STUDYING THE IMPACT
Statistical analysts love this kind of stuff, because predictions and theories about cause and effect can be studied and tested, if never quite verified. Last time around, Bill James wrote an extensive article analyzing the 1963 expansion of the strike zone, and making predictions as to who would benefit the most and who would be hurt the most. His top pick to step forward was his favorite pitcher at the time, Danny Jackson, who was coming off seasons of 11-12 and 9-18. In 1988, Jackson went 23-8. Mat Olkin of Baseball Weekly did a great piece on the young power pitchers who can be expected to benefit most from the new zone; in it he runs a chart of James’ pitcher predictions and their tremendous accuracy:

I’ll get out my own crystal ball in a little bit. I certainly agree with some of Olkin’s picks (Matt Anderson could benefit tremendously from the high strike) and he’s probably seen some of the young guns in the NL more often than I have. But as I was working on my Hall of Fame column, a thought hit me: it seemed like an awful lot of the key candidates – Hernandez, Carter, Dale Murphy, Rice, Parker, Lance Parrish – hit the wall dramatically right around the time the new strike zone came in, cutting the productive parts of their careers short just shy of the qualifications needed to cement their Hall of Fame cases. I started to think back and realize that they weren’t alone – there were lots of players of that generation who just evaporated at about the same time (remember Buddy Bell?), to the point where comparing a list of the best players in baseball in 1987 and 1991 would yield very dramatically different lists.

Just suspicion wasn’t enough; I decided to take a systematic (albeit not entirely scientific) look at what happened to players age 32 and up when the new strike zone hit town. I picked 32 because the most dramatic results seemed to be with guys who were expected to begin a long, slow decline to their careers and instead just turned into pumpkins overnight. Spurred on by the cases of the most prominent players, I decided to focus not on the immediate one-year impact but on how these players’ careers changed from 1986-87 to 1988-89, a long enough span to test whether their relationship to the rest of the league was fundamentally altered.

Of the roughly 300 players who played at least semi-regularly in 1988, 60 were 32 years old or older. This was a bit of a self-selecting list; guys like Jerry Mumphery, who dropped from .333 in 1987 to .136 in 1988, were left out because they didn’t even last out the year. Ditto for Ted Simmons. To calculate the change in performance, I used OPS (On Base Plus Slugging), which provides a good general snapshot of offensive production.

SPLAT! THE RESULTS
They weren't as dramatic as I expected, although there were a good many players who just fell off the end of the earth, turning from good/outstanding players to bad ones overnight. Here are the 20 steepest declines in OPS:

-30.3% Bob Brenly (34, C: 780 to 544)
-28.0% Dave Concepcion (40, SS: 707 to 509)*
-24.3% Larry Parrish (34, DH: 832 to 630)*
-24.2% Buddy Bell (36, 3B: 801 to 607)
-22.9% Mike Schmidt (38, 3B: 936 to 722)
-22.8% Dale Murphy (32, CF: 908 to 701)
-22.1% Bo Diaz (35, C: 715 to 557)
-21.3% Ray Knight (35, 3B: 727 to 572)*
-20.0% Ron Hassey (35, C: 813 to 650)
-19.1% Larry Herndon (34, RF: 785 to 635)*
-18.9% Bill Buckner (38, 1B: 709 to 575)
-17.9% Frank White (37, 2B: 747 to 613)
-17.3% Darrell Evans (41, 1B: 839 to 694)
-17.1% Denny Walling (34, 3B: 813 to 674)
-15.5% Jim Rice (35, DH: 831 to 702)
-15.4% Ken Griffey Sr. (38, LF: 830 to 702)
-15.0% Alan Ashby (36, C: 760 to 646)
-15.0% Willie Randolph (33, 2B: 779 to 662)
-14.8% Keith Hernandez (34, 1B: 836 to 712)
-14.7% Mookie Wilson (32, CF: 795 to 678)
* - Player’s career ended in 1988

Other players with 10% or greater dropoffs (in order): Don Baylor*, Terry Kennedy, Jack Clark, Fred Lynn, Pedro Guerrero, Lance Parrish, Chet Lemon, Keith Moreland, and Gary Carter.

There are some obvious caveats here. The league OPS declined 4.7% in the AL and 5.7% in the NL over this period, so anyone who declined less than that was actually improving relative to the league, and anyone who declined by less than about 8% or so certainly wasn’t suffering from anything more severe than the natural aging process. Also, you can easily identify individual issues at work in some of these cases: Jim Rice was going downhill in 1987, and a bunch of these guys (Hernandez, Buckner, Carter and Guerrero) suffered from various leg injuries.

A number of players (18 of the 60 in the study) actually either improved or improved relative to the league (i.e., a 2-3% decline). The ten biggest trend-buckers:

+25.5% Carlton Fisk (40, C: 691 to 867)
+18.0% Lonnie Smith (32, LF: 755 to 891)
+16.9% Bob Boone (40, C: 603 to 705)
+14.0% Dave Winfield (36, RF: 814 to 928)**
+13.7% Luis Salazar (32, UT: 621 to 706)
+8.5% Tony Armas (34, CF: 692 to 751)
+8.5% Garry Templeton (32, SS: 590 to 640)
+4.0% Tom Herr (32, 2B: 675 to 702)
+3.7% Jamie Quirk (33, C: 648 to 672)
+2.1% Claudell Washington (750 to 766)
** - Winfield was injured and missed the 1989 season

Notables just off this list include George Brett, Robin Yount and Andre Dawson. Again, some individual factors were at work; Smith’s improvement was all in 1989, as he had less than 200 at bats in both 1987 and 1988; Dawson didn’t move to Wrigley until 1987; Salazar got his first everyday job in years in 1988. This list also includes a lot of people who were bouncing back after hitting rock bottom, including Fisk (who sulked through an awful '86 in left field before returning to catching as a part-timer), Smith, Armas and Templeton. There is, perhaps needless to add, neither any rational explanation nor any precedent in history for two of the three most-improved hitters in any group being a pair of 40-year-old catchers. Fisk and Boone just stick out like a sore thumb from virtually all the visible trends.

To wrap up the heavy number-crunching, here are the overall trends, listed by Age, Average Change, and number of players declining out of number in the sample.

Age 32, -5.4%, 12 of 18
Age 33, -5.5%, 4 of 9
Age 34, -13.5%, 8 of 10
Age 35, -14.2%, 5 of 6
Age 36, -7.6%, 4 of 6
Age 37, -10.8% 3 of 3
Age 38, -19.2% 3 of 3
Age 39, -14.5% 1 of 1
Age 40, +4.0% 1 of 3
Age 41, -17.3% 1 of 1

Ages 32-33, -5.4% 16 of 27
Ages 34-41, -11.6% 26 of 33
Ages 32-41, -8.8% 42 of 60

CONCLUSIONS
A good watchword for 2001-2002 is “don’t trust anyone over 33.” And that could have a drastic impact: even moreso than in 1988, the top hitters include legions of guys who have been fixtures on the scene for the last 7-8 years or more. The overall trend, in the absence of a control group (i.e., a study of how much and how many players this age ordinarily decline in a year with no strike zone changes – I know I’ve seen studies somewhere but couldn’t lay my hands on one this week), is hard to separate from the aging process, but the same is true either way. This despite the fact that the over-33 group was an above average group of players; they entered 1988 with an aggregate OPS of 777 compared to the 761 for the 32 and 33 year olds and league averages of 716 in the NL and 747 in the AL (for obvious reasons; the guys who lasted that long as at least semi-regulars tended to be players who were great hitters in their 20s). These guys were stars entering the 1988 season. And few of them were still stars two years later.

As far as individual declines, the list here reminds us what we should already know: catchers in their mid-30s tend to drop like flies. The rest of the list of big losers is a mixed bag of the patient and the impatient, the tall and the short . . . all different types of hitters. When you combine it with the list of improvers, though, one thing does jump out: the guys who were hit hardest were mostly good players, while several of the people who went the other way were terrible. That suggests that reduced offensive conditions tend to exacerbate the leveling forces already at work in the game, and that players who have built a foundation of some success have the most to lose. Also, the decliners were more likely to be people who depended on good strike zone judgment, while half of the top 10 list of improvers were died-in-the-wool hackers (Templeton, Quirk, Washington, Armas, and Salazar).

In retrospect, it would have been more interesting to run a complete study of all hitters, to see if there were other patterns among the likely victims. The other group of hitters who had a tough time in 1988-89 were the guys who had their first good year – mainly rookies and guys getting their first full-time job – in 1987. I didn’t study them systematically; there are certainly counterexamples (like Bonds and Bonilla, or like Howard Johnson, who bounced back in 1989), but the number of players who dropped off severely and somewhat permanently in 1988 was substantial, including Larry Sheets, Benito Santiago, BJ Surhoff, Devon White, Dale Sveum, and Juan Samuel. But this group exists in any year: guys who just had a big year and never adjusted once the pitchers caught up with them. Dave Concepcion, among others, fits in both groups, since he had a career year with the bat at age 39 as a part-timer in 1987.

The reasons why so many older players, particularly successful ones, took it on the chin when they started calling the high strike in 1988 seems easy enough to explain rationally, in two ways:

--1. Players with a long track record of success may be more stubborn about changing their approach.

--2. The high strike mostly helps out the hard throwers – meaning that these guys are suddenly seeing a lot more high fastballs just at the age when they are starting to have real trouble catching up with the high heat.

--3. Players who could foul off borderline fastballs and let the high hard one go for a ball, laying in wait for breaking balls, are suddenly required to swing at pitches they really can’t hit anymore with consistency. There’s nowhere to hide.

BILL JAMES’ 1963 STUDY AND 1988 PREDICTIONS
James’ analysis of '63 didn’t focus on the age groups for hitters; he found a decline among older players but he didn’t feel comfortable drawing conclusions without a control group (as an amateur I’m not constrained by the same qualms about speculating). Instead, he grouped hitters by their body type (height) and hitting style. To summarize briefly, he found that oversize power hitters tended to lose a lot in batting average, that players with poorer strike zone judgment tended to suffer less, that at least some low-average high-strikeout hitters (today’s Dean Palmer and Russ Branyan types) would wash out of the league.

The most pronounced effect he found was that “tweeners” – players who hit for good but not great averages with medium power – just got destroyed. For 1963, James cited people like Willie Davis, Brooks Robinson, Vic Power and Tito Francona. The 1988 results at least partly bear this out. The people he named for 1988 were Keith Hernandez, Pete O’Brien, Phil Bradley, Carney Lansford, Ryne Sandberg, Bobby Bonilla, and Terry Pendleton. I’m not sure that the last two really belonged in the group; Pendleton had been wildly inconsistent before this and kept that pattern, while Bonilla blossomed into a serious home run hitter in 1988. Sandberg was OK in 1988 and later returned to being a big home run threat. But the others held the pattern:

* Hernandez I discussed above, as well as Buddy Bell, Walling, Griffey, Knight, Herndon, and Buckner, also all players of this type.
* O’Brien, age 30 in 1988, was off 10.4%.
* Bradley, age 29, was down 11%.
* Lansford, age 31, was only off 5.3% because he bounced back with a big 1989
after struggling in 1988.
* Pat Tabler, age 30, was off 16.4%.
* Mike Aldrete, in his prime at 27, was off 17.3%.
* Kevin Bass, age 29, was down 9.9%.
* Mitch Webster, age 29, was down 12.4%.
* Brook Jacoby, age 28, was off 18.6%; some of that was his flukey 1987, but
his BB/K dropped from 75/73 to 48/101 in one year.
* Von Hayes, age 29, was down 6.9% with a dramatic drop in his BB/K ratio.
* Wally Joyner, though not then thought of in this group, was 26 in 1988; he dropped off by 9.9%.
* Tim Raines, at age 28 possibly the best player in baseball entering 1988 but the same general type of line-drive/gap hitter, was down 13.2%

(Another group worth mentioning: three nearly identical players, all centerfielders with speed, some power, and some plate discipline but only moderate averages and high strikeout rates: Lloyd Moseby, Mike Davis, and Oddibe McDowell. Not sure why, but these guys all got ruined for good in 1988-89, even though they weren’t that old. Hard to say if that’s a trend or a coincidence.)

2001 PREDICTIONS: HITTERS
Before we go too far, let’s remember that the shrinkage of the zone on the sides may help balance out some of the effects of the new zone. Logically one would assume that this benefits smaller players and guys who don’t crowd the plate (i.e., players who have trouble with the outside corner) while leaving intact the downside for taller and older hitters, although in practice the results may be more complicated than that and a lot may depend on which hitters are more flexible in making adjustments.

Let’s start with the obvious suspects, the guys who lived through this last time and took it on the chin then as young players: Surhoff (age 35), Rafael Palmiero (age 36), Mike Stanley (age 38), Dave Martinez (age 36), Santiago (age 36), Devon White (age 38; he’s basically done anyway), Joyner, Raines (working on a comeback with the Expos), and Mark McGwire. McGwire may seem bulletproof, but remember: he’s 37, he has an enormous top half of the strike zone, his batting average fell off a cliff in 1988-89, and he’s got to get his timing back after a half season on the DL. Could be tough sledding for these guys.

What about the Keith Hernandez group, the line-drive-hitting tweeners? James defined these guys as players who hit .275 to .310 with 15-20 homers a year, although the definition of “moderate power” has changed some; I’m thinking more of guys who generally hit around .290-.320 with 15 to 25 homers most years. The two guys who come to mind as parallels to the Hernandez/Buddy Bell type are Mark Grace and John Olerud; both are in their 30s (37 and 32, respectively) and Olerud is about 6 foot 5 to boot.

Others in this general class of hitters include Surhoff, Joe Randa, Rusty Greer (age 32), Garret Anderson, Bobby Abreu, Travis Fryman (age 32), Paul O’Neill (age 38), Dante Bichette (at sea level; Bichette is 37), Johnny Damon, Jay Payton, Ray Lankford (age 34), Todd Walker, Jeff Cirillo, David Segui (age 34), Brian Daubach, Herbert Perry, Troy O’Leary, Jeff Abbott, and until recently Derek Bell (in his good years; Bell is 32), Jeff Conine (age 35) and Rico Brogna, all of whom are the same type of hitter.

(Abreu and Damon are just hitting their prime and at the upper end of this group, so they would seem the best bets to buck the trend or at least stay very valuable. Also, there’s no telling how this will play out in Colorado. I would not want to have a lot of money tied up in Randa, Fryman or Greer under these conditions, never mind some of the guys who have multiple strikes against them.)

An additional group that, one reasons, should have a tough time is players who had long track records as pretty weak hitters until the 1994 offensive bonanza, and who would thus presumably be most vulnerable to changed offensive conditions. These guys may have stepped up for other reasons, such as adding muscle mass, but it’s worth a spin: Jay Bell (age 35), Surhoff (boy, he’s really got a lot going against him), Bichette (his improvement wasn’t all altitude), Todd Zeile (age 35), Ken Caminiti (age 38), Steve Finley (age 36). A subsidiary group is the guys who were good enough hitters until 1993 but were vaulted to stardom by the same changes: Edgar Martinez (age 38), O’Neill, Jay Buhner (age 36), to a lesser extent Palmiero.

In a class mostly by himself is Frank Thomas. Thomas is unusually dependent on the strike zone; you may remember that some people blamed his 1998-99 slump on his running feud with the umpires over to his continual griping on called strikes; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he had a big resurgence after Alderson fired about half the veteran umps in the league. Thomas could be in for a long, grouchy year.

The other enormous power hitters in the McGwire/Dale Murphy mold will be the main group to have trouble, although these guys were all over the map in 1988. This group includes Richie Sexson, Canseco (who had his best year in 1988 but is a lot older now), Cliff Floyd, and Tony Clark. Of course, these days the ranks of 6-foot-3 and over power hitters is a very long list and includes catchers and shortstops.

Rickey Henderson may actually be helped by the new zone if the narrower corners are actually enforced; with his crouch there’s not much room between the belt and the letters anyway. But Rickey is obviously sensitive to any tinkering because he rarely swings at anything anymore.

Eric Davis will be unaffected as he was in 1988, since he swings at everything above the belt anyway. Tony Gwynn’s decline should not be affected, since contact hitters in the Gwynn mold (including Gwynn) faired pretty well the last two times.

Anything that makes scoring runs harder is good news for Rey Ordonez, who can’t hit under any conditions.

2001 PREDICTIONS: PITCHERS
I’ll leave aside the young guns Olkin dwells on. The corner-painters, most notoriously Maddux and Glavine, may struggle with the new zone; sinkerballers like Kevin Brown, Derek Lowe and Mike Hampton probably won’t be much affected.

The old power pitchers may wind up being helped as much as the new ones, since they will know from Day One how to take maximum advantage. Clemens, even at his advanced age, should be one of the biggest beneficiaries, since he can get ahead of hitters by throwing closer to the head, thus setting up the split finger pitch (same goes for Armando Benitez). Clemens’ control has been a big issue in recent years. Al Leiter also loves to work high in the strike zone and misses high a lot, as does Curt Schilling. The high strike may revive the careers of Troy Percival and Billy Wagner, and might even rehabilitate Jose Mesa and Heathcliff Slocumb. Randy Johnson, if he stays healthy, should finally break the strikeout record. A number of players have been quoted as saying Pete Harnisch will be particularly tough with the high strike. I’ll address Hideo Nomo and David Cone in my Red Sox preview (coming in the next few weeks).

Pedro would seem to be helped as well, but he’s the flip side of Ordonez; since Pedro’s butting up against the theoretical limit on how good a pitcher can be, anything that helps the rest of the pack catch up is bad news. Same goes for Mariano Rivera.

Should be fun to watch and see.

***** ***** *****

FUN FACT: The federal budget averages out over the year to spending just over $205 million an hour. At that rate it would take the entire government 73 minutes to spend the equivalent of the reported value of A-Rod’s contract.

THE JOHNNY DAMON TRADE
I’ll skip some of the detail on this one, since guys like Neyer and Rany Jazayerli (Royals fans both) have picked it over extensively. The A’s got a good deal; while Ben Grieve may turn out to be a better hitter given his youth and power potential, the A’s have been long on accumulating great batting lines and short on complete ballplayers. Damon gives them more of what they don’t have at the cost of what they already have, and the A’s need to shore up a defense that surrendered a ridiculous number of unearned runs last season. With a young pitching staff, the improved outfield defense could be a big factor. Plus they got Steamboat Corey Lidle, who looked OK for the Mets and might be a sleeper fifth starter.

The Royals are either stupid or got screwed, depending on whether you think Damon would have fetched a higher price elsewhere; clearly they're a better team with Damon. While their bullpen the last two years was the worst in baseball history by several standards, Hernandez may be a shorter-term fix than they think, given 76 hits and 9 homers in 73.1 innings last year. They still have no starting pitching. They claimed that the A-ball shortstop was the key to the deal, but that’s just what M. Donald Grant said when he traded Tom Seaver (“the Dan Norman trade.”) GMs do that because the guy at the bar who thinks they otherwise gave Damon away doesn’t know anything about the A-ball shortstop and will forget about him in two years.

For Tampa, this was Christmas in January; when you are looking to dump an expensive 36-year old relief pitcher, how often does somebody offer a 25-year-old power hitter in return? Grieve becomes the first good young player in franchise history. You know they weren’t the ones to think of this deal; Allard Baird told Billy Beane he wanted Hernandez for Damon, and the Rays got a gift.

Another thing that caught my attention (I think it was on ESPN) was a “fantasy analysis” of this deal focusing on Damon and Grieve. Duh! Damon and Grieve are bit players in this deal from a Roto perspective, and neither one will really change his roto profile much; the only difference is the domino effect of giving Dermal Brown a job and taking away Vinny Castilla’s (he’ll move soon anyway). The BIG Rotisserie issue is that the KC bullpen finally settles down – you can forget about Lance Carter, Orber Moreno and Jaime Bluma – while Tampa’s opens up to competition between Esteban Yan, Albie Lopez, Jesus Colome and Doug Creek (don’t count out Creek).

THE MELUSKEY/AUSMUS TRADE
Roger Cedeno will be a huge addition to the Tigers -- a slap hitter with great speed is much more valuable in a big ballpark where he can drop hits between the outfielders, cover lots of ground in the outfield and manufacture runs (unlike Enron, where they get shipped in bulk).

THE ROYCE CLAYTON TRADE
Maybe I didn’t see him enough this year, but why move Jose Valentin off shortstop to be a utility man? Valentin’s a good SS, and had great range factors. His problem was errors, but bad hands are bad hands at any position (it’s not like he’s Jose Offerman, whose big problem at short was throwing errors). Plus they might wind up benching Chris Singleton, who’s an amazing centerfielder and really no worse a hitter than Royce Clayton. They may live to regret dealing Myette.

THE TRADING BLOCK
Who should be on the block? Delino DeShields (who’s still a useful player – the Yankees don’t really have a second baseman, and they’re not the only ones – but has no position in Baltimore). And Troy Percival. The Angels have plenty of good relievers – if Hasegawa can’t close maybe Mike Fyhrie or Lou Pote could – and Percival is in serious decline. Sell!

REGGIE SANDERS
Baseball Weekly notes that Sanders hopes to avoid injury this season because he has put on 25 pounds of muscle working out since last season and says he is in the best shape of his career. Now, first of all, this ain't Allen Iverson bulking up to survive daily beatings; Sanders usually pulls things, and adding mass doesn't cure that.

But I also have a question: how does a 33 year old man gain 25 pounds of muscle in three months? I lifted weights 5-6 days a week when I was in college . . . now, I'm no professional athlete, but I got a real education in how hard it is for a 19-year-old to add muscle; it's a whole lot harder past 30 . . . or it should be . . .

RACISM?
No, just stupidity. What else explains rehashing the managerial careers of two of the least successful managers in recent history, Bob Boone and his ex-teammate Larry Bowa? Boone isn’t just a Gene Mauch disciple; he’s a Mauch missionary. In an Earl Weaver world. Bowa, as Bill James once remarked, “lacks character like Dracula lacks a suntan.” I don't get it.

CHRIS CARPENTER
It's much easier to find pitchers capable of relieving well than starting well, and wherever possible a team should use its best pitchers to throw the most innings. It's also important, however, to give up once it's clear that you've assigned a man to a job he can't do, and find out what he can. In my humble opinion, it's time for the Blue Jays to cut bait and turn Chris Carpenter into a reliever. It's not easy, since he had good ERAs in 1998 and 1999 and big things have been predicted for him, but it's time.

Look at the facts. Carpenter got off to a good start in 1999 and then imploded. In 2000, coming off surgery, he was hit on his pitching elbow in his last start of the postseason and had to be carried off the field. He stumbled out of the gate, getting clocked for a 7.31 ERA, 10 walks and 6 homers to only 6 K in losing his first three starts. After that he righted the ship, running off a 6-2 record and a 3.86 ERA in his next 11 starts through June 14. He was pitching well, allowing less than a hit an inning, averaging a gopher ball every 11 innings, and striking out 5 and a half men per 9 innings. But there was a downside: he averaged almost 107 pitches per start in this period, often topping 120; he was working very hard for a guy with a surgically repaired elbow.

Something must have given out, because over the next 10 starts Carpenter pitched about as badly as anyone in the game's history has ever pitched: 99 baserunners and 12 home runs in 38.2 innings, resulting in a 1-5 record and a 13.27 ERA. Combined with Roy Halladay's ERA hovering over 11.50, the Jays were getting pounded out of too many games too early to stay in the race. Carpenter was exiled to the pen.

It didn't happen immediately upon going there, but on August 7, something clicked. Carpenter struck out over 7 men per 9 innings the rest of the way, alternating between the bullpen and the rotation, and had a good 3-2 record and 3.92 ERA in his last ten outings.

Cut up in four slices, Carpenter's season presents an almost unfathomable contrast: one pitcher who rivals any non-Pedro starter in the league, with a 9-4 record, a 3.88 ERA, a K/BB ratio nearly 2-to-1 and a good 1.326 baserunners/inning ratio in 21 appearances; another who goes 1-8 with an 11.52 ERA, more walks than strikeouts, 2.3 baserunners per inning and a homer every three innings. Yeah, a lot of pitchers can be broken down to look like Jekyll and Hyde like this, but I find it impossible to believe that the "good" Chris Carpenter could possibly pitch so badly if he was healthy.

The pitch-count crowd may argue that all he needs is a 95-pitch limit or some such, but it's very hard to enforce those limits on a thin staff. Even with a solid closer, the Jays can always use a good reliever more than a starter who spends half his season making the batting practice pitcher look good. Time to make the move.

THE GOING RATE
Seattle reportedly offered Mike Cameron and Brett Tomko for Phil Nevin but balked at including Antonio Perez. Since when is the going rate for Phil Nevin the same as for Ken Griffey?

HE’S BACK
Dan Plesac is back in Toronto, thus leaving the Diamondbacks officially nothing to show for Tony Batista.

THE POOR GET RICHER?
According to Baseball Weekly, the Mariners' new TV deal makes them the majors' sixth richest revenue stream. Don't be shocked to see Seattle become a player in free agent signings or salary dump deals in the coming years.

Personally, I thought a few years ago that the Mariners were missing a good business opportunity. The situation: you've got a contending team with three hugely marketable stars (Johnson, Griffey, Rodriguez), two of them young, plus other talented players who could be fan favorites if they got more exposure. You've got a new stadium on the way, with the city screaming about cost overruns. The idea: Bill Gates, who was in desperate need of good PR at the time, should have bought the M's (not a huge ticket item for him), re-signed the three stars, eaten the cost overruns at Safeco and strong-armed MSNBC into giving the Mariners a TBS-Braves deal for nightly national basic cable telecasts.

The benefits: Gates would have won himself some serious good press (to say nothing of a new challenge for his competitive juices) by making a firm commitment to keeping the team's stars in the town they started in and by getting taxpayers off the hook for Safeco. I'm no tax lawyer, but if the Mariners really had no legal exposure for the cost overruns there may have been a way to structure a gratuitous assumption of the city's debts as a charitable tax deduction.

Long-term, a national cable deal would give the M's a serious financial advantage, as the Braves have despite not being in a NY or LA size market. There is no West Coast team on TV every night, and with that star-studded team and two guys maybe chasing home run records they could have built a big regional following. And MSNBC may have finally found a voice in focusing on political yelling matches, but at the time it was a station with access to a lot of homes but not much in the way of distinctive programming. 10 p.m. EST baseball would have been a plus. Thus, it's unlikely that either Gates or the station would have found this a bad financial deal in the long run.

Anyway, the moment has passed, and the Pacific Northwest is NOT a small market. Don't cry for the Mariners.

Meanwhile, the Expos have lost their number one sponsor (Labatt's, which had planned to buy naming rights to the now-dead new ballpark) and with it $1.4 million in annual revenue. Most of the small-market teams still have enough revenue to compete periodically, but there's just not enough money there to support baseball in Montreal. They have to either move or be put out of business.

TOE NASH
The Toe Nash story is a great American tall tale, and I would love to see Nash become a star in the majors. But we should be cautious about hype, particularly from a Tampa Bay organization that has been long on publicity stunts and short on successful talent evaluation. Remember Jim Morris, the 38-year-old schoolteacher who supposedly had the best left arm short of Randy Johnson? What did he last, two weeks with the Rays? Brian Daubach or Troy O'Leary would look like Babe Ruth in a bayou beer league; heck, Daubach had 80 extra base hits in a season in AAA. I wish Nash (and Morris) the best, but don't get too excited just yet.

HALL OF FAME POSTMORTEM
I've about beaten this topic to death, but just a few points after the votes are in:

--1. I picked eight players . . . the writers picked two. I can't be too hard on them for being stingy; heck, Joe DiMaggio didn't get in on the first ballot. Better too few than too many.

--2. Gary Carter, with almost two-thirds of the vote, is now nearly inevitable. I've yet to hear a writer explain why he doesn't belong; the best I've heard is USAToday's Rod Beaton say Carter "doesn't feel like" a Hall of Famer. Deep. Rice, Sutter and Gossage all gained votes as well; the writers are taking their time with the closers, which is prudent. Rob Neyer ran Rice's career home-road split, and got me thinking yet again about whether he belongs . . . until next year . . .

--3. I was appalled that Lou Whitaker didn't get enough votes to stay on the ballot. I defy any writer who voted against him - or anybody else, for that matter - to name ten players who had better careers at second base. And no cheating with active players the jury's still out on or guys like Carew who spent half their careers at an easier position. Five are easy (Hornsby, Morgan, Collins, Lajoie, and Gehringer), and Jackie Robinson would be a clear sixth if they had let him start his career before age 28; he was better than Whitaker so we'll count him. But after that . . .

Evers, Lazzeri and Doerr had much shorter careers, and Doerr and Sandberg played in hitters' havens. Fox, Schoendeinst and Mazeroski weren't even close as hitters. Lazzeri and Billy Herman played in far higher scoring eras, and Herman's offensive numbers still don't stack up, while neither Lazzeri nor Doerr could match Whitaker defensively. Frankie Frisch had marginally higher career SLG and OBP (.432 and .369) than Whitaker (.426 and .363) in careers of about the same length, but Frisch's numbers are a little less impressive because scoring was higher in the twenties and thirties; they would also seem to have been comparable defensive players. The evidence outside their respective batting lines (championships, contemporary opinion, etc.) all points to Frisch by a nose (he won an MVP award and was traded straight up for Rogers Hornsby once, after all), but it's hard to argue that the difference there is huge.

That leaves three spots to fill (two if we overlook Sandberg's park and on base percentage) - with who? Bid McPhee? The other candidates haven't been enshrined either -- Bobby Grich, Joe Gordon, Davey Lopes, Larry Doyle, etc. Bring it on!

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S TRIVIA QUESTION
When Bert Blyleven broke Robin Roberts’ record of allowing 46 homers in one season in 1986, Jay Bell hit the record-breaker.

Besides, comparing Kaat and John to Blyleven is apples and oranges. The 1970s are already represented in Cooperstown by more starting pitchers than any other decade since the pit of the dead-ball era; we can’t just enshrine everyone from the pitcher-dominated years 1963-76. That’s a strike against all three of these guys (and Tiant too); but you have to remember that, while we may think of them all as 70s pitchers, Blyleven was NOT from the same era as Kaat and John. Kaat broke into the big leagues when Blyleven was 8 years old, and won in double figures for the last time in 1976. John also preceded Blyleven to the big leagues by seven years; he beat the league ERA only once (in 70.2 innings) after 1982 and threw 200 innings for the last time in 1983. Blyleven, by contrast, won the same number of games between 1984 and 1989 as Roger Clemens, and just 5 fewer than Dwight Gooden.

Kaat pitched against Ted Williams; Blyleven pitched against Pudge Rodriguez.

LOOKING AT WHO’S IN AND OUT
But before we get there, we have to ask: what's a Hall of Fame pitcher? The easiest answer is great pitchers with long careers, the Seavers and Fellers and Groves, but the fact is that there are only about 25 or so of those guys in the game's history, and none on this year's ballot. Then there are pitchers who may have shorter careers who dominate the game for 4 or 5 years at a stretch, the likes of Koufax, Dean and Ed Walsh. We'll get to Ron Guidry and Dave Stewart below, but the short answer is there's really nobody in that class on the ballot this year either. That leaves the other two categories: pitchers who were good but not great for a very long time, and pitchers who were very good for a fairly long time.

Let’s look at it more systematically. There are 93 pitchers who won 200 games in the major leagues with a winning record. 49 of those are in the Hall, 6 are ineligible for various reasons, and 38 have failed to win election. Let’s break those down:

* Twenty pitchers won 300 games; all are in the Hall, and with a minimum of controversy. 300 wins is 30 a year for 10 years, or 20 a year for 15, 15 a year for 20, or 12 a year for 25. It has remained a durable standard of excellence throughout changing times; the worst guy to do it was probably Don Sutton, and perma-Don went 22 years without missing a turn in the rotation (I read that somewhere, and if it’s not true he was close), which is much more impressive than what Cal Ripken did.

* Nineteen pitchers won 250-299 games; 11 of those are in the Hall. Of the other 8, one (Roger Clemens) is still active, three (Irish-born sometime “switch pitcher” Tony Mullane, Jim McCormick, and Gus Weyhing, the last man to play without a glove) pitched in the 19th century and really have to be judged by a different set of rules for these purposes. That leaves four: John, Kaat, Blyleven, and Morris, all still on the ballot.

* Of the pitchers with 200-249 wins, 14 had winning percentages of .600 or higher. 8 are in the Hall; two (Maddux and Glavine) are active, three (Bob Caruthers, Charlie Buffington, and Jack Stivetts) pitched in the 19th century. That leaves Carl Mays, who once killed a man with a pitch and (according to Bill James) was embroiled in several other controversies.

* Twenty-two won between 55 and 59 percent of their decisions. Three of those are ineligible; Orel Hershiser and Dennis Martinez retired too recently, and Eddie Cicotte was banned from baseball. Of the other 19, 7 are in and 12 are out. The seven are Amos Rusie, Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock, Jesse Haines, Hal Newhouser, Don Drysdale, and Catfish Hunter. If you are cringing at that list, it's with good reason: it reads like a "who's who" of the Hall's worst mistakes in picking pitchers, particularly Hoyt and Haines (the next list is even worse). Several of these guys would have been .500 pitchers or worse if they hadn't pitched their best years for great teams. I'm not saying none of these guys belong, but more of them don't than do, and the others are close calls. Anyway, as I’ll discuss in more detail below, Luis Tiant is in this group.

* Twelve had winning percentages between .525 and .549. Three somehow made the Hall: Vic Willis, Jim Bunning, and Rube Marquard. Nine didn’t, although there’s an active Veterans Committee push afoot to induct Mel Harder (more on him if they vote him in).

* Six had winning records below .520 (Tanana, Koosman, Reuss, and Joe Niekro are the recent ones). None are in danger of going to Cooperstown.

BLYLEVEN’S CASE
For the main candidates, I’m running “Translated Records” for purposes of comparison. For an explanation of the translation method, CLICK HERE.

--Actual record: 287-250, .534, +37 (games over .500), 3.31 ERA, 4970 IP
--Translated record: 262-224, .539, +38, 3.16 ERA, 4624.1 IP

The best argument for Blyleven is that he’s number 1 or 2 in almost everything among non-Hall of Famers – 2d in wins, 2d in starts, 1st in shutouts, 1st in K, 1st in IP. He’s third on the all-time K list and threw more shutouts than Tom Glavine, Kevin Brown and Mike Mussina put together, more than Maddux and the Big Unit combined. Most of the guys around him in each of these categories is in.

One criticism of Blyleven that I think is unfair is that he lacks the "wow" factor - you just don't think of him as a Hall of Famer. To fans scanning the leaderboards that may be true, but I bet if you asked the top AL hitters of the early 70s - Reggie, Yaz, Dick Allen - who the toughest pitchers they faced were, Blyleven's name would come up pretty quickly. If you asked them or asked the next generation of AL bats (Brett, Winfield, Mattingly, Rice) who had the toughest curveball they ever saw, I'd be shocked if less than two-thirds named Blyleven. Maybe he didn't wow the crowds, and his teammates never liked him (he was standoffish and sarcastic, traits he now puts to better use as a broadcaster) but when you look at what his peers said about him, they were certainly impressed.

The big problem I have with Blyleven is that his tendency to hover around .500, particularly in the 1970-78 period, can't be adequately explained by the quality of his teams. In 1970, Blyleven went 10-9 for a team that won 98 games; his teammates Luis Tiant and Jim Kaat were a combined 21-13 despite higher ERAs. In 1977, Blyleven went 14-12 for a team that won 94 games; teammates Gaylord Perry and Doyle Alexander went a combined 32-23 with significantly higher ERAs. In 1978, Blyleven was the staff ace for an 88-win Pirates team with a powerhouse offense led by MVP Dave Parker and a deep bullpen; Blyleven went 14-10 despite leading the team in ERA and innings, while 21-year-old teammate Don Robinson went 14-6. In 1980, admittedly having an off year, Blyleven went 8-13 for the defending World Champs; Jim Bibby was 19-6 for the same team. Rehabbing from an injury in 1983, Blyleven went 7-10 while Rick Sutcliffe was 17-11 (with a higher ERA). In 1986, Blyleven was 17-14; Frank Viola was 16-13 with an ERA a half run higher. In 1985 he was 9-11 with a 3.26 ERA when the Indians traded him; Curt Wardle went 7-6 with a 6.68 ERA for the same team.

When that happens to a pitcher now and then, you call it luck. But year in and year out? How can a run of bad luck keep up for 685 starts without catching a break, without once running off a year like Jack Morris had in 1992? Even a lot of the crappy teams Bert pitched for were bad because the rest of the pitching staff stank, not because they couldn't score, yet he was always 17-17 or 16-15 or 20-17. The Twins of 1972 were not a good team, but they were better that season than the Mets, the Phillies, or the Angels - the teams for which Seaver, Carlton and Ryan went 21-12, 27-10, and 19-16, respectively. Blyleven was 17-17. According to the “Great American Baseball Stat Book 1988,” Blyleven’s teams scored 4.29 runs/game in his starts between 1976 and 1986, while he allowed 3.25 per 9 innings; he still had just a .545 winning percentage.

Blyleven’s real problem, though, is not that he won too little but that he lost too much. That comes with the territory of being a workhorse on bad pitching staffs. In 1973-74 Blyleven started 77 games and got 71 decisions, a staggering total even for the seventies. In 1985-86 he was at it again: 73 starts, 64 decisions, way above the league average. That doesn’t explain everything, but it’s a start; Blyleven was the guy who was left in to lose tie games in the 8th and 9th while the bullpen rested.

If we are going to immortalize Blyleven, the key is in the mid-1980s (the 1984-87 period) and the 1981 and 1989 seasons - in short, the years when he often went head to head with Morris. Those were the years when his workloads were remarkable; those were the years when he posted records that were often significantly better than the teams around him deserved, pitching under difficult conditions. Blyleven was 19-7 in 1984 for a miserable Indians team, and was the top starting pitcher in the Cy Young voting (behind Willie Hernandez and Dan Quisenberry); he was 17-5 in 1989 for an Angels team with a distinctly unimpressive offense. In 1985 he became the last man to throw 290 innings or 20 complete games.

In the end, even with reservations about his wins, I just can’t shake the fact that Blyleven pitched so well for so long. On this score, Blyleven’s postseason greatness is huge: the man proved he could win the big ones, so we should give his record the benefit of some doubt. The Translated ERAs of several of his contemporaries were worse: Carlton (3.22), Ryan (3.35), Gaylord Perry (3.20), Jenkins (3.25), and Phil Neikro (3.21). Blyleven just kept on going at this pace for nearly 5,000 innings. That’s too much good pitching. IN.

LUIS LUIS
--Actual record: 229-172, .572, +57, 3.30 ERA, 3486.1 IP
--Translated record: 201-154, .566, +47, 3.27 ERA, 3128.2 IP

My initial sense of Luis Tiant was that he just missed out; he didn’t pitch as much as the titans of the 1970s, and his numbers were inflated by the era. When he won 20 in 1973, he wasn’t even in the AL’s top 10 in wins. But when I looked closer, I just couldn’t separate Tiant that far from the crowd of the deserving inductees.

Consider: between 1921 and 1993, only three pitchers qualified for the ERA title with an ERA below 2.00 more than once: Sandy Koufax, Hal Newhouser, and Luis Tiant. Tiant's 1.91 mark in 1972 was the lowest at Fenway between Babe Ruth's 1916 season and Roger Clemens in 1990; his 1.60 ERA in 1968 remains the lowest in the AL since Walter Johnson in 1919. Those gaudy ERAs are less impressive when you consider that 1972 and 1968 were the low points for scoring in the AL after 1920, but the translated ERAs for the two seasons are still impressive, 1.99 and 2.16. As the TR for Tiant indicates, he was a guy who would have been a winner even on average teams; his offenses, on balance, just weren’t that great.

To best guage Tiant’s qualifications, I looked for similar pitchers. Let’s face it, the Hall has actually been pretty consistent in giving the benefit of the doubt to pitchers who could be shown to meet the standards of those already in there, regardless of where the ideal line should be drawn.

Going over the list I discussed above, I came up with a list of 29 pitchers with similar credentials: I picked all the pitchers with 200-249 wins and winning percentages between .541 and .597, putting Tiant smack in the middle on both counts. I excluded the ineligibles (Hershiser, Martinez, Cicotte) and the 19th century types (Rusie, Will White, and Silver King), leaving me with 23, including Tiant. Of those, 8 are in the Hall; I’ll list their W, W%, games over .500 and “ERA+” (percent better than the league, park-adjusted) since I haven’t run a TR:

Now, as I’ve said before, these are hardly the Hall’s greatest hits. But Tiant isn't just trying to get in on the bootstraps of being similar to this crowd; I'm pretty confident that he was better. (Newhouser was a great pitcher but for only four years, two of them against weak wartime lineups). Hoyt and Pennock are in the Hall of Fame because of Babe Ruth. Drysdale and Hunter are much more famous because of their postseason exposure, but even their superficially flashier numbers aren't so striking: neither of them ever had a 1.60 ERA, after all.

The best case for Tiant is that he meets the standard they don't: a guy who would still have had very good records even with just average teams. Yeah, Catfish won more games in the postseason, but tell me that Tiant wasn’t as good a big-game pitcher as anyone in his time; counting the postseason, Peter Gammons in “Beyond the Sixth Game” noted that Tiant’s September/October record with the Red Sox – in some of the tightest pennant races and serieses ever – was 32-10. 32-10! It’s simply impossible to look at the career records of Hunter and Bunning and explain why they were any different from El Tiante. We can’t kick them out.

He’s gotta go IN.

MORRIS
--Actual record: 254-177, .577, +77, 3.90 ERA, 3824 IP
--Translated record: 227-190, .544, +37, 3.55 ERA, 3883 IP

So why not Morris? The 80s were a tough time, and Morris won more games than anyone. There’s no precedent for denying Hall induction to a 250-game winner with a .577 winning percentage. The seventh game of the 1991 World Series may have been the greatest game anyone ever pitched, given the circumstances. When the game ended, I told everyone I could find that he had just pitched his way into the Hall of Fame.

This was a tough one, but the translated record – and the close look I took at his record to get there – sold me. Year in and year out, Jack Morris had outstanding offenses behind him. Always. Six times he pitched for teams that were 10% better than league-average in putting runs on the board. Only three of his teams were below-average (1981, 1985 and 1989). That, and not anything else, is the reason he won so many games with unimpressive ERAs. You want comparisons? Check out the record of Dennis Martinez (245-193, .559, 3.70 ERA) and tell me how Morris goes in and he doesn’t. And the Hall of Fame doesn’t need to explain why invisible differences make Morris and Catfish better than Tiant and Martinez.

In the end, so much of Morris’ case is built on a freak of timing – all the best pitchers of Morris’ generation flamed out before they could make it to the 1990s. Guidry, Steib, Mario Soto, Dennis Leonard, Fernando, Steve Rogers . . . Morris endured. But I’m not ready to put him in on his record. He's OUT

KAAT
--Actual record: 283-237, .544, +46, 3.45 ERA, 4530.1 IP
--Translated record: 244-227, .518, +17, 3.45 ERA, 4190.1 IP

Was Jim Kaat ever a great pitcher? Yes, in his one best season. In 1966 Kaat won 25 games with little help from a Twins offense that fell off sharply from the prior year's pennant winner and had a 2.75 ERA in over 300 innings in a tough hitter's park; he led all AL pitchers in the MVP voting and would have won the AL Cy Young Award easily if one had been given (at the time there was just one award for both leagues, which Koufax won unanimously). His translated record for that season? 27-12, which puts him in some very fast company. You could classify two other Kaat years as star-level seasons (the two 20-win years for Chuck Tanner's White Sox in 1974-75), but that's really it; Kaat spent the rest of his career as a just-above-league-average starter living off Harmon Killebrew and Mike Schmidt. He pumped up his numbers by just lingering, winning 17 games in relief his last 4 years. Kaat was a great fielder, a no-windup lefty who won 16 straight Gold Gloves, but he was not, on balance, particularly close to being a great pitcher. He's OUT.

JOHN
--Actual record: 288-231, .555, +57, 3.34 ERA, 4710 IP
--Translated record: 254-221, .535, +33, 3.37 ERA, 4484.1 IP

You saw Tommy John. Well, I did, anyway. Immortal? The John of the sixties was better than the John of the eighties, but neither was ever anywhere near the top of the game. As for his durability, John was hardly a guy who never missed a day at the office; he pitched forever, but was rarely a workhorse in between (really just 1979-80). And throughout the 70s he had great parks to work in, and great, great offenses behind him (take a look at the 1974 Dodgers, more than 30% better than the league, an offensive juggernaut). John was never, and would never have been, a number one starter for a contending team. End of story. He's OUT.

GUIDRY
I didn’t run a TR on Guidry, but with him the question is simple: did he stay on the mountaintop long enough? Maybe it’s just a gut feeling at this point, but I say no. His ERAs and other numbers in 1983 and 1985 just don’t say “Dizzy Dean” or “Ed Walsh;” he was a very good pitcher with a very good offense in those years, but he wasn’t carrying the team on his back. That really just leaves a 3-year stretch (1977-79) when he dominated the league, and in two of those years he fell short of 20 wins. Guidry was only a slightly healthier version of Saberhagen or Gullett – great pitchers all when 100%, but rarely all in one piece. He's OUT.

THE OTHERS:
I’ll be very quick here because I'm voting no for everyone left Dave Stewart pitched 200 innings only 4 times, with an ERA over 5.00 as often as under 3.00, and wound up above the league average for his career. Jose Rijo was a great one when he could take the mound, but he won just 111 games. Ron Darling was a solid #2 starter and won some very big games; I particularly remember an October 1985 duel against John Tudor at Busch, won by the Mets in 13. Tom Browning threw a perfect game, so he should already have a glove or game ball or something in the Hall.

Jim Deshaies wraps up my Hall of Fame ballot (another NO). The only mystery about Deshaies, a promising young pitcher who looked like he would be as good as Browning or maybe Darling, is why the Astros never used him in the 1986 NLCS after he had eaten up the Mets during the season, particularly when they let a washed-up Aurelio Lopez lose game six in the 16th inning.

Next week: back to the present . . .

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S TRIVIA QUESTION
The five pitchers to win 20 and save 10 in the same season? Three Finger Brown (1911), Ed Walsh (1912), Larry Cheney and Chief Bender (1913), and Dizzy Dean (1936). One alert reader informs me that Bender’s 13 saves may be in dispute, but for now that’s what the record book says.

TRIVIA QUESTION
When Bert Blyleven broke the single-season record by allowing 50 homers in 1986, who hit the record-breaking homer?

The clearest conclusion we can draw is that both of these guys lasted an extraordinarily long time as effective relievers, carrying heavy workloads in a business where few guys have that combination of effectiveness, consistency, longetivity, and ability to pitch a lot of innings. Counting his brief trial as a starter, Wilhelm threw over 100 innings 11 times, with an ERA below 3.00 in 8 of those, and over 80 innings 17 times, with an ERA below 3.00 12 times, including a streak in the late 60s of five straight seasons below 2.00. Fingers threw over 100 innings 11 times, including 10 in a row, with an ERA below 3.00 nine times, including 8 of those in a row (he only cleared 80 innings 1 other time, with a bad ERA, though he won an MVP award throwing 78 innings with a 1.04 ERA in the two-thirds of a season played in 1981). It helped, of course, that both guys retired as the all-time saves leader.

I’m satisfied that both guys belong, given their combination of these virtues. But I’m in no great hurry to build a relief pitcher wing in the Hall of Fame. There are no pinch hitters in Cooperstown, no backup catchers, no late-inning defensive subs – heck, Yaz, Paul Molitor, and Jim Rice are the closest we are soon likely to see to a career DH in the Hall (unless Edgar Martinez keeps hitting .330 until he’s 45). And that’s OK, because none of those jobs is nearly as important to a baseball team as an everyday player or a guy who starts 35 games a year, at 6 to 8 innings a pop. Neither is a relief pitcher; the modern 60-70 inning closer faces somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 batters a year, while regular players bat 600-700 times and starters generally face at least 800-1000 batters a year (even today).

It's certainly true that 100 innings of relief, from a closer or a key middle reliever, is worth a lot more than 100 innings of starters’ work, because teams save their best relievers for the late innings of close games, where they can have a disproportionate impact on a team’s record. Then again, starting pitchers ALWAYS enter the game with a tie score, and a team’s ability to maximize the number of games where it has a big lead or is in a close game entering the seventh inning has a much bigger effect on its overall record than its ability to win the close ones. After all, few pennant winning teams play better than .540-.550 ball in close games.

To be extremely generous to the relievers, let’s estimate the value of a relief inning as twice the value of an inning of starters’ work, on the theory that starters spend half their time pitching in games that are not close and were never in danger of being close. This is demonstrable nonsense, but it gives us a floor that we expect relievers to meet. That makes the 100-inning reliever worth just as much as the 200-inning starter. It does NOT, however, make today’s 60-inning reliever worth much more than half the value of a 230-inning starter, let alone the 320-inning starter of the early 1970s or the 270-inning starter of the 1978-85 period.

Then, let’s do one other critically important thing: ignore saves. That’s right, ignore saves. Examine saves, wins and losses as measurements of how much time a reliever spent pitching in critical situations, but don't use those stats to evaluate a reliever’s bottom line -- saves are just too dependent on how a manager uses a pitcher, and with the game on the line a guy’s “ability” to convert save opportunities is useless.

You don’t believe me? The World Series is on the line with three outs needed and a 1-run lead, and you have two choices: bring in 1978 Goose Gossage, who saved 27 games, had a 2.01 ERA, with 122 K, 87 hits allowed in 134.1 innings, and a fastball that could pound a catcher’s mitt into diamonds; or 1998 Rick Aguilera, who saved 38 games, had a 4.24 ERA, with 75 hits and 57 K in 74.1 innings (I don’t have their save % numbers here, but you get the idea). Who are you going to call? Aguilera’s saves are meaningless at this point – you want Goose’s firepower. I could list pages of examples like this. Starting with the assumption that most relievers who are up for Cooperstown weren’t mop-up men, we should throw saves out the window and just ask three things:

1. How much did they pitch?
2. How well did they pitch?
3. How long did they pitch?

That makes the Goose a pretty easy call. In his heyday, he was a totally dominating figure, throwing between 133 and 141.2 innings with an ERA between 1.62 and 2.01 in 1975, 1977 and 1978. Leaving aside his disastrous 1976 foray into starting, when you combine 1975 with 1977-85 he threw at least 79 innings with an ERA below 2.30 seven times in 10 years, and with an ERA below 3.00 eight times. Gossage threw in an 0.77 ERA in 46.2 innings in 1981; the only off year was 1979, when he was his usual self but pitched just 58.1 innings because he broke his hand in a clubhouse fight with Cliff Johnson. And he was better than his ERAs indicate because he was so unhittable entering games with men on base.

The Goose was a classic “fireman” rather than a modern “closer,” sometimes riding the bench during easy “save situations” but often entering close games in the seventh or eighth innings with men on base. Twice he averaged more than two innings per game for an entire season (1975 and 1978), and he averaged over 1.5 innings per game in nine of his ten “peak” seasons. He made nine All-Star teams. True, Gossage stuck around too long, but even after 1985 he had ERAs below 3.00 twice plus a 3.12 mark in hitter-happy 1987; he also pitched well in 1993 (at age 41) but had his season ERA ruined by one horrific outing where LaRussa left him in during a blowout to give up something like 7 or 8 runs to save the younger arms in the pen.

In short, while Gossage’s declining years and early struggles as a starter don’t help his reputation, they certainly don’t detract from his towering peak. For example, he had a 3.01 ERA in 1809.1 innings, but it was 2.55 in 1366.1 innings if you throw out those four early seasons where they screwed around with him as a starter and 2.93 in 1714.1 innings if you remove his last two seasons. In my book, he’s IN.

As for Bruce Sutter, when he was on with the Cubs, he was UNTOUCHABLE -- the toughest pitcher I've ever seen (including Pedro), the most unhittable pitcher I've even seen (including Ryan and El Sid), and the guy who humilated batters most that I've seen (including the Big Unit). In his second season in the NL, Sutter had a 1.34 ERA, striking out 129 batters while allowing 92 baserunners in 107.2 innings; the league ERA was 4.40, more than three times Sutter’s. Even Pedro can’t top that (nor any other starting pitcher ever).

Though Sutter’s late-season fades, and restrictions on his use to combat them, presaged the modern closer, Sutter never threw less than 82.1 innings (and that in 1981) in his first ten seasons in the majors. In 1984 he had another eye-popping year, a 1.54 ERA in 122.2 innings, Dwight Gooden-ish numbers if you indulge in our fantasy that a reliever’s inning is worth two for a starter.

Still, the outstanding seasons for Sutter number only 7 or 8, and he neither had as many dominant seasons as the Goose nor as many good ones. He cleared 110 innings but once, and had ERAs below 2.60 just three times, pitching in a more pitcher-friendly league. He was totally and utterly through by age 32. He was in six All-Star games, good but not really a Hall of Fame mark. In his Cardinal years he didn’t have the same intimidating effect as he had before. Yeah, he was a Candy Cummings-like pioneer, but I’m not a big fan of honoring innovators unless they can turn their inventions into Cooperstown-worthy results. Hey, Steve Yeager invented that thing that hangs down from the catcher’s mask . . . he pitched just over 1000 innings in his career, barely half as many as Fingers or Dizzy Dean, the patron saint of pitchers with short careers. Sutter’s not so far off – but he has to stay OUT.

Keith Woolner of the Baseball Prospectus lays out a case for Tom “the Terminator” Henke, but again I don’t see it. Henke pitched 789.2 innings in his entire big league career; Bert Blyleven, on the ballot with Henke, threw almost 5,000 innings and appeared in 50 more games, even as a starter. Henke never threw 100 innings and only once appeared in more than 66 games in a season. He even only led the league in saves once, if that’s your criterion. Henke was an extremely good and consistent closer – 311 saves and a 2.67 career ERA – and pitched well in the postseason, but I put Henke’s Hall of Fame case in the bin with Manny Mota, Herb Score and Smokey Joe Wood. OUT.

Dave Righetti three years as a promising starter, three years as an outstanding closer, five years playing with matches in the ninth inning of close games, and three years accepting charity from major league organizations. Sound like an immortal to you? He saved 46 games once; Antonio Alfonseca saved 45 last year. OUT.

Steve Bedrosian won a Cy Young award by default when the best starting pitcher in the NL went 8-16 for the defending NL West champs (you can’t give a guy with an 8-16 record the Cy Young award). Bedrock should be content with that piece of immortality. OUT.

(A final note: one other guy who was even more valuable than Sutter and almost comparable to Gossage in his career, and another who wasn’t far behind Sutter? Kent Tekulve and the late Dan Quisenberry, respectively, neither of whom threw hard enough to dent play-doh. Tekulve had a 2.85 career ERA in over 1000 games and over 1400 relief innings, and the Quiz in his best season threw 139 innings with an ERA less than half the league’s. You could look it up).

Also, random HOF thought for the day: In 1984, one of the four seasons on which Don Mattingly’s boosters rest his Hall case (Mattingly won the batting title), the AL MVP voters rated him third AMONG FIRST BASEMEN, behind Kent Hrbek and Eddie Murray. After finishing first in 1985 and second in 1986, Mattingly didn't finish in the top five in '87. Think about that the next time somebody tells you that Mattingly was revered as a god in his prime.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Rich Gossage: By coming in and throwing nothing but unhittable fastballs, the Goose solidified the 'fireman' concept of drenching the late innings with gasoline to douse the opposition's rally."
--USA Today's Tom Weir, on the Goose's Hall of Fame case. As my brother put it, Weir is "not who I'd call if my house was on fire . . ."

TRIVIA QUESTION
OK, I could be missing somebody on this one, but I found five pitchers – four of them Hall of Famers and the fifth a guy I never heard of – who won 20 games and saved 10 in the same season. Name them.