quote:Originally posted by RJM:
"My arguement for Morris is the Hall is about the best in their era. Morris was the winniest pitcher for a ten year period. I don't understand why he's not in the Hall."
ONE ten-year period, cherry-picked mostly because it corresponds with what we normally think of as "a decade" - i.e., "the 1980s."
Pitcher "wins" is about as crude a measurement of pitching excellence as there is. Pitcher "wins" are really a team measure, and Morris in the 1980s got the benefit of playing with a lot of very good teammates, guys like Trammell and Whitaker and Gibson and Lemon and Parrish and Evans.
But even if you DO value pitcher wins, even by that crude measure, this "most wins in the 1980s" thing is seriously overblown, and you can see how silly and even poor an argument it is when you "de-randomize" the endpoints - in other words, stop looking at the decade of just "the 1980s" but any 10-year period within Morris' career, because there is no particular reason to care more about "wins" within a period that begins with a year ends in "0" and ending with a year that ends in "9" than any other ten-year period.
Hey, whaddya know? Frank Viola had more wins in the decade between 1984 and 1993, and Ron Guidry had more in the decade between 1977 and 1986. Nobody's clamoring for those two to be enshrined.
And Jack Morris when NOT pitching in the 1980s? 92-67, 4.32 ERA, 11 WAR. Nothin' special (except maybe "the game" - ONE great game that has somehow taken on the stuff of myth and legend, enough to carry a good but not great pitcher into the Hall of Fame).
Thankfully, today there are a lot better statistical ways to measure pitching excellence out there than wins. By one of them (and not JUST one, but this one for the sake of brevity), WAR, Morris was no better than the 12th best pitcher in the years 1980-1989, behind (in order) Dave Stieb, Bob Welch, Fernando Valenzuela, Bert Blyleven, Orel Hershiser, Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan, Dwight Gooden, John Tudor, Bret Saberhagen, and Charlie Hough (and just ahead of guys like Mario Soto and Teddy Higuera). Now there are some Hall of Famers in there, but for the most part, that is not a grouping that screams out Hall of Famer. Beyond that, when you normalize pitching performance by looking at WAR per 200 innings pitched, Morris was the worst pitcher of the group of 21 "best" pitchers of the 1980s.
I know none of this means Jack Morris was not a good pitcher, and don't mean to suggest that it would be some kind of travesty if he made the Hall. But if he did, there would be a lot of demonstrably better pitchers on the outside looking in. Guys like Kevin Brown, David Cone, Bret Saberhagen, El Presidente, and Orel Hershiser. I am OK with those guys NOT getting in, too, but it bugs me more than a little that there is all this clamor for Jack Morris, and hardly a peep for any of these guys, who were just as good or better.
As Joe Posnanski wrote in his run-down of Hall of Fame candidates last year,
quote:"I have spent way too much of my life explaining why I don’t think Jack Morris is quite a Hall of Famer. I have made the point that his 3.90 ERA would be the highest in the Hall of Fame, and I simply don’t see what Morris did that would make his Hall of Fame case especially compelling beyond that. He did not win 300 (254), he did not strike out 3,000 (2,478), he did not have any historically great years (he never even finished a season with a sub-3.00 ERA). His WHIP (1.206) and strikeout-to-walk ratio (1.78-to-1) are nothing special.
"And I’ve made this comparison before:
Jack Morris: 527 starts, 3.90 ERA, 105 ERA+
Rick Reuschel: 529 starts, 3.37 ERA, 114 ERA+
"The cases made for Morris have been, in my opinion, not particularly convincing or even intellectually honest. That Morris won more games than any pitcher in the 1980s is a nice piece of trivia, but even if you stay in the fairly uninteresting realm of pitcher wins it’s worth pointing out that Morris did not solely lead baseball in wins EVEN ONCE in the 1980s. Not a single time. In the strike year of 1981, if you want to count that year, his 14 wins tied him with Dennis Martinez, Tom Seaver, Pete Vuckovich and Steve McCatty for most wins. You would think that even the most passionate Morris fan would not trumpet that. But there is no other year to trumpet. Other than that year, he did not even tie for the lead in wins one single time in the 1980s.
"This would make Morris, in that pointed phrase that Morris fans seem to despise, a 'compiler of stats.'
"The other argument, that he was a big-game pitcher, is mostly built around his gutsy Game 7 performance in the 1991 World Series. He was very good that whole series, winning Game 1 and pitching six strong innings in Game 4, but it was his 10 shutout innings in Game 7 that secured his legend. The thing is that Morris already had a reputation as a big game pitcher — baseball people always wanted to believe in Jack Morris as force of nature. Game 7 against Atlanta in 1991 clinched that reputation forever.
"Was Morris a big game pitcher? This has been argued endlessly already, and there is both supporting and opposing evidence. I think the opposing evidence tends to be a bit more convincing. Bill James last year did an interesting study about how teams did against good and bad teams. It suggests that no pitcher in baseball history got more wins out of beating up bad teams than Jack Morris. He was 92-114 against the teams that Bill calls Class A and Class B teams — those are the average to better-than-average teams. Considering that he spent most of his career playing on a very good Detroit Tigers team, that’s not too impressive.
"I’ve written all this before, as mentioned. I guess my point here is to ask those people who think that Jack Morris belongs in the Hall of Fame to PLEASE make more appealing arguments."