I voted for Tim Raines his first year of eligibility. But when he failed to get 25 percent of the vote, he was moved to the back burner. Sorry, that’s just the way it has to be. Maybe more eligible ballwriters should have measured the Rock’s career numbers in all phases against those of analog basestealer and first-ballot inductee Lou Brock. Try it, you’ll be amazed.

Good news for Raines, however. Yesterday, in one of the most bizarre elections in a bizarre process, he collected 30 percent and is now back on my radar.

So yeah it’s hard to get worked up that he wrote yet another stupid thing. The proper approach is mockery since like Murray Chass (who doesn’t have a blog!!!) he’s not interested in discussing anything. Just making a splash to keep getting attention until he is inevitably put out to pasture.

Looking at the dates in my Friday+ plan, I noticed something that didn’t make me very happy.

I realize that 7/02 corresponds with the weekend of July 4th of course and 9/03 with Labor Day Weekend, but neither of these holidays include getting a Friday off. You get labor day off, and after looking at my work calendar I asked around and it seems the norm is getting Monday the 5th off.

How aggravating. What do they gain by having these games at 1pm at a time when people will be at work? I had planned on going to all the day games across my plans but because of this insane Friday fiasco I now hold tickets for many more weekday day games than I had planned which makes that not really feasible. And as I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’m really annoyed by that. I doubt I’ll be able to find takers for the single seats since generally everyone I know has a job and isn’t getting those days off. Argh.

So that’s my whine for the year. Much smaller than last year but a whine nonetheless.

(Oh and hi, I’m back.)

That sure doesn’t look like Bagwell went from hitting homers to a power outage overnight to my untrained eye.  Forgetting the arthritis condition that Bagwell had is a pretty big memory wipe as well since it by all accounts turned him into a Giambi-esque firstbaseman after being quite good. As you grow older things like arthritis become worse, and baseball skills (like hitting for power!!!) decline. To put it simply: Injury + age = decline.

I mean really it takes three seconds to look at that table and come to the conclusion that he was in a decline phase after 1999-2000 rather than experiencing a “power outage”.

But hey I’m not the professional so maybe I’m making this all up.

Marty Noble – Barry Larkin, Dave Parker

You may say that he got one out of two right, I would say that it is ridiculous to think only two people on the ballot deserve induction and that one of them is Dave Parker. This ballot simply doesn’t make sense in any context. Small hall? Then probably neither of them should be included. Big hall? If your Hall is big enough for Dave Parker it should have half the people on the ballot and you’d run out of votes.

The Jack Morris but no Bert Blyleven Crew

Murray Chass, Jon Heyman, Bruce Jenkins, Danny Knobler, Buster Olney, Dan Shaughnessy, Joel Sherman and Tom Verducci all voted for Jack Morris but not Bert Blyleven. If you don’t think Bert is a Hall of Fame pitcher and don’t buy the arguments of people like Rich Lederer that’s fine.We all have different ideas about what the cutoff for the Hall should be. But if you don’t think Bert belongs then there is absolutely no way that Jack Morris should be one.

Bert outclasses Morris in every important pitching category. Rate states, counting stats, you name it. Not even the fancy things that Shaughnessy thinks suck out all the joy of the game. The only thing he doesn’t have is a 10 inning Game 7 of the World Series shut out. On the other hand, he also doesn’t have two horrible losses in the 1992 World Series like Jack Morris.

The worst part about people citing the post season appearances Morris had is that they completely ignore what Blyleven did.

If Morris gets a boost for his postseason pitching, which was pretty similar except for one game to his regular season pitching than so should Bert. Maybe Jon Heyman’s eyes were closed when Blyleven was in the games, I don’t know.

Jack Morris was a good pitcher and had a good career and I really don’t want to take anything away from him, but it’s like saying you’d pick Andy Pettitte for your team instead of Mike Mussina. Then again I expect to be annoyed at people voting for Andy and not Moose in the future.

The Jay Mariotti Idiot Achievement Award

Jay Mariotti is an attention whore, I get that. This year he decided to play attention whore and send in a blank ballot. I don’t really have an issue with blank ballots as a concept. There are people who want to vote for no-one and have their ballot count because they’re very small hall type guys, for example. But Mariotti decided to use his 2010 ballot as something to get people to pay attention to him.

Now, the baseball gods can strike me down, Reali, but guess what? I didn’t vote for anybody in the baseball hall of fame this year. Ya know why?  To me…the first ballot is sacred. I think Roberto Alomar is an eventual Hall of Famer, not the first time. Edgar Martinez, designated hitter, eventually, but not the first time. Same goes for maybe Fred McGriff. As far as Blyleven and Dawson…if they haven’t gotten in for years and years I cannot vote them in now. Ripken, Rickey Henderson and Gwynn. They are true first ballot Hall of Famers, but I didn’t vote for anybody, throw me out of the Baseball Writers. I don’t care.

Last year he voted for Blyleven and Dawson, so what changed between now and then? Well enough people weren’t looking at him, I guess and he needed to do something to change that. The BBWAA should take his ballot away. He wants to get kicked out or whatever and they absolutely should comply with that. He can tell the world he got kicked out but then he can’t pull stupid stunts like this anymore.

They probably won’t, however, so he’ll continue to use things like this as an opportunity to get people to pay attention to him. It’s a shame.

For my own crazy purposes, I keep track of the Hall of Fame ballots that are made public by writers every year. You can see the crazy nerdsheet here.

This year, the shocking thing that happened was the difference between the support between online voters and whoever it is with a vote that doesn’t make their ballot public (which is a lot of people, once you have a Hall of Fame vote you have it forever) for Roberto Alomar. I expected a difference in Bert Blyleven for sure and I was disappointed that he missed it by five ballots but Andre Dawson going in by himself was a shock.

So here are some ugly graphs covering the vote over the past two years. I’ll probably write up my oh-so important thought on this later. They’re kinda big so the full-size versions are linked. I may also make the graphs less ugly!

Comparison of return candidates and their vote totals 2009 and 2010.

]]> http://teamnerdrage.com/2010/01/06/2010-baseball-hall-of-fame-results-with-ugly-graphs/feed/ 0 http://teamnerdrage.com/2010/01/06/2010-baseball-hall-of-fame-results-with-ugly-graphs/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheGirlWhoLovedAndyPettitte/~3/WWFe4wUeU1Y/ http://teamnerdrage.com/2009/12/31/you-may-have-forgotten-kevin-appier/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:32:26 +0000 leokitty http://teamnerdrage.com/?p=2360 Besides actually putting people into Cooperstown, the Hall of Fame ballot is a good way to reflect on very good players of times gone by. And yeah, sometimes that’s only five years ago but not everyone has a great memory. This year, for me, Kevin Appier was the guy who I found I’d mostly forgotten. I’m sure that I’m not the only one, so consider this a brief refresher course.

For 8 seasons, Kevin Appier was a really good pitcher for the Royals. How good? Take a look:

He finished third in the Rookie of the Year voting in 1990 (behind Sandy Alomar and True Yankee Hero Kevin Maas) and followed it up with 7 more awesome years. He only finished in the top 5 of Cy Young voting once in 1993 which went down like this:

So he probably should have gotten more than, you know, one 1st place vote but wins are often blinding to the powers that be. 1993 is also notable for being the year that Randy Johnson stopped walking so many dudes and became frightening.

So what happened after 1997? A sad thing that derails many pitchers: Major arm surgery. He had surgery to repair a torn labrum in early 1998 and was never really the same, although he did pull two more good years together. Here

Besides actually putting people into Cooperstown, the Hall of Fame ballot is a good way to reflect on very good players of times gone by. And yeah, sometimes that’s only five years ago but not everyone has a great memory. This year, for me, Kevin Appier was the guy who I found I’d mostly forgotten. I’m sure that I’m not the only one, so consider this a brief refresher course.

For 8 seasons, Kevin Appier was a really good pitcher for the Royals. How good? Take a look:

Year	Age	W	L	W-L%	ERA	G	GS	CG	SHO	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	IBB	SO	HBP	WP	ERA+	WHIP	SO/BB
1990	22	12	8	.600	2.76	32	24	3	3	185.2	179	67	57	13	54	2	127	6	6	139	1.255	2.35
1991	23	13	10	.565	3.42	34	31	6	3	207.2	205	97	79	13	61	3	158	2	7	121	1.281	2.59
1992	24	15	8	.652	2.46	30	30	3	0	208.1	167	59	57	10	68	5	150	2	4	165	1.128	2.21
1993	25	18	8	.692	2.56	34	34	5	1	238.2	183	74	68	8	81	3	186	1	5	179	1.106	2.30
1994	26	7	6	.538	3.83	23	23	1	0	155.0	137	68	66	11	63	7	145	4	11	130	1.290	2.30
1995	27	15	10	.600	3.89	31	31	4	1	201.1	163	90	87	14	80	1	185	8	5	123	1.207	2.31
1996	28	14	11	.560	3.62	32	32	5	1	211.1	192	87	85	17	75	2	207	5	10	138	1.263	2.76
1997	29	9	13	.409	3.40	34	34	4	1	235.2	215	96	89	24	74	2	196	4	14	137	1.226	2.65

He finished third in the Rookie of the Year voting in 1990 (behind Sandy Alomar and True Yankee Hero Kevin Maas) and followed it up with 7 more awesome years. He only finished in the top 5 of Cy Young voting once in 1993 which went down like this:

Rank		Tm	Vote Pts	1st Place	W	L	W-L%	ERA	G	CG	SHO	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	SO	HBP
1	Jack McDowell	CHW	124.0	21.0	22	10	.688	3.37	34	10	4	256.2	261	104	96	20	69	158	3
2	Randy Johnson	SEA	75.0	6.0	19	8	.704	3.24	35	10	3	255.1	185	97	92	22	99	308	16
3	Kevin Appier	KCR	30.0	1.0	18	8	.692	2.56	34	5	1	238.2	183	74	68	8	81	186	1

So he probably should have gotten more than, you know, one 1st place vote but wins are often blinding to the powers that be. 1993 is also notable for being the year that Randy Johnson stopped walking so many dudes and became frightening.

So what happened after 1997? A sad thing that derails many pitchers: Major arm surgery. He had surgery to repair a torn labrum in early 1998 and was never really the same, although he did pull two more good years together. Here

Year	Age	Tm	W	L	W-L%	ERA	G	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	IBB	SO	HBP	WP	ERA+	WHIP	SO/BB
1998	30	KCR	1	2	.333	7.80	3	15.0	21	13	13	3	5	1	9	1	1	61	1.733	1.80
1999	31	TOT	16	14	.533	5.17	34	209.0	230	131	120	27	84	4	131	7	10	94	1.502	1.56
1999	31	KCR	9	9	.500	4.87	22	140.1	153	81	76	18	51	3	78	6	5	103	1.454	1.53
1999	31	OAK	7	5	.583	5.77	12	68.2	77	50	44	9	33	1	53	1	5	79	1.602	1.61
2000	32	OAK	15	11	.577	4.52	31	195.1	200	109	98	23	102	10	129	9	6	104	1.546	1.26
2001	33	NYM	11	10	.524	3.57	33	206.2	181	89	82	22	64	4	172	15	12	117	1.185	2.69
2002	34	ANA	14	12	.538	3.92	32	188.1	191	89	82	23	64	2	132	7	7	113	1.354	2.06
2003	35	TOT	8	9	.471	5.40	23	111.2	120	69	67	21	43	4	55	8	6	83	1.460	1.28
2003	35	ANA	7	7	.500	5.63	19	92.2	105	60	58	17	36	4	50	8	4	78	1.522	1.39
2003	35	KCR	1	2	.333	4.26	4	19.0	15	9	9	4	7	0	5	0	2	115	1.158	0.71
2004	36	KCR	0	1	.000	13.50	2	4.0	7	8	6	0	3	0	2	0	2	35	2.500	0.67

You may also notice that I removed CG and SHO from this table where it appears on the first–that’s because after his labrum surgery he pitched only 3CG over these seasons, two of which were shutouts so it’s not really worth noting. Here’s a top level view look at his pre and post surgery numbers:

Years	W	L	ERA	G	CG	SHO	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	IBB	SO	HBP	WP	ERA+	WHIP	K/9	K/BB
1989-1998	105	80	3.34	259	31	10	1680.1	1496	673	623	116	573	27	1373	33	63	135	1.231	7.4	2.40
1999-2004	64	57	4.48	155	3	2	915	929	495	455	116	360	24	621	46	43	101	1.409	6.1	1.73

Baseball graveyards are full of  pitchers like Appier who had good/very good/excellent careers derailed by injuries. Most of them didn’t even get to have eight good to great seasons, so in that respect Appier actually came out ahead of the pack. It’s a little sad, but I’m thankful of the things that pop up and jolt my memory about guys like him. Maybe this time I won’t forget.

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Hideki takes special pride in being a complete player — at the plate and in the outfield — and from the start of negotiations, the Angels made every effort to accommodate him. On Sunday, during a meeting with team officials at my home, manager Mike Scioscia offered Hideki the chance to show that he can still play the field. Hideki is a longtime fan of Scioscia, and the lunch cemented his desire to play for him. Scioscia’s current plan is to have Hideki test his knees and mobility in spring training. Ideally, Hideki would start in left at least once or twice a week. The rest of the time, he’d DH.

I had heard that Hideki signed with the Angels for two main reasons: 1) He wanted to get things resolved quickly and the Yankees told him to wait for a few weeks while they took care of a few other things; 2) He wants to play in the field again. But I didn’t really expect anyone to offer up time fielding because it seems like a great way to sabotage your pitchers a few times a week.

Hideki is–or I guess, was, since he’s no longer with the team–one of my favorite Yankees (and I have a farewell post about halfway finished but I’ve been busy and neglected it a bit), but if some other team is going to let him play the outfield God bless them and I’m glad that’s not happening on the Yankees. Beyond that, allowing him to play in the field makes his knees even more of a liability.

Will the Angels hold to their promise? I don’t know, but Mike Scioscia has been known to do things that make no sense like pinch hitting Gary Matthews Jr for Mike Napoli pretty frequently and allowing GMJ to play at all, period.

My hatred for Mike Mussina wasn’t cemented in anything resembling logic (other than him being really good, of course) but rather a Sports Illustrated cover story about him and Ben McDonald. I am pretty sure I just really hated his face because I’ve gone back and read the article and there’s nothing hatable in there. Hey, I was 13 which is not exactly when you expect people to be making rational decisions.

When the Yankees signed Mike Mussina after the 2000 season I accepted it pretty much the same way as I did with the Clemens acquisition: Grudgingly. He made the pitching staff better, there was no argument about that and so I was glad to have him on the team. But in the back of my mind he was still Mike Mussina: Guy I Hate.

A lot of people have a hard time accepting players on their team who they don’t like for whatever reason, and that’s why you get non-sarcastic crying about True Yankees versus people who aren’t and WFAN callers who will never give Alex Rodriguez any credit for being one of the best baseball players of all time. I try to take a big picture view: Just because I don’t want to be someone’s friend doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate their skill. Does anyone in the entire world like Gary Sheffield? Probably not, but if you wouldn’t take Classic Sheff on your team to hit baseballs you are shortsighted and probably crazy.

And so, I accepted Mussina with open arms to the team. But I never expected to actually warm up to him beyond that.

The 2001 campaign that Mike Mussina put together was quite spectacular. If you aren’t a person who just looks at wins and losses and makes their decisions, it’s pretty easy to spot that he was much better than the guy who won the Cy Young (Roger Clemens). Here’s a high level comparison of the two:

As you can see the difference was, as I mentioned, their records. Mussina was 17-11 while Clemens was X-X and he actually finished fifth behind a bunch of guys with .700 win percentages. A common story in baseball history, but always a bummer.

At this point, I had firmly moved from “appreciate” to “like”. I’m pretty easy to win over. His crankiness became endearing and his quotes to the media amusing.

The most memorable game Mike Mussina pitched in pinstripes was, easily, Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. Roger Clemens had done a grand job pitching badly, and after the third inning the Yankees were losing 3-0. It was 4-0 shortly after the 4th started as Clemens gave up a solo-homerun followed by a walk and a single. It seemed like it would be impossible for the Yankees to keep the game close.

With runners on first and third and no outs, Mussina stepped onto the mound to take over. He struck out Jason Varitek and got some guy named Johnny Damon to ground into a double play. No runs scored. The game didn’t get out of hand. The Yankees had a chance. Mussina gave them two more scoreless innings and received an insane ovation from the crowd (for good reason).

But no, I didn’t quite love him after this. I was extremely grateful to have a pitcher on the Yankees who could step in and do that but performances like that don’t necessarily push you over that edge and form a personal (totally one-sided) connection for a player. I would expect that if my most beloved Andy Pettitte were called on in that situation it would have ended differently, for example. Love is very rarely rational.

The moment in time I crossed over that line with Mussina was May 31st, 2006. Mussina was trying to finish up a complete game against the Detroit Tigers in the 9th inning and was having some trouble. Not entirely caused by himself (a throwing error behind him extended the game), but it was there.

With the score 5-1, 2 outs and a runner on base Joe Torre decided that his pitcher had run out of juice. He began to get ready to head to the mound for a visit-and-lift when Mussina looked in the dugout and saw him and screamed ”YOU STAY THERE!”.

That was it, I was in love. Right then, forever.

Yes, it came late in his Yankees career and 2007 was often extremely painful to watch (especially when I was in attendance for some of the absolute horror-shows) but it was there. I finally gave in and learned to love the Moose. All hail the cranky old man on the mound. I miss his postgame (and pregame and between game) quotes from reporters.

When a Western Union operator tried to enter the grounds, [Charles] Comiskey refused to let him in. He was concerned that if men could sit in saloons and restaurants and pool halls and read the play-by-play action, they wouldn’t go to games. Ban Johnson agreed and urged all his clubs to do the same.

To give it some context, this comes from a paragraph describing Opening Day for the first year of the White Stockings franchise in 1900.

Ownership has a long history of being worried about new forms of media cannibalizing their attendance and in-park profits. Baseball was rather slow to adopt radio and TV, with most owners not immediately seeing the benefits from exposure and instead worrying about attendance numbers.

Things are obviously different now with the money that teams get from TV contracts, and since people still go to baseball games in large numbers (or modest to large depending on the team and their circumstances, I should say) I guess none of these things destroyed the sport.

In fact, we should all be rather glad that TV turned out the way it did since the huge success of MLB on TV has helped to shape current thinking that it’s better to distribute the games to as large an audience as possible. Extra Innings and MLB.TV exist because they generate money for Major League Baseball through both subscriptions and ad sales,

The blackout restrictions baseball has to deal with now come from cable providers and networks who are worried about their ratings and in the case of cable TV, their subscription numbers. And yes, many of the rules around the blackouts make no sense and probably actively cost MLB a decent chunk of change which is why MLB is looking into ways to loosen them. And I do actually believe the Commissioner’s Office when they say that they want to fix the blackout restrictions so that they make more sense, because they are trying to make as much money as possible by having as many subscribers as possible.

As a footnote to the Western Union ban at Western/American League games, it didn’t take very long for Ban Johnson and company to do a 180. By the time Connie Mack was starting up the Athletics for the 1901 season, teams were actively soliciting and setting up contracts with WU to do play-by-play telegraphs. It’s amusing that the same scenario was repeated three times before they finally just realized it was good for them from the onset.

The Yankees have re-signed Andy Pettitte for one-year at $11.75 million, the Post has learned.

The two sides quickly hammered out an agreement once Pettitte signaled he did want to play again in 2010 — and only for the Yankees.

The contract this time around is not incentives based, which makes sense. Last year, the team was worried that Andy’s shoulder/elbow/arm in general wouldn’t hold up and it turns out that it did pretty well. He only missed one start over the season, and once again finished up around the 200 innings mark. Almost all of his incentives were hit (not hitting the actual 200 innings mark was the last one, I believe), so it’s reasonable to expect that he’d do that again.

I am pretty happy that this year was drama-free compared to 2008 (retirement pondering station) and 2009 (money squabbling). This was obviously also important to the team since Brian Cashman stated that signing Andy was Priority #1, whereas last year they were in CC Sabathia land at this time. It probably made him feel important, plus I’m sure that whole winning the World Series thing puts you in a good mood.