9/20/2023 0 Comments Andy pettite signed baseballI'd put Kenny Lofton in the Hall of Fame, but I never wrote a column about it. No starting pitcher did that twice this fall.)īut not all yeses are urgent enough to write about. This year's starters went six or more innings in 26% of postseason games, while Pettitte did so in 80% of his. (Nobody else has more than 15, and starters today don't regularly pitch deep into postseason games the way Pettitte did. Pettitte's record 19 postseason wins are undeniably the benefit of playing in an era of expanded playoffs, but it's also a record that'll probably never be broken, at least until the definition of the win is changed. Pettitte threw three times as many postseason innings as Morris, with a comparable ERA and three times as many wins. Cooperstonian Jack Morris' postseason résumé was (rightfully) a big part of his Hall of Fame case. His postseason win probability added is sixth all time. If his WAR gives us a reason not to discard him as a no, his postseason performance gives us the reason to elevate him to a yes. His FanGraphs WAR is higher than Tom Glavine's or Roy Halladay's (to compare him to contemporaries), and his Baseball-Reference WAR is about level with Juan Marichal and Don Drysdale (to compare him to his ancestors). Pettitte's WAR - 60 at Baseball-Reference, 68 at FanGraphs and 61 at Baseball Prospectus - is around the lower tier of inducted Hall of Famers and near the very top of the non-HOF tier, which makes his case the very definition of arguable. To be clear: There's a good case for Pettitte that doesn't involve the decade in which he was born. That's what this is really about: Everybody should vote for Andy Pettitte. It's a very conspicuous drought, and it probably tells us a lot more about an era of baseball than it tells us about the actual talent of baseball pitching that 1970s date nights produced.īut more than Hudson or Buehrle, they should definitely check the box next to Andy Pettitte. As it stands now, and as it threatens to stand for a very long time, there are only two Hall of Fame pitchers who were born in the 1970s. Neither will be inducted in 2021 - or, probably, ever - but voters should really consider each of them. I bring this up because this year, Tim Hudson and Mark Buehrle will be on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time. But "one of the two best baseball players born that year" really gets to the heart of it - especially when it splits, as it so often does, into one pitcher and one batter, the yolk and albumen in baseball's egg: Two per year creates a nice symbolic standard, doesn't it? To the question "What's a Hall of Famer?" we can come up with any number of esoteric definitions. OK, it's not quite that precise, but as an average, it works out: 20 future baseball Hall of Famers (from the Negro Leagues and the American and National Leagues) were born in the 1910s, and so on from there: Why everybody should vote Andy Pettitte into the Hall of Fame You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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