Blyleven Was Better Than We Thought

Throughout its history, the body of voters that elects players to the National Baseball Hall of Fame has been the target of any number of campaigns on behalf of candidates. These have ranged from the wholly noble to the entirely frivolous. Ken Keltner, a good player from the 1940s, is chiefly remembered today for a long, obnoxious, and somewhat unseemly push for enshrinement conducted on his own behalf.Among the candidates on this year’s ballot, the one with the best-organized advocacy group is Bert Blyleven. This is partly because he is thought by many to be,by any reasonable standard, qualified for Cooperstown. But the debate over his career is also an excellent proxy debate for those who define themselves as partisans of new-school and old-school approaches to the game. Because of this, the argument over his induction is fiercer than it might otherwise be, with young turks pointing out Blyleven’s considerable merits partially as a means of tweaking cranky old columnists, who retaliate by claiming that if you don’t think win-loss records are the best measure of a player’s achievements, you’re a geek.To oversimplify, if your favorite baseball writer is Bill James, you probably think Blyleven is a no-brainer pick; if you prefer Roger Kahn, probably not. Those who, like me, would take Leonard Koppett or Bill Veeck over both of them tend to have no strong opinions on the matter. Leaving out the ideology, how good was Blyleven?His case is actually pretty easy to make. The man won 287 major league games, pitching at times for some dire ballclubs. He was a key pitcher on championship teams, earning rings with the Pirates and Twins and posting a 2.47 ERA in eight postseason appearances. He ranks fifth all-time in strikeouts with 3,701, and 13th in innings pitched. He was consistently good and occasionally great for 22 years, and the players most comparable to him – Don Sutton, Gaylord Perry, Fergie Jenkins, and Robin Roberts – are all Hall of Famers.The case against him is pretty easy to make, too. Those 287 wins were accompanied by 250 losses, which ranks 10th all-time. Blyleven was an All-Star only twice, and finished in the top 10 in Cy Young balloting just four times (never higher than third), showing he was not regarded as a great player in his day. He never won an ERA title; even adjusting for ballpark and league effects he was only about as good, per inning, as Kevin Appier.Most of his achievements are a result of durability, and for environmental reasons we don’t fully understand, pitchers of his generation were somehow able to pitch 250-300 innings every year with no ill effects. To some, that makes his longevity less impressive in context – during the 1970s, when he regularly pitched 275+ innings, he never ranked higher than fourth in IP. All this makes for a picture of a player who was good for a very long time, but never great.I give a lot of credit to the case against Blyleven. The losses don’t bother me, as the pitchers directly ahead of him include Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Sutton, Perry, and Nolan Ryan. You have to be damn good to lose 250 games, and there’s good reason to believe that run support, not an inability to nail down a game, was what kept Blyleven from a gaudy win percentage.There are two arguments that do bother me. The first is that Blyleven’s durability wasn’t unusual for a pitcher of his generation – not that this is a case made by old-school Blyleven-bashers, who generally prefer to point to his winning percentage and lack of Cy Youngs and 20-win seasons. The second is that he was never really great.Under scrutiny, these don’t hold up. Of the top 10 in IP from 1970-79, the only two pitchers who aren’t in the Hall are Blyleven, who ranked seventh, and Vida Blue. Go a bit further down the list to pitchers like Luis Tiant, Jim Kaat, and Mickey Lolich, and you’ll see that Blyleven pitched about a quarter again as many innings as they did in the ’70s. He also ranked seventh in the 1980s. Even in an era of durable pitchers, his durability was remarkable.The second argument doesn’t hold up, either. Baseball Prospectus publishes a statistic called WARP3 (WARP stands for Wins Above Replacement Player), which measures about how many wins above a sixth starter a pitcher was worth in a season, adjusted for ballpark, league, and era. For context, Roger Clemens’s WARP3 this year was 8.2, and Nolan Ryan had three seasons of 8 or higher.Blyleven had six, going as high as 11.7, in 1973.That year, in 325 innings, he went 20-17 with a 2.52 ERA, pitching 25 complete games and striking out 258.This was in a good hitter’s park in a league whose average ERA was 3.99; correct for context, and it was as valuable as one of Sandy Koufax’s prime years.He had another five seasons between 7.4 and 7.9. The problem is how they were spaced. The seasons in which he had 8+ WARP3 were 1973-75, 1981, 1984, and 1989. Had he had all those seasons in a row, neatly book ended by seasons just below that level, no one would say he wasn’t great. That his great seasons were spaced out over 17 years shouldn’t detract from their quality or their quantity.The truth is, there’s no argument to make against Blyleven as a Hall of Famer. He was in a different class than Tommy John and Jim Kaat, with whom he’s often confused. He was better than Fergie Jenkins and Don Sutton, he was better than Catfish Hunter and Nolan Ryan; you could make a decent case that he was better than Steve Carlton. Hopefully this year’s Hall voters will leave aside the arguments about who’s a geek and who’s a stodgy old man for another time, and give Bert Blyleven his due.

Blyleven Was Better Than We Thought

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