Yesterday was voting day for the Hall of Fame. Here’s who got in: Rickey Henderson, probably the best leadoff hitter of all-time, and all around super athlete, and Jim Rice, the “most feared” hitter of his era, and one of the biggest products of his environment of all time.

Here’s who didn’t get in: Tim Raines, who is a top 5 leadoff hitter ever and with a career .294/.386/.425 line and a career 131.1 WARP3, (which is 50.9 better than Rice by the way. Tim Raines was worth over 50 fucking wins more than Jim Rice and isn’t in the hall. Unreal.) Raines was a borderline first-ballot player, and is an absolute lock for enshrinement.

Also not getting in: One of the best 20 starting pitchers of all time. Blyleven has a career dERA (defense independent ERA, similar to FIP) of 3.86. Compare him to some other hall of famers: Nolan Ryan (4.21), Steve Carlton (4.02) Don Drysdale (3.92). You get the point. Bert was very good. And yet he’s not in the hall of fame. Why? Well for starters Bert has 287 wins. Still good for 17th all time, but short of the magical 300 number. Bert Blyleven played on some truly terrible teams. He has 15 wins in 1-0 games, which is the most of all time. Since 1900, just 1 pitcher (1!) beats Blyleven in wins, strikeouts and shutouts, and we’ve already shown using dERA that Blyleven is better than Ryan.

Since I’m way too lazy too look up all of Bert Blyleven’s hard knock losses over the course of his career, I looked around, and found that this guy found 42 such games, and he limited himself to one loss and one no-decision per year. if Blyleven had won just one-third of those games, he would be at 301 wins and sit in a completely different light in the eyes of the voters and the idiots that make up the majority of baseball fans out there.

Please someone, come up with a reason why Bert shouldn’t be in the hall of fame.

Oh he didn’t win any Cy Youngs? Or finish in the top 5 enough? Well first let me ask you something, who should have won the AL MVP in 2006? Correct answer: Derek Jeter. Actual answer: Justin Morneau. So when Morneau’s candidacy rolls around, he’ll get credit for an award he shouldn’t have won. Oh by the way, voters are idiots. Here are Bert Blyleven’s stats in 1971: 2.81 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, 126 ERA+, 224 SO. He was first in the league in K/BB ratio, fourth in strikeouts and ERA+, and third in runs saved above average. How many Cy Young votes did he get? ZERO! I’m not saying he should have won the award, but top three easy. Wilbur Wood and Vida Blue were off the hook that year, but Blyleven at worst was the 4th best pitcher in the league. And before you get all riled up about using stats like runs saved above average, just because you’re too stupid to understand the math involved doesn’t make it wrong. Would you rather use addition and subtraction to fly the space shuttle, or use calculus?

In 1973, Bert led the AL in: K/BB, shutouts, ERA+, he also was 2nd in ERA, strikeouts and WHIP. Good enough for a Cy Young right? Wrong, he finished 7th.

2nd complaint: “He doesn’t feel like a Hall of Famer to me”

Well too fucking bad. That’s your fault for not understanding baseball. Those little artificial vaginas probably feel like a vagina, but they’re not. Which just goes to show you how much you can trust your feelings. Blyleven has the 5th most strikeouts EVER. 5th! Steve Carlton, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan. Those are the 4 who have more. Carlton and Ryan are in. Johnson will be. If Clemens misses, it only will be due to steroids. The rest of the top 10? Tom Seaver, Don Sutton, Gaylord Perry, Walter Johnson, Phil Neikro. One of those got to benefit from an illegal pitch, one got to benefit from a rare pitch, all are in the hall. I’m basically paraphrasing an argument that has already been made many times, but Bert is tied for 6th in the most seasons with more than 200 strikeouts, and tied for 4th in the most seasons in a row with more than 200 strikeouts.

Since some idiot left a comment on how Tommy John should have been in last night, I suppose I had better rebut that as well. Blyleven’s career ERA+ was 118, John’s was 111. Blyleven’s ERA was 3.31, John’s was 3.34. Blyleven’s WHIP was 1.20, John’s was 1.28. John struck out 1456 less batters than Blyleven. Blyleven also saved 171 more runs than John over the course of their careers.

By the way, in 1979 Bert Blyleven set a record for no decisions in a season. Blyleven had below average run support with average run support he jumps to 298 wins. Quite frankly, unless your Hall Of Fame is about 40 people large, and you still don’t think Blyleven belongs in the hall of fame, you need to go back to middle school to learn how to do math.

Let’s move on to perhaps the worst ballot this year, or at least the worst I’ve heard about. That being of Tony Massarotti of the Boston Globe. Massarotti was on First Take yesterday and he revealed his hall of fame ballot:

Rickey Henderson, Jim Rice and Andre Dawson

What? First of all Henderson is a no brainer. We’ve already taken Rice apart a little, but let’s do it a bit more. The second half of Jim Rice’s career was terrible. He hit .299/.355/.490, and that’s before any type of adjustment. In the second half of his career, Rice was in the top 10 in AL Slugging twice. Two times! And he got to play in Fenway! Rice was also a terrible left fielder, something that conveniently gets left out when discussing him.

Let’s move on to Dawson. For his career, unadjusted, Dawson hit .279/.323/.482. Andre Dawson made approximately, and I am not exaggerating, 1 trillion outs in his career. How bad is a .323 OBP? To put it mildly, Nick Punto’s career OBP is .319. One common argument against this is that “the game was different back then” and “Dawson just did what he was told to do.” Oh my fault, I forgot that in the 1980’s the object of the game was to make the most outs possible. By the way, Dawson has a .195 batting average against Blyleven. Real baseball analysts know this means nothing due to the fact that batting average doesn’t mean anything, and small sample size, but most people reading this will say: Man Dawson sucks, or man Blyleven should be in. Andre Dawson’s career .352 wOBA, which gives extra credit to hitting for power, is similar to Melvin Mora, Edwin Encarnacion and Randy Winn. With all apologies to NickP and his Reds fandom, none of these three will even be allowed in the city of Cooperstown when they’re done playing.

It’s funny that people make these types of cases for Bert Blyleven all the time, but the only case ever made against him cites only A: wins, and B: some need to uphold the standards of the hall of fame. If that is the case, there are dozens of players to work on before Bert Blyleven, such as, oh I don’t know, Jim Rice and Andre Dawson.

I will end my post with an excerpt from Jay Jaffe, who devised the JAWS system, which evaluates Hall of Fame credentials based on players’ career and peak WARPs, relative to Hall of Famers at the player’s position.

BLYLEVEN

In years past JAWS rated Bert Blyleven as the best eligible pitcher not in the Hall of Fame, and one of the top 20 pitchers of all time. A tweak in the system’s replacement level means he has been surpassed by one eligible pitcher (Rick Reuschel) and is now “only” among the top 30 of all time. While the value of his peak years has fallen, he still ranks 22nd in career WARP and 57th in peak, and his overall score is still over the line.

Blyleven’s traditional credentials are solid enough that voters must perform Olympic-level gymnastics to justify why Blyleven doesn’t get their vote, most fixating on his relatively unimpressive winning percentage (.534), his 250 losses, a win total on the wrong side of 300 and his failure to garner a Cy Young Award or top the 20-win mark more than once — all of those related to the level of support he received from his teammates (not to mention unenlightened voters). His career totals place him in elite company: fifth all-time in strikeouts (only Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton, Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson are ahead), ninth in shutouts, 11th in games started, 14th in innings and 27th in wins, with virtually everybody around him on those lists either in the Hall of Fame or headed there. His problem is that the BBWAA hasn’t elected a starter with fewer than 300 wins since Ferguson Jenkins in 1991, spoiled by the half-dozen members of Blyleven’s peer group — Carlton, Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Ryan, Tom Seaver, Don Sutton — who won 300 games from the mid-’60s through the mid-’80s, when the days of the four-man rotation dominated. Blyleven is right in the middle of that pack, JAWS-wise, outdoing Ryan and Sutton as well as Hall of Fame contemporaries Jim Palmer and Catfish Hunter.

So, the JAWS ballot ends by recognizing McGwire, Trammell, Henderson, Raines and Blyleven as worthy of a Hall of Fame vote. We’ll find out just how differently the BBWAA voters see things at 2 p.m. Eastern on Monday.

BBWAA = FAIL

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