Gossage’s Day in the Sun Is Long Overdue
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When Goose Gossage is officially inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame this Sunday, it will be a wonderful afternoon. The baseball writers took nine years to elect the great Yankee reliever, eight more than they really needed, but the wait is finally over, and he can take his rightful place alongside the immortal players enshrined at Cooperstown.
Gossage is an icon in New York. Anyone who heard the ovations at the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium last week, when the crowd roared his nickname so loudly the old ballpark actually rumbled, or who watched him look perfectly right throwing out the game’s ceremonial first pitch alongside Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Reggie Jackson, would know it. What’s more, Gossage is an icon of the sport. No one in today’s game is quite like him, and those closest are menacing starters such as Joba Chamberlain and Chicago’s Carlos Zambrano, rather than any reliever. But 30 years after his prime, the image of him falling off the mound after delivering a vicious fastball, glowering from under a filthy cap while his left leg and right arm point in parallel toward home plate and his right leg and left arm flail off toward the corner bases, is still what comes to mind when you think of a closer.
That’s fitting, because when Gossage retired in 1994, he did so as arguably the best relief pitcher of all time. He, and every other aspirant to that title, have since been surpassed by Mariano Rivera, but Gossage still stands as one of the two or three best of all time at his position, which puts him in pretty exclusive company and at a considerable remove from even the average Hall of Famer.
By modern standards, the most astonishing thing about Gossage is just how much he pitched. He topped 130 innings three times, and pitched between 89 and 104 innings another four; since 1996, Rivera has topped 80 just once. The man himself will, by the way, be happy to remind you of all this; last year he said, “Don’t even compare what Mariano does to what we used to do.” But the focus on how much he pitched, which was partly a product of his times and had its drawbacks as well as its advantages — Gossage burnt out early, while Rivera is having his best year at 38 — tends to obscure just how dominant he was.
The numbers are difficult to fathom. From 1976 to 1985, Gossage pitched 1,057 innings with a 2.49 ERA. In one of those years, though, he was used in the rotation; set it aside, and his ERA drops all the way to 2.10. That’s a hard number to run up over the course of a year, and Gossage did it for a decade, averaging 93 innings and 88 strikeouts in the years he was used exclusively in relief. Along the way he pitched for four division winners, three pennant winners, and the 1978 Yankees, who won the World Series. Rivera aside, no relief ace has ever had a clearly better run.
Other measures present Gossage’s dominance even more starkly. As an arbitrary threshold, a park- and league-adjusted ERA 50% better than average works pretty well as a way of separating the good relief season from the excellent one. Rivera has hit that mark a dozen times. Hoyt Wilhelm, the famed knuckleballer who was even more durable than Gossage, hit it 11 times, as has Mets closer Billy Wagner, who’s higher on the list of the game’s all-time best closers than he generally gets credit for. Gossage turned the trick nine times — as many as longtime career saves leader Lee Smith and Hall of Famers Bruce Sutter and Rollie Fingers combined.
Impressive as this sort of thing is, though, it’s irrelevant; no save, inning, or strikeout total is at all adequate at describing the sheer immensity of Gossage as a violent force. I’m a bit too young to remember his prime, but even in the early 1990s, with his best years a decade behind him, he was frightening. His fastball may not have been what it once was, but he was an overwhelming presence on the mound, with the visceral mastery of an at-bat’s rhythm you only see from the greats.
Pitching with good Oakland and Texas clubs, he hadn’t even yet turned 40, but he seemed ageless. Like Nolan Ryan, with whom he briefly played, he seemed a living remnant of a slightly darker and more aggressive brand of baseball. Wilhelm may have been slightly better statistically, but if he ever scared any children, I’ve yet to hear about it.
Whether Gossage was so scary because he was so good or whether he was so good because he was so scary is an interesting question to think about, but what matters is that he was, in the truest sense, an iconic player — not the absolute greatest, but one who represented something fundamental to baseball. Just as Berra was the sage and Ford was the playboy and Jackson was the clutch hitter, Gossage was the intimidator. Style counts, and he had it to spare. Baseball will be lucky to see anything at all like him again.
tmarchman@nysun.com