BP Unfiltered

Also, there are really a lot of stat gurus that didn't see Morris pitch? It's not like he's Juan Marichal. Dude was pitching in the 90s.

I am not following the point accumulation method here. The points are not additive for each year in the decade, or Clemens who won two Cy Youngs ('86, '87) would have two points (or more). Are the total votes a pitcher received in the decade divided by the sum of the winners totals for each year the pitcher pitched in the decade?

I will now take up the "Steve McCatty for HOF" flag.

"I wouldn't suggest that Rick Sutcliffe is a better pitcher than Morris nor would I imagine anyone else would as well."

I think you could actually make that argument. At the very least they were both comparable. On their careers Morris has the slight edge in WARP 32.57 to 29.02, but in their seven year peaks Sutcliffe beats Morris by two wins, and his two best season were better then any season Morris had.

Morris was certainly the more durable pitcher (1200 more innings), but on a per inning basis, I think the argument could be made that Sutcliffe was the higher quality pitcher.

Please stop feeding the troll that is Jon Heyman.

As a younger baseball fan (24) I always find it funny that on one hand the writers love to hate the "steroid guys" because they tainted the numbers. Yet on the other hand, when you try and use actual numbers (and I'm not even talking SABR stuff)to decide on players for the HOF, your argument is instnatly not valid because "You didn't see him and I did."

Would the same reasoning be an argument against the HOF case of Bert Blyleven?

Heyman's comments are unfortunate, because 1) they are utterly defensive (and need not be), and 2) they subtract from the (vaguely) legitimate debate over Morris's credentials.

But he does raise an interesting point: If a voter didn't see a player, should they be allowed to vote for that player? I'm guessing Heyman, who was born in 1961, has never cast votes for and against players he never saw.

Oh wait! He voted for Ron Santo, whose final season was 1974, when Heyman was all of 13.

Ah well, there's room for hypocrisy in baseball, too, I suppose. Especially when writing about it.

The Morris as a HoF pitcher seems tied entirely to his 10-inning gem in '91. It is the same as people who put Joe Carter in the HoF after he went yard off of "Wild Thing."

I just want to say it's totally adorable how people keep arguing against the Jack Morris Hall of Fame case with things like "stats" and "facts" and "logic."

The argument on behalf of Jack Morris for the Hall is almost entirely religious. If you believe Morris is a Hall of Famer, you just plain believe it, and no amount of logic is going to push you off of that point.

I was a huge Tigers fan in the 80s which was before I really got into advanced stats. Your chart confirms what I remembered - that Morris was not viewed by the media as a great pitcher in the 80s. When Morris, Trammell and Whitaker made the ballot, it never occurred to me that Morris would be the one who get the most attention. First, he was not as good as the other two. Second, the media had never paid that much attention to him as a Tiger.

It seems that he did not become a candidate until he pitched his famous 10-inning game for the Twins. Only then did they start building up his career and coming up with arbitrary stats to make him look better than he was. It has nothing to do with having seen him pitch or understanding of intangibles that stat guys can't see. I think it was just that one game which started the ball rolling.

Re: the "pitching to the score" meme... has Heyman ever bothered to explain why any pitcher would ever choose to do this? What would be the point? In effect, he's admitting Morris purposefully let up when he had a big lead. Why would that be considered a positive and not a negative???? Not that I believe Morris did any such thing. But it begs the question... why would any pitcher make that choice????

Wouldn't it be better to repeat this exercise with the endpoints the start and finish of Morris' career rather than an arbitary decade? Not that it will change the point any.

Wasn't Heyman the Yankees beat reporter for Newsday for most of the 80s and 90s? If that's the case, how many times did he actually see Morris pitch? Would it have been more often than the casual fan or stathead?

As to seeing him pitch, I wouldn't be suprised if Heyman watched only one game pitched by Morris, his 10th inning WS game.