The stats of two players, no other contexts given:
|
Name
|
W-L
|
Win%
|
IP
|
ERA
|
|
Player A
|
142-84
|
.628
|
1979
|
3.41
|
|
Player B
|
139-78
|
.641
|
2025
|
3.20
|
Okay, we’re looking at some junky metrics. A pitcher’s win-loss record and winning percentage is strongly influenced by the teams they played for. Earned Run Average is difficult to interpret without contexts: an ERA of 3.20 would be pretty terrible in 1909, while an ERA of 3.40 might get you some down-ballot votes for the Cy Young Award in 2017. Innings pitched? We have no way of knowing if these guys were dead-ballers who threw 400 innings a year, or modern pitchers who averaged 180-220 innings a year.
Alone, these metrics don’t tell us much. But in combination they start to tell us something. Both pitchers managed to win a high percentage of their decisions with those ERA’s: that’s useful. Bill Dineen had a better career ERA than both of our mystery men (3.01), but he stumbled to a career record of 170-177. These guys were winners. They won with those ERA’s.
We can give more context, though I am sure that at least seventy percent of you have guessed who these two pitchers are:
|
Name
|
W-L
|
IP
|
ERA
|
ERA+
|
IP
|
CG
|
K
|
BB
|
|
Player A
|
142-84
|
1979
|
3.41
|
119
|
1979
|
111
|
1347
|
688
|
|
Player B
|
139-78
|
2025
|
3.20
|
136
|
2025
|
15
|
1988
|
567
|
We get a little more context: adjusted for offensive contexts, Player B’s ERA shows as much better than Player A: our second guy is 36% better than his league, as opposed to 19% better. Player B struck out more hitters and walked fewer.
On the other hand, Player A threw more complete games. That’s something. I mean, that’s not nothing.
Okay…enough with the mystery. Player A is newly-elected Hall-of-Famer Jack Morris. Or it’s part of Jack Morris…the numbers above are his tallies for 1979, and 1981 thru 1987. We’re leaving off some dud years of Morris, but we’re also leaving off his 21-6 season in 1992, and his 18-12 season in 1991, as well as a 16-win 1980 season. We’re cherry picking a teeny bit.
Player B is Johan Santana’s entire career.
* * *
That was a junk exercise: I don’t mean for you to take anything too seriously from it. You could probably take the best years of Jim Perry or Joe Niekro or Ramon Martinez and, with a little cleverness, make them all look like their Hall-of-Fame brothers.
But the exercise isn’t entirely useless. I suspect that a fair percentage of you think of Johan Santana as a not-so-crazy candidate for the Hall of Fame. I make that assumption because I think of Santana as a not-so-crazy candidate for the Hall-of-Fame. I’d consider tossing Johan a vote, if the current BBWAA ballot didn’t have about seventy-eight players worth thinking about.
Jack Morris, at his peak best, wasn’t anywhere near the pitcher that Johan Santana was. I’m not going to make that case, and no one else is going to make that case either. If you looked at their three best seasons, or their five best seasons, Santana would blow Morris out of the water.
But something strange happens if you go further out: Jack Morris starts to draw closer.
Let’s rate each pitcher’s best seasons by Baseball-Reference’s WAR metric. I know WAR has come under fire recently, and we’re not really using it to evaluate our pitchers. We’re just using it to give us an objective list of each pitcher’s best seasons, in order.
Santana laps Morris, in their first-, second-, third-, and fourth-best seasons. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Santana’s fifth-best season, according to BB-Ref’s WAR, was 2007, when he went 15-13 with a 3.33 ERA over 219 innings. Morris’s fifth-best season, according to our metric, was probably in 1991: 18-12 with a 3.43 ERA over 246.2 innings.
Who are you going to take?
I’d lean towards Morris. I like innings, and Morris’ team won the World Series. Santana’s 2007 Twins won 79 games. It’s a close call, but I’d lean to Morris.
Sixth-best season? Santana’s sixth-best season was his 2010 season with the Mets, his last full year in the majors. Santana went 11-9 with a 2.98 ERA over 199.1 innings. The Mets won 79 games.
Jack Morris’ sixth-best season shows up as 1983 in Detroit: he went 20-13. Morris led the league in innings pitched with 292.3.He threw twenty complete games and had a 3.34 ERA. He finished third in a Cy Young contest that picked the immortal LaMarr Hoyt as the best pitcher in the AL. His team won 92 games.
Who ya gonna to take?
Baseball-Reference’s WAR suggests that you take Santana (4.6) over Morris (4.0). I don’t know about you, but I’m taking the guy with the twenty complete games, and 100 extra innings pitched. Is that silly? That's probably silly.
Santana’s 7th-best season…I’ll stop after this, I promise…was his breakout season in 2003, when he went 12-3 with a 3.07 ERA over 158.1 innings. The voters applauded that effort, giving him some down-ballot votes for the Cy Young Award. One voter slotted Santana at the bottom of his Cy Young ballot. That was a pretty decent year.
Jack Morris’s 7th-best season was strike-shortened 1981. He went 14-7 with a 3.05 ERA over 197.2 innings, pacing the AL in wins. He made 25 starts and completed 15 of them. He finished third in the AL Cy Young vote, behind Rollie Fingers and Steve McCatty.
Again, who would you take?
After that things tilts heavily towards Morris….in Johan Santana’s 9th-best year, he threw 100 innings as a young pitcher for the Twins, splitting time between the rotation and the bullpen. In Jack Morris’s 9th-best year, he went 21-6 for the World Champion Blue Jays. In Johan Santana’s 10th-best year, he pitched a whopping 52 innings. In Jack Morris’s 10th-best year, he went 19-11 for the 1984 Detroit Tigers. They’re not really comparable as pitchers: one guy is the ace of two World Series champions; the other guy is just trying to break into the league.
Usually, when I compare players like this, I am doing it because the comparison makes sense. In this case, it doesn’t make any sense. Jack Morris, as a pitcher, was nothing at all like Johan Santana. Trying to compare them is like trying to compare a refreshing swim in the ocean with the sensation of eating a really good BLT. It’s two nearly separate things.
But the comparison tells us something. Jack Morris never came close to reaching the brilliant peaks of Johan Santana. He didn’t come close. He didn’t reach the peaks his contemporaries: he wasn’t ever better than the best years of Gooden or Saberhagen or Stieb or Mike Scott or Hershiser. He wasn’t close to the heights they reached.
But he had many, many more productive seasons than those guys. If he couldn’t match any of them in their best years, he could at least hold his own: he was never a Cy Young winner, but he was the guy that voters thought about after they cast votes for Fingers or Hoyt or Willie Hernandez. And when you get down to the seventh- or ninth-best years, Morris was still putting up typical Jack Morris seasons (lots of innings, lots of decisions) while the other guys have all disappeared down a well.
* * *
I was happy to hear that Alan Trammell was elected to the Hall-of-Fame: he is a deserving player, and I hope Cooperstown doesn’t drag its feet too long in getting Whittaker in net to him.
I was happy for Trammell…but I was much more excited about Jack Morris finally getting the nod.
Why?
Because he earned it. I know it’s not particularly sabermetric to say that, but Morris belongs in the Hall. He earned his spot.
Stepping outside of the conversation for a moment: one of the things I intensely dislike about the current BBWAA vote is that voters have gotten in the habit of measuring the ethics of candidates on standards that are applied in retrospect, and in a way that is inconsistent with the institution’s past votes. Baseball had a problem with performance-enhancing drugs in the 50’s, and the 60’s, and the 70’s, yet we honor the legacies of the players of those eras. Baseball had a performance-enhancing drug problem in the 80’s and 90’s: we have honored many of the players from that era. Then, for some reasons, we drew a line and decided that player who use performance-enhancing drugs shouldn’t be honored. We compounded that error by deciding to lump players into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ camps, sometimes based on evidence (Bonds), and sometimes based on the dubious narratives of swarthy hangers-on (Clemens), and sometimes based on our own judgements, facts be damned. It’s ugly, and it’s stupid. We have a Hall of Fame that honors Bob Lemon or Hal Newhouser, but leaves out Roger Clemens, a man whose pitching career eclipses their combined efforts. We have a Hall of Fame that honors George Kell and Joe Tinker, but can’t find room for Barry Bonds, a man who was awarded his league’s Most Valuable Player Award seven times. The brick building in Cooperstown isn’t a Hall of Fame; it is a Hall of Moral Relativism.
Jack Morris is the other side of the same coin. We mock Jack Morris as a candidate for the Hall of Fame because Jack Morris doesn’t look like an ace in our modern context. We expect an ace to pitch like Lincecum or Santana or Halladay or Kershaw or Felix or Scherzer. We expect absolute brilliance, and we don’t give a damn about long careers, or complete games. Those are anachronisms now, and so we diminish the importance of them in their own time. We expect lots of strikeouts, and impressive tallies in WAR. We don’t know what to make of an 20-18 Win-Loss record: we give hardware to the 15-7 records.
And that’s all great. I have no problem with the progress we’ve made as analysts. We have made terrific strides in our knowledge of baseball, and I am not trying to denigrate those strides.
But when Jack Morris complains that his record has been tarnished by our community, he is saying something that is absolutely true. Jack Morris spent his career being called ‘ace’: he was an ace during his years as the workhorse for the great Tigers teams of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, and he was the anchor for the Twins and Blue Jays staffs during consecutive World Series runs in 1991 and 1992. If you came up with a ‘decade’ team for the 1980’s, you could list a bunch of guys who pitched four or five or six years, or you could list Jack Morris.
It is my opinion that the Hall-of-Fame should reflect the history of game, and not whatever attitudes and opinions happens to rule the present. We might not want Jack Morris as the pitcher who reflects the current era of baseball, but there is no question that Morris was one of the most important pitchers of the eighties and early nineties.
And he was a great pitcher: certainly, he didn’t match the pitch-by-pitch genius of Kershaw or Santana, but that wasn't what a starting pitcher was in the 1980's. In the 1980's, a starting pitcher threw a lot of innings, and that's what Morris did, year after year. In an era when bullpen strategies were just rising to a place of prominence, Jack Morris was the last pitcher who expected to finish what he started. There is a genius to that, too: it is as much of an accomplishment in the context of its time as the strikeout feats of the Klubers and Sales are in today's game.
Jack Morris won more games than anyone else during the decade of the 80’s. The importance of that statement isn’t the mere fact of it, but the truth that no one who followed baseball during that time would have been particularly surprised. Of course Jack Morris was the winningest pitcher of that decade…who the hell else would it be? This is echoed in all of the literature from the era: if you pick up any guide from the 1980’s, or look at old baseball cards with text, all of them will invariably describe Morris with words like ‘ace’ or ‘star’ or ‘workhorse’ or ‘champion.’ That’s not some grand hallucination on the part of baseball fans of the era: Jack Morris really was an ace.
He followed the 1980’s with consecutive seasons anchoring the rotations of two World Series champs. He pitched brilliantly in the 1984 and 1991 World Series, winning four out of five starts and posting a not-too-shabby 1.53 ERA across 41 innings. He faltered in 1992, but the Blue Jays won anyway: he started Game One in three different World Series, for three different teams, and his team won all three contests.
Jack Morris is a deserving Hall-of-Famer, and Cooperstown took one good step towards correcting the mistakes of a difficult decade in finally electing him.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.