to '80 Phil Niekro was approximately 20% better than his teams, compiling a .525 winning percentage for teams that had a winning percentage of .437 in games in which Niekro was not the pitcher of record. In effect, Phil Niekro made a last-place Braves team into a team on the cusp of contention when he took the mound - the difference between a .437 win% and a .525 win%.
From '71 to '80 Don Sutton compiled a .617 winning percentage for pretty good Dodger teams that had a .558 winning percentage in games in which Sutton wasn't the pitcher of record. The Dodgers had the record of a contender or solid, second-place team when Sutton wasn't pitching, but had the record of a 100-win pennant winner when Sutton was on the mound. Sutton improved on the Dodger's record by approximately 10.5%, an increase that looks even more impressive when you consider that the average Dodger pitcher upon whom Sutton was improving was a pretty good pitcher. The Dodgers consistently had one of the premier pitching staffs in the National League in that era, compiling team ERA+'s between 108 and 120 every year other than '71 and '79. But Sutton improved upon the best National League pitching staff of the '70s by 10.5%.
Great pitchers transform their teams. Great pitchers turn poor teams into mediocre teams, mediocre teams into good teams, and good teams into champions. That's what Guidry did between '77 and '85, compiling a winning percentage 26.5% better than that of his teams when other pitchers were on the mound.
The "he lacked run support" excuse does not explain why Bert Blyleven only marginally improved upon his team's performance. As we've seen, Bert generally received run support commensurate with that provided to other pitchers on his teams, and yet Bert barely won a higher percentage of his decisions than the rest of the staffs on these mediocre teams. There is no need to adjust for park factors, or control for differences among teams - the very average pitchers who lead Minnesota to mediocre records in the '70s were backed by the same offenses and defenses as Blyleven was. For large swaths of Blyleven's career, including during his prime years in the '70s and the late '80's, he generally received the same run support as other pitchers on his teams but compiled records only marginally better.
Whatever are the intangibles that make certain pitchers "winners", Bert didn't have them. Sutton and Niekro did, at least during the decade in which they were in their prime. And Ron Guidry possessed these intangibles in spades, in effect taking good Yankee teams in the late '70s and early/mid '80s and turning them into a .700 team - the 1927 or 1998 Yankees. Yes, he received slightly better run support than other pitchers on those teams, but only marginally, and the small difference in run support cannot begin to explain the vast difference between Ron's .697 winning percentage from '77 to '85 and the .552 winning percentage of the teams he played on in games in which other pitchers took the decision.
All of this leads back to the fundamental difference between the pro-Bert and anti-Bert camps in their conception of the Hall of Fame. I believe baseball is about winning, not piling up huge stats over lengthy careers. As a fan, I would rather my team have great players who had relatively short careers but produced World Series championships, pennants, division titles and exciting races in September. It's what baseball is all about. It's what turns entire cities into baseball hotbeds in September as their hometown team makes a run for glory. It's what gets your wife talking about baseball some years. It's why the butcher is talking about baseball on Saturday morning as you shop for something to put on the barbecue Labor Day weekend. It's about aspiring to win it all. And when it comes to the Hall of Fame, it's about talent and competitive drive so great that it etches itself into that epic, dramatic narrative arc that constitutes every baseball season. And it's about the great players who did the most to propel their teams not only to wins and championships but into the consciousness of the casual fan and into baseball lore. Those are the players who belong in the Hall of Fame.
The personal statistics sometimes capture the greatness of these players and sometimes don't, and statistics can look pretty similar but really mean completely different things. Bert Blyleven's 287 wins mean something quite different than Randy Johnson's 297 (and counting). The ostensible similarity between Koufax's and Guidry's career numbers mean different things as well, and in this case mean one pitcher was great enough for nine or ten seasons to be the best of his time, and the other was so dazzling for a brief 5 year period as to elevate him into the ranks of the greatest ever. The Hall of Fame has to be about more than a small selection of arid, three and four digit numbers. Presumably that's why HOF selections are delegated to the sportswriters and the players rather than the statisticians; the sportswriters and the players are there day after day during the season, observing not only the aspects of the game that show up in the boxscore but those that don't, as well.
The Veterans Committee of the Hall of Fame has evinced an understanding of this in the past. Lefty Gomez and Stan Coveleski and Hal Newhouser may not have been 250 game winners, but there were Veterans Committee members who remembered actually being on the field with these guys and remembered things that sterile stats can't hope to convey. They remembered that these guys were intense competitors who were just damn tough to beat. They remembered that these guys were great pitchers for many years, and were considered among the best pitchers in the game during their prime, even if they didn't play 18 or 20 years and rack up those 250 W's. They remembered what it was like to actually stand in the batters box against these guys, where a hitter doesn't need a stat sheet to know who the great pitchers are.
Here's hoping there are enough guys on the Veterans Committee who remember competing against Ron Guidry, because anyone who does ought to be a surefire vote for Gator's induction in the Hall of Fame.
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?
The Curious Case of Bert Blyleven
Jack Morris and Bert Blyleven are both making serious bids for the Hall of Fame. Blyleven polled 63% of the vote last year and has the kind of momentum that should take him across the 75% goal line in the next few years. Morris got 44% last year in his tenth year of eligibility, which is about where Blyleven was two years ago in his tenth year of eligibility. Morris appears to have established a clear foothold in the 40s, a position of strength in Hall of Fame voting that almost always leads to induction (by the veterans committee if not the baseball writers).
To be blunt, it is positively absurd that Blyleven and Morris are on the fasttrack to Cooperstown while Guidry has already washed out. Let me explain why.
Let's begin with an analysis of the peak years. Conveniently, each pitcher had a nine-year period of peak productivity, after which each experienced a precipitous dropoff in performance and consistency. Morris and Blyleven each had two years following their peak period where they approached, but did not equal, their peak period performance, but in each case these two years occurred in the midst of a marked decline. Here are the numbers for their respective peak periods:
The first thing that leaps off the above table is the fact that Blyleven has the best ERA and ERA+ but a distinctly worse winning percentage than either Morris or Guidry. I'm sure the immediate reaction of most is along the lines of "sure, Guidry was pitching for perennial pennant winners, Morris was pitching for good but not great Tiger teams in the '80s and Blyleven was saddled with some terrible Twins and Rangers teams." But the record shows something quite different. The Yankees weren't as consistently good during this period as many recall, and the teams Morris and Blyleven pitched for were much better than one might assume.
Guidry's teams had a .575 winning percentage during his peak years, Morris's teams had a .554 winning percentage and Blyleven's a .514 winning percentage. However, each of these figures includes the contributions of the pitchers we're examining. We should be looking at their records without the contribution of our pitchers in order to assess the relative strength of these teams. After subtracting the won-loss records of our pitchers we see that Guidry's teams had a .552 winning percentage when he didn't get the decision, Morris's teams had a .540 winning percentage and Blyleven's teams a .509 winning percentage.
These records confirm that Guidry did indeed pitch for the best teams and Blyleven the worst, but the differences in these team records don't begin to explain the vast disparity in the winning percentages of our three pitchers. Quite simply, Guidry's record was 26.5% better than his team's, Morris's record was 13.9% better, and Blyleven's was 5.5% better.
There is the conviction among sportswriters and commentators that Blyleven was a "hard luck" pitcher, as if a black cloud followed him from the Twins to Texas to the Pirates to the Indians and back to the Twins and finally the Angels, and it rained on poor Bert steadily for 22 years across nearly 700 career starts and 5000 innings. But an examination of Bert's record shows that he had his share of luck, he just never knew what to do with it.
It is true that the Twins were the essence of mediocrity after winning a division title in Blyleven's rookie year, but Blyleven's record was mediocre right along with them. After leaving Minnesota after the 1975 season Blyleven spent the next four years with Texas and Pittsburgh teams that averaged more than 90 wins a season and provided Blyleven with better than average run support, the net effect of which on Blyleven's record was...more mediocrity. He averaged only 12 wins a season despite making an average of 33 starts a year for some of the best teams in baseball, and while his teams played .560 ball during this period Bert managed only a .545 winning percentage. Bert's winning percentage might have been substantially worse, too, but for the fact that the 1979 World Series winning Pirates team had an astounding 13 comebacks in games where Blyleven left the game behind, thereby saving Bert from an additional 13 losses!
After Bert's peak period he pitched another 12 seasons, winning 139 and losing 122 for a .533 winning percentage. The astute reader will notice that this winning percentage is only slightly lower than during Bert's alleged peak period. However, Bert's ERA during this period was 3.80, which tranlates to an ERA+ of 108 as compared to the 131 ERA+ during his peak years in the '70s. He won 10 games or fewer in half of those 12 seasons and had a .500 record or worse in five seasons. As I mentioned earlier, Bert had two excellent seasons in the midst of these 12 years of drought, going 19-7 in 1984 for a Cleveland team that was bad but provided Blyleven with excellent run support, and 17-5 for a good Angels team in 1989 that also provided excellent run support that year.
The Cy Young voting during Blyleven's career suggests that Bert is held in far greater esteem by today's HOF voters than he was by those who cast their ballots for the Cy Young award during his career. In 22 seasons, in 16 of which he pitched more than 200 innings, Bert received votes for the Cy Young award in only four years, and received serious consideration in only one year - 1984. His career Cy Young award shares totalled 0.45, as compared to Guidry's 1.91 in a career barely half as long (Morris had a 0.73 shares).
Blyleven was a prime example of a pitcher who was at his very best in situations in which the game was not on the line and tended to pitch worse in critical situations. A host of situational statistics confirm this, and the striking statistical contrast with Morris in those situational statistics explains how Blyleven could have had a much better ERA than Morris but a distinctly inferior record.
Blyleven, like Sutton and Niekro, amassed impressive career totals over a lengthy career. Unlike Sutton and Niekro, however, Blyleven never demonstrated that he could be a consistent winner while pitching for average or good teams. Despite reservations about Sutton's and Niekro's Hall of Fame qualifications, I can understand how a reasonable person could favor their inclusion. Blyleven's election, however, would be truly troubling, and even perverse in view of Guidry's dismissal by HOF voters. If Blyleven makes it, the Hall of Fame should take a second look at pitchers like Tommy John and Jim Kaat.
