Baseball Hall of Fame

Congrats to Boggs and Sandberg, two extremely deserving candidates recognized by the baseball writers as deserving of entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame. However, I would be remiss in my duties as a Twins fan if I did not say that it is a shame that Bert Blyleven is not getting more support than he is for Hall consideration. Blyleven has the fifth most strike outs ever (3,701). He’s got the 24th most wins of all time (287). Over 22 seasons he compiled a 3.31 ERA and had a sub-3.00 ERA nine times.

So why isn’t he in the hall of fame? Essentially because 1) he never put together a truly dominant season and 2) because he mostly played on losing teams (mostly the Twins, Rangers, Indians, and Angels, none of them baseball power-houses in the 70s and 80s) which cost him total wins and gives him more than his fair share of losses (250 of them, to be precise). The second argument is just dumb. Baseball fans complain until they are blue in the face about a few teams, especially the Yankees, stealing all of the good players. So, when a great player decides to not play for the Yankees, and spends his career trying to help bad teams become good ones, how can we hold that against him? The first argument holds more water; he never did win a Cy Young award (though he did finish third a couple of times), and he only won 20 games once. But wins tells us as much about a pitcher’s team as it does about a pitcher’s caliber, and Cy Young awards often go to good players who had great seasons (Blyleven did lose out in Cy Young voting to Willie Hernandez, after all). The Hall of Fame, however, is set up to reward great players, and for 22 seasons in the major leagues, Bert Blyleven was a truly great player.

He deserves a place in the Hall.