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.

But there's one area where the difference between Blyleven, on the one hand, and Sutton and Niekro, on the other, is quite striking. This difference virtually leaps from the pages of the baseball encyclopedias. Both Sutton and Niekro consistently and significantly outperformed their teams over an extended period while receiving run support comparable to that afforded the other pitchers on the staff. Bert Blyleven did not.

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.