On the 2014 and 2015 baseball Hall of Fame ballots, as voted by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), there is more depth of excellent players than at any time since 1946, which was less than ten years since the Hall was created.
Of particular note is the stunning and historic quality of starting pitchers who have hit the ballot in the last few years. This began with Roger Clemens, who retired (for the final time) after the 2007 season and first hit the Hall of Fame ballot two years ago. The Rocket, of course, has not been inducted because of his alleged use of Performance Enhancing Drugs. Also on the 2013 ballot was Curt Schilling, who debuted with 39% of the vote, slightly more than the support for Clemens (38%). Neither was close to the 75% vote needed to gain induction to Cooperstown.
Last year, three more fantastic hurlers joined Clemens and Schilling on the ballot: Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Mike Mussina. 300-game winners both, Maddux and Glavine sailed into Cooperstown. Their presence clearly hurt Schilling by comparison and his support dropped to 29%. Mussina debuted with 20% of the vote.
Now, this year, as if there wasn’t enough quality in the starting pitcher category, we’ve added three more stars who hold 9 Cy Young Award titles between them: Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and John Smoltz. The Big Unit and Pedro will easily be elected next week. There has been much chatter over the last few months that Smoltz will join them (and his former Braves teammates Maddux and Glavine) but I think that’s highly questionable. If John Smoltz is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, then how can Schilling and Mussina not be also?
JOHN SMOLTZ
John Smoltz was the Third Amigo (next to Maddux and Glavine) on the historically great Atlanta Braves rotations of the 1990’s. Between 1991 and 1998, these three men won 7 of the 8 NL Cy Young Awards. Glavine won it in 1991, Maddux then won four in a row (the first as a member of the Cubs in ’92), Smoltzie won it in 1996, Pedro Martinez (then of the Expos) in ’97 and Glavine in ’98. While Smoltz ranks behind 300-winners Maddux and Glavine for career accomplishments, he was always considered the “money” pitcher of October. Smoltz had Tommy John surgery after the 1999 campaign and returned in 2001 as the Braves’ closer, amassing 154 saves in 3 ½ seasons to pair with his 213 career wins.
Mike Mussina was durable, consistent and a man of impeccable character, winning 270 career games in the rugged American League East. His win total is more than 50 better than either Smoltz or Schilling, who spent parts of their careers pitching out of the bullpen. 270 wins and .638 winning
MIKE MUSSINA
percentage is very impressive, but it is also true that he had the luxury of pitching for excellent teams for most of his career. The Baltimore Orioles won an average of 85 games per season (adjusted for the strike of 1994-1995) in Mussina’s nine full years there. In his eight seasons in New York, the Yankees averaged 97 wins per year. So, for Mussina’s career, his teams won an average of over 90 games, which certainly boosted his win totals. In his 537 career games (all but one which was a starting assignment), his teams scored an average of 5.4 runs per nine innings, which is 12.5% better than the league average during that time. Smoltz also pitched for great teams, of course, but received slightly less than league average run support during his career.
CURT SCHILLING
Curt Schilling was not durable, spending large chunks of 7 or 8 seasons on the disabled list. He had a terrific season in 1992 with the Philadelphia Phillies, struggled in 1993 but made two terrific starts and was the MVP of the NLCS, leading his team to the World Series, where they fell short to Toronto. After three injury plagued seasons, Schilling hit his peak and became the future Hall of Famer that he now is in the 1997 season, at the age of 30, when he finished 4th in the NL Cy Young Award voting. His chief statistical claim to fame is that, with the exception of 19th century pitcher Tommy Bond, Schilling has the best strikeout-to-walk ratio (4.38) in the history of baseball. I think he’s the best of this group but has been overlooked because, during his peak years, he wasn’t the best starter on his club. In his Arizona years (2000-2003), he was overshadowed by Randy Johnson. In both 2001 and 2002, he finished 2nd in the Cy Young Award voting to his taller teammate. When he joined the Boston Red Sox in 2004, he played second fiddle to Pedro Martinez (although he had a better year than Pedro). Schilling went 21-6 with a 3.26 ERA but finished 2nd in the Cy Young voting for a third time, this time falling short of the Twins’ Johan Santana.
So besides the obvious choices of Johnson and Martinez, why would I choose Schilling and Smoltz over Mussina? First, let’s look at the regular season numbers for the five mound men, including the Big Unit and Pedro, ranked by career wins. (Notes: ERA+ is the park-adjusted metric, with 100 being average. Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is a modern metric that attempts to put a number on the totality of a player’s contributions to winning).
Name W-L ERA ERA+ SO WAR GS
Randy Johnson 303-166 (.646) 3.29 135 4,875 102.1 603
Mike Mussina 270-153 (.638) 3.68 123 2,813 83.0 536
Pedro Martinez 219-100 (.687) 2.93 154 3,154 84.0 409
Curt Schilling 216-146 (.597) 3.46 127 3.116 79.9 436
John Smoltz 213-155 (.579) 3.33 125 3,084 69.5 481
Again, Johnson and Martinez are obvious choices. Despite his shorter career, Pedro’s 2.93 ERA translates to a 154 ERA+ because of the difficulty of this era for pitchers. Now, if you look at Mussina’s regular season numbers compared to Schilling’s and Smoltz’s, his total wins and winning percentage are clearly superior. His ERA is higher but he spent his whole career in the American League East, while Schill and Smoltzie spent a good many years in the National League, where the pitchers have to hit. He has the highest WAR of the three (and it’s even better than Pedro’s) but one thing that you need to understand about WAR is that it is a “counting” stat like wins or strikeouts and not a “rate” stat like ERA. So, the more you pitch, the more WAR “points” you can earn. Mussina’s superiority here over Martinez, Schilling and Smoltz is due to having started many more games. Longevity counts, of course. Mussina had a superlative career and it’s tough to choose between him, Smoltz and Schilling based on their regular season performances.
The difference between these three great hurlers lies in October. Simply put, Curt Schilling and John Smoltz are two of the best post-season pitchers in the history of baseball. Let’s look at the post-season numbers of the three, along with Johnson and Martinez. Incidentally, WAR and ERA+ do not exist for October baseball, since not all teams participate.
Name GS IP W-L ERA WHIP SO
Curt Schilling 19 133.1 11-2 (.846) 2.23 0.968 120
John Smoltz 27 209.0 15-4 (.789) 2.67 1.144 199
Mike Mussina 21 139.2 7-8 (.467) 3.42 1.103 145
Randy Johnson 16 121.0 7-9 (.438) 3.50 1.140 132
Pedro Martinez 14 96.1 6-4 (.600) 3.46 1.080 96
Schilling and Smoltz were clearly superior to the others. Let’s remember here, we’re dissecting five high-quality pitchers, all of whom should (and likely will) be in Cooperstown. What I’m showing here is why I believe Schilling and Smoltz should be in front of Mussina in line.
Schilling and the Big Unit were singularly responsible for the Arizona Diamondbacks’ World Series title over Mussina’s Yankees in 2001. In that entire post-season, Schilling went 4-0 with a 1.12 ERA. Johnson was also 5-1, with a 1.52 ERA. They were deservedly the co-MVP’s of the Series. Mussina also had a good post-season in 2001 (2-1, 2.62 ERA) but was bested decisively by Schilling and Johnson in the Series. Schilling also had the famous “bloody sock” game in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS comeback against Bronx Bombers and Mussina.
Smoltz, like Schilling, was a terrific October performer. He was the other half of one of the greatest Game 7’s ever in the 1991 series against Jack Morris, a performance 2nd only to his 9-inning shutout over the Pirates in Game 7 of the NLCS. Ironically, his worst post-season performance was in 1995, the year his Braves won their only title. He posted a 6.60 ERA in 3 starts that year.
Here is what is curious about the Mussina-Schilling-Smoltz Hall of Fame question: for the last six months there seems to have been a universal assumption in the chattering class that Smoltz will be a first-ballot selection next week. When you look at the three of them, it’s hard to see why Smoltz is an “obvious” choice when Schill and the Moose received 29% and 20% just of the vote respectively last year. I see three reasons why the narrative about Smoltzie is different than the others:
- He was part of a legendary triumvirate of Cy Young starters with Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. Having just two of those three in Cooperstown seems incomplete.
- He spent 3 ½ years as the Braves closer after coming back from Tommy John surgery, compiling 154 saves. So he likely gets the Eck effect (in honor of starter-turned-closer Dennis Eckersley), getting a pass for having “merely” 213 wins because he also has all of the saves.
- He has looked like a Hall of Famer from the early years of his career. His post-season heroics in 1991 occurred when he was just 24 years old and won the 1996 Cy Young Award with a 24-win campaign. While Schilling had a great October with the Phillies in 1993, he didn’t really start his Cooperstown years until he was 30 (in 1997), when he made his first All-Star team and was fourth in the Cy Young Award voting.
Anyway, Johnson and Martinez will gain enshrinement this year, Smoltz might, Schilling and Mussina will have to wait a couple of years. There are no new Hall of Fame-caliber starting pitchers to crowd the ballot until Andy Pettitte and Roy Halladay join the party in 2019, so Smoltzie, Schill and Moose will all likely make it to Cooperstown in the next couple of cycles.
Some final notes on the historic nature of all of these superlative starters all joining the Hall of Fame ballot within a few years of each other: the quality of these eight starting pitchers who retired between 2007 and 2009 seasons has never been seen before. By next week, at least four will be Hall of Famers, possibly five if Smoltz makes it (and Clemens certainly would be as well if not for the steroid links). So we will soon have a full seven starting pitchers receiving Cooperstown plaques who hit the ballot within a three-year period. This has not happened since the inaugural 1936-1937 ballots, when the likes of Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and Cy Young were being considered for the first time.
In fact, assuming that Mussina eventually joins Maddux and Glavine and Smoltz joins Pedro and the Big Unit, you would have two consecutive cycles with three immediate or future Hall of Fame starting pitchers. The only time since the 1930’s that there were three Hall of Fame starters debuting on the ballot for the first time was the ballot of 1973, when Warren Spahn, Whitey Ford and Robin Roberts were first considered (Spahn was elected on the first try, Ford on the second, Roberts on the fourth).
And finally consider this: from 2000 to 2013 (14 years), only one starting pitcher was elected by the BBWAA into the Hall of Fame. It was Bert Blyleven, and it took him a whopping 14 tries before he took the stage in Cooperstown in 2011. The eight men named Clemens, Maddux, Glavine, Johnson, Martinez, Mussina, Schilling, and Smoltz have eight of the 22 best WAR totals for pitchers since World War II. Even more remarkable is that these eight men pitched at such a high level during the PED era when offensive numbers were exploding. What a pleasure it was to observe them ply their trade.