MARK McGWIRE: In or Out?

I'd love to be a fly on the wall at their family reunion.

(instead of starting a new thread, i'll just add to this one, making it a general discussion of baseball HOF candidates as they crop up)


so curt schilling decided to hang 'em up yesterday.
no great shocker -- a comeback at age 42, after rehabbing his right shoulder for a year, was iffy at best.

he ends his career with:
• 216 wins, 146 losses
• 3.46 ERA
• 3116 K's (15th all-time)
• 3 world series rings
• 6-time all-star
complete career stats


yay or nay?
what say you peeps...

I'll put aside (hopefully) my allegiances to Red Sawx and still say Yes! Basically, because his overall good stats and his record. He has had the greatest modern post-season record of all time! His 2.32 ERA in post-seaon surely helps. Unfortunately, what hurts him is his sometimes-poor-relationship with the media who votes on HOF. Putting an end to the "Curse of the Bambino" puts him in my HOF, no doubt about that!

I'm not sure whether or not he'll be proven to have been clean of steroids, but I think he was clean and nothing will be found out later.

I say yea -- the guy's got 3 World Series rings w/2 different teams, and was instrumental in the big win for the Sox in '04, plus was a part of the greatest comeback of all time. For quite a while there, he was a skeery good pitcher.

Out! You cheat, you forfeit your place in the hall of fame!

Cycloptichorn

Which one are you saying is the cheater? Can you be saying Shilling? I've not heard anything indicating he used steroids -- have you?

nah, Big Mac

Cycloptichorn

It used to be that a pitcher with either 300 wins or 3000 strikeouts would automatically go into the HoF. Now, those are more like the minimum requirements. On that basis, Schilling goes in because he has 3116 Ks. On the other hand, he didn't get close to 300 wins (too many injuries). He has a good winning percentage, but he's not in the top 100. In some ways, he has comparable stats to Dwight Gooden, who ended up with 194 wins in 410 games started (as opposed to Schilling's 216 W in 436 GS). Gooden had a much better winning percentage (.634 to .597) but he didn't get 3000 Ks. And, of course, Gooden was a major druggie, so that's a strike against him. But then Gooden still has better stats than Dennis Eckersley, and Eckersley is in the HoF, so I suppose anyone can get in these days.

I'm sorry, what was it we were discussing?

We were talking about how Schilling was 11-2 in the post season.

Postseason stats have never really impressed me. Of course, being a Cubs fan might have a lot to do with that. Really, though, regular-season stats should be the main determinant for getting into the HoF. Not to say that the voters feel the same way that I do -- how else do you explain Brooks Robinson in the HoF while Ron Santo is left out?

Sure, Schilling was 11-2 in the postseason. That still doesn't make him a 300-game winner.

I say NAY..

If Bert Blyleven can't get in

Career stats -
287 wins
3.31 ERA
3,701 strikeouts
2 World Series rings


Why on earth should Schilling get in?

The knock on Blyleven seems to be that he didn't win 300 games. Schilling is a long way from that.

Oh... and Blyleven was 5-1 in postseason. (edit )

Thankfully stats aren't the only criteria for entry into HOF. In Eck's case, he was a good starter who became an ELITE reliever. He's has one of two pitchers who had a 20-win season and a 50-save season in a career (the other being John Smoltz).

Of course, with my being a Red Sawx fan, Eck stands out in my mind for more than one reason. It was his trade from Sawx to the Cubs that brought cursed Bill Buckner to the Red Sawx! His pitching in ACLS swept the Sawx and next year saved A's and won World Series over SF giants. I believe thay he won Cy Young as well as league MVP in '92. All this put hims in a different light as compared to Gooden's career achievements.

Who said post-season stats were or should be a main determinant?! Certainly not me! And why downplay post-season stats? Post-season stats (particularly Wins and Losses) shows how they perform when the pressure is on against much tougher opponents. How important is it if they hit .300, hit bunches of HR, or pitched a shutout in a reg season as compared to doing the same in a WS?

Eckersley is a joke. He wasn't good enough as a starter to get into the HoF, and he wasn't good enough as a reliever to get into the HoF. How he managed to get in as a starter-reliever is, to me, an abiding mystery.

In any event, elite relievers are about as common as dirt. The single greatest season by a reliever in the history of baseball was Mike Marshall in 1974. He pitched over 200 innings from the bullpen that year and deservedly won the Cy Young Award. "Mike who?" you might ask. Exactly.

Eckersley was the relief pitcher of the year in the AL in 1992. The year before that it was Bryan Harvey. The year after was Jeff Montgomery. Really, it's like if Mark McGwire won the home run crown, followed the next year by Ruben Rivera.

The save is, far and away, the most vastly overrated stat in baseball. Every relief pitcher in the major leagues should erect a golden statue of Jerome Holtzman and kiss its shiny metallic ass every single day in honor of Holtzman's invention of the save. Eckersley got 51 saves in 1992 -- that wasn't even the AL record, which was set by Bobby Thigpen two years earlier (Bobby who?). 51 saves in a year puts Eckersley in a tie for 10th place on the all-time list, and every year he gets pushed down another notch. In other words, it wasn't such a big achievement, and as the years go on it becomes even less so.


On the whole, Buckner had a better career than Eckersley.


I was addressing the post made by Gargamel, who raised the point that Schilling was 11-2 in the postseason. It's not always about you, y'know.


A player's ability to play in the postseason depends, in a large part, upon his teammates. A great player can go his entire career without ever playing in the postseason (e.g. Ernie Banks) or in only one (e.g. Ted Williams), yet that shouldn't reflect badly on his own abilities. Similarly, just because a guy gets to play in the postseason doesn't mean that he is suddenly better than a player on a team that fails to make it to the playoffs. Furthermore, postseason stats are inflated now, given that there are three rounds of playoffs. Schilling's 11-2 postseason record looks pretty good compared to Whitey Ford's 10-8 record, until you realize that Ford only pitched in the World Series.

Like I said, it's good that Schilling had an 11-2 record in the playoffs, but adding those eleven victories to his career total still doesn't bring him in over 300.

agree that ol' curt doesn't quite measure up.

he basically wallowed in mediocrity for 9 years before hitting his stride in '97.
from '97 to '04 he was a premier power pitcher.
but chuck the post-season stats -- cy young voters only consider regular season stats...


eck, on the other hand, deserves to be in the H0F.
check out the numbers he put over a 24-year career...

Yeah, I've seen them. He had two good years as a starter: 1978 and '79. His best year, 1978, he came in fourth in Cy Young voting, so that gives you some perspective on how his contemporaries viewed his performance. From '80 to '86 he can only be described as "mediocre" (2 games under .500). Indeed, his overall win percentage is .535, which, for a Hall of Famer, is pretty weak. His 3.50 career ERA is about average for a pitcher in that time frame, and is rather poor in comparison to his HoF colleagues (only six HoF pitchers have worse career ERAs, and most of them pitched in the 1930s, when nobody had a good ERA). He led the league twice in saves, but only in 1992 was he significantly better than the guy in second place. He is fourth on the list for games pitched, but the leader in that category is the immortal Jesse Orosco, so that isn't such a great accomplishment.

In short, Eckersley had two careers: a mediocre starter with two good years, and a better-than-average short reliever with about five really good years. His career as a starter doesn't even put him in Addie Joss territory. His career as a reliever is inferior to that of Lee Smith -- who, by the way, is equally undeserving of a place in the Hall.

Eckersley is in the Hall because he's the answer to a trivia question: who is the only pitcher that, in his career, won 20 games and saved 50 games? But then, as you pointed out, he isn't even the answer to that question any more, as John Smoltz has since done the same thing -- and Smoltz was a better pitcher.

not true!
he was voted in his first year of eligibility with 83.2% of the votes.
it's not like the BBWAA mulled it over for years...

Baseball has changed whether we like it or not and hopefully it will continue to evolve (with the help of the effectiveness of the Asian teams in the WBC).

I agree with Jim Caple regarding Schilling and 300 wins to be HOF eligible

"But, is Schilling a Hall of Famer? He'll likely get my vote thanks to his three 20-win seasons, three second-place Cy Young finishes, more than 3,000 strikeouts, a great winning percentage and, of course, all those big postseason performances. Although his 216 career wins fall well short of 300, it's high time many voters quit using the 300-win mark as an absolute standard. Have the standards for starters become too high in the age of five-man rotations? Consider this: Depending on whether Bert Blyleven's Hall of Fame candidacy gains momentum the next couple of years, and how writers feel about Roger Clemens by 2013 (Schilling's and Clemens' potential first year of eligibility), Schilling could become the first starting pitcher elected to the Hall of Fame who made his big league debut after 1968."

Link here

Eckersley is in the Hall because of his record as a closer. He was one of the first pitchers to be used effectively as a closer and is still #5 on the career saves list even though he spent half of his career as a starter. His saves per year as a closer are better than any of his contemporaries. If he was to be voted on compared to some of today's closers he might not make it but based on the period when he pitched, he probably deserves it.

That's abundantly clear.

That's a record that makes a better case for Lee Smith to be in the Hall than for Eckersley to be there.