With Just 216 Wins, Schilling Deserves Cooperstown

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Today in Wilmington, Del., Boston’s Curt Schilling will undergo what he described on his Web site Friday as “extensive and potentially career ending shoulder surgery.” This is both unsurprising — Schilling is 41, and didn’t throw a pitch this year — and a bit sad. Yankees fans, among others, may curse loudly at any mention of the grandstanding Schilling, but it would be nice to see him pitch in October one more time.

This may happen, but even if it doesn’t, at least the man went out in style. In what may have been his final game, he got the win as the Red Sox edged Colorado 2-1 in the second game of last year’s World Series. Nothing could be more fitting. Before he helped engineer the greatest postseason comeback in history in 2004 en route to the first Boston championship in 86 years, he won a World Series MVP in 2001 while doing his bit to end the Yankee dynasty by making three brilliant starts. And eight years before that, he won a National League Championship Series MVP with Philadelphia. In all, he went 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA and was responsible for several of the more indelible moments baseball has seen in decades — a record to rate with Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Mariano Rivera, or anyone else you might care to name.

What gets a bit overlooked is that had Schilling never pitched a playoff game, he’d still be a deserving Hall of Famer. His topline numbers are terrific — 216-146 with a 3.46 ERA, 3,116 strikeouts — and they get better the more you look at them. When adjusted for park and league effects, for instance, his ERA is as good as Gibson’s or Tom Seaver’s, and he has the highest strikeout-to-walk ratio in modern history. Only two eligible pitchers have won at least 200 games with a winning percentage exceeding Schilling’s .597 and not eventually made the Hall, and one of them, Carl Mays, isn’t in mainly because he killed someone with a pitch.

Despite all this, a developing consensus paints Schilling as a bit of a marginal case. ESPN’s Buster Olney, for instance, wrote this weekend that Schilling was a “borderline candidate” who may have to wait “10 to 13 years” to be elected. Voters surveyed by the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo were generally unenthusiastic. One noted that he wasn’t as good as Greg Maddux, maybe the best pitcher of all time; another surmised that he may benefit from “lowered statistical standards” 10 to 15 years from now. Two said that it would be hard to vote for someone who didn’t near 250 wins.

Hard as it is given the state of our society to give anyone grief for maintaining high standards, let me gently suggest that these worthies are part of a problem that has been eroding the credibility of the Hall of Fame for many years and will ruin it if it goes unchecked, that problem being that the world has changed over the last 100 years while the voters haven’t noticed. The Ottoman Empire no longer exists, alcohol can be bought legally in America, and pitchers do not need to win 300 or even 250 games to prove their greatness.

Of the starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame, seven debuted from 1901 to 1910, nine from 1911 to 1920, six from 1921 to 1930, three from 1931 to 1940, four from 1941 to 1950, and five from 1951 to 1960. During all this time, there were 16 major league teams. When expansion hit, the pool of Hall of Famers grew: Nine of them debuted from 1961 to 1970. Interestingly, though, not one starting pitcher who debuted at any point over the last 38 years has been elected to Cooperstown, and no one currently eligible is going to get the call. You and I (or at least I) may think it self-evident that Dave Stieb deserves to be elected, but the voters clearly do not.

This will change soon enough. Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Randy Johnson, all of whom debuted in the 1980s, will be elected, and if Roger Clemens isn’t, that will be for unique reasons. Schilling will probably be elected, too. Among starters who debuted in the 1990s, though, only Pedro Martinez is a cinch, with Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte, Tim Hudson, and Roy Halladay all having odds ranging from the shorter to the longer.

Another way to put this is that Hall voters will, when all the tallies are in, most likely have deemed that as many great pitchers debuted from 1961 to 1970 as did from 1951 to 1960 and from 1971 to 2000 combined, despite the near doubling of the population of major league players and the fact that the game has become much more difficult.

There are two reasons why this might be so. The first is that they don’t make ’em like they used to. The second is that because of the conditions of the game, it was a lot easier for pitchers who debuted during the second deadball era to win 300 games than it was for many years before or has been since, and voters haven’t noticed. This would imply that if an all-time postseason legend who enjoyed a long, dominant career can only reach 216 wins, that may have less to do with a failing on his part than with the times in which he played. It would also suggest that Schilling, whether or not he reached some arbitrary number, should be elected with at least as much ease as, say, Catfish Hunter was, and respected as one of baseball’s truly great pitchers. At any rate, with luck today’s surgery will go well, and Schilling will stage an epic comeback and make a real run at those 250 wins. I, for one, would love to see it.

tmarchman@nysun.com


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