Another Hall of Fame vote, another round of questions

Unlike last year, this year's Hall of Fame vote almost certainly will result in new players on the steps of Cooperstown. Even in these times, it is impossible to deny Greg Maddux. He might even have company in the Class of 2014.

New blood will enter the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum this year (Beyond My Ken/GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Hall of Fame vote, which has always been enjoyable and never easy, now is quite less enjoyable and more difficult than ever, owing to the well known controversies arising from performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Last year's ballot of the Base Ball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) produced no new inductees, striking many fans and writers with the force of moral disaster.

This corner of the Internet doesn't share those worries. It's supposed to be hard to get into the Hall of Fame, and it is. And if PED backlash costs a generation of players its proportion of baseball immortals, there shall be no hand wringing about it from here. The burden belongs to the players of that generation. They're the guys who knew it first, they're the guys who knew the most, and they're the guys who didn't say anything. This is what happens.

It remains astounding that anyone should rationalize PED use among baseball players.  Some will tell us, for example, that if PED use is the issue, then generations of players who used speed also should be excluded. But amphetamines simply don't force the same difficult choices upon players who would rather not use them. Long and grinding as the season is, players can stay awake and alert by getting their rest and eating right, maybe mixing in a cup of coffee. Don't stay out all night having drinks and chasing women. It's not that hard. A lot of us work 300 days per year, and we do it without amphetamines.

But steroids and HGH confer benefits upon players that are available in no non-invasive way. When steroids and HGH are unchecked, then players who do not want to take that risk with their bodies know they will fall way behind if they don't do it. Thus, players, especially those on the margins, are all but forced to use them if they want to maintain that earning power, and we certainly don't want people believing they must harm themselves if they wish to compete in baseball.

Now that we have some kind of testing and enforcement, players who wish to stay clean can hope for some kind of justice. Of course, the system remains imperfect, mostly because the clubs aren't held accountable, so players still profit from juicing. But there is getting caught now, and it is stigmatizing, as it should be. It will cost you the high opinion of your public, and it might cost you the Hall of Fame.

I hold baseball to a challenging standard. Guilty as charged. Football, basketball and pornography are freak shows, and those people can do what they want, so far as I'm concerned. I'm not saying I dislike freak shows, but I detest freak-show baseball. I want baseball in human proportions. Perhaps it's a question of personal taste. That's mine. And I am not moralizing one bit more than you are when you say you're fine with PEDs in baseball. You just have different morals, if that's even the right way to think about it.

Happily, the ballot this year includes an open-and-shut case or two, so new players will enter the gates of Cooperstown this summer, along with the three great managers -- Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa and Joe Torre -- who have been selected by the veteran's committee.

It remains that the backlog of players on the ballot makes it very crowded. In the past, a voter could conscientiously vote for well fewer than 10 players, due to a limited number of solid cases. Now, the strain comes from the opposite direction, as many more than 10 players can argue for those votes. I would have been happy to vote for 12 this time.

None of those 12 would have been Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens. However, this process, year after year, is rife with second and third thoughts. That's always been the case with borderline players, and now it applies to players who have produced like no one else in the game's history. This voter is always cheerfully disposed to revise his beliefs in the light of compelling new evidence, so he shall never say "Never." About these players on future ballots, I'm going to say things like, "I doubt it," "We'll see," and "I don't know." But definitely, "Not now."

Herewith is this year's roster of players named on my ballot, along with a few little notes and anecdotes. The players are listed in order of conviction. All statistics are from, or are extrapolated from, baseball-reference.com.

Greg Maddux: What made Maddux the best and most intriguing pitcher of his time? The incongruity between his bookish appearance and his athletic dominance? The eye-popping numbers? The sharp mental approach? The idea that, in many respects, he appeared to be indistinguishable from the ordinary run of pitchers?

One night, way back when, a friend and I were watching a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, Scott Service, a pretty ordinary guy, if that, by the results. From the center-field camera angle, Service was electric. His pitches dipped, dived, curled, zoomed, rose and fell. And he threw strikes with that stuff. We remarked that he looked a little like Greg Maddux out there. But about every 20 pitches or so, Service would throw a clunker, and it would get smashed. And we noted what made Maddux different.

It happens with pitchers, now and then, that they just don't get the right finger pressure, the right arm angle, the right stride. Maybe his arm trails his body and he flies open. Something goes wrong and he throws a pitch with nothing on it, or it's in a poor location, his curve ball is straight or his fastball is up and dizzy, and it is just begging to be destroyed. And unless the batter is completely helpless, it gets destroyed.

Not to celebrate the vulgarism, but my friend and I called that pitch a "turd." We thusly determined that if we really wanted one statistic by which to gauge a pitcher's effectiveness, or his chances of being effective, it would be a measure of how many pitches a man could throw without lobbing up a turd. PPT: Pitches per Turd.

It is, granted, an unknowable statistic, broadly speaking. We could go back to the start of this century, or a little before then, when 99.9944 percent of all big league games have been videoed at least for scoreboard replays, pick out which pitches are turds, divide that amount by the total number of pitches and come up with a PPT for every pitcher. But we can't go back and watch most of the games pitched by Sandy Koufax or Sal Maglie, and we can't go back and watch any of the games pitched by Christy Mathewson or Walter Johnson. So, PPT isn't happening.

But the concept of PPT is useful for assessing pitchers. The line between throwing a turd every 40 pitches instead of every 45 pitches is the line between escaping a two-out jam or giving up a few runs. And it does happen, a lot. Nobody is perfect. Turds are a part of the game.

Except when Maddux pitched. He went entire games without throwing a turd. That separates Maddux from almost everyone else. He almost never threw a pitch on which the other guys could beat him. Everything he threw had some action, some well conceived location or some mystifying tempo.

Maddux won 355 games with a career ERA of 3.16. From 1988 through 2004, he won 15 or more games every year. During his peak, 1992 through 1998, his ERA finished higher than 2.22 only twice, never higher than 2.72. He won four Cy Young Awards and five other times finished in the top five. He won 13 straight Gold Gloves and 20 in 21 seasons.

His PPT? Don't know. But he is a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Tom Glavine: The day after you face Maddux, you're facing Glavine. That's how it worked against the Atlanta Braves. Glavine worked perfectly with his coy style between Maddux and the power game of John Smoltz, who was generally Atlanta's third starter and will absolutely get this vote when his time comes next year.

A left-hander, Glavine based his game on establishing a wide strike zone against right-handed hitters. If he could consistently hit his spot a couple of inches off the outer black against the right-handed hitter, the umpire would give it to him. At that point, Glavine had the game right where he wanted it, because he was a master of hitting his spot and changing speeds. As the game progressed, he might push that strike zone a little bit wider.

Glavine put up with some base runners because he would walk a few. His career WHIP of 1.314 isn't stunning. But he didn't allow batters to punish him for it very often. During his career, right-handed batters slugged .380 against him, and left-handed hitters slugged .368.

Glavine surpassed 300 career victories (finishing at 305), which is automatically going to put him into the Hall of Fame so long as other questions don't arise. Glavine also won two Cy Young Awards, finished second twice and finished third twice.

Jack Morris: Much as been said about this, and much more could be said. Morris is the most controversial borderline case to come along since I began making this vote in 2000. Call me a softy, but I have a tendency to vote for the borderline cases.

Morris calls up a facet of the competition that is gone and all but forgotten now, the absolute differentiation between the American and National Leagues. After Morris missed again last year, I went through the ballots of BBWAA members who had made their votes public and noted the names of voters from my days of daily or quasi-daily baseball reporting, which would be the 1980s and 1990s (I differentiate reporting from writing, which is what I attempt to do now). Among the American League voters from those days, Morris received about 80 percent support. Among the National League voters, it was right around one-third.

Morris was a unique creature of a unique window in one league's history, a 14-team AL breaking in the designated hitter before interleague play came along. In the AL of those days, pitching was an endurance test, and many excellent pitchers came into the league who did not endure. Morris did. I have pretty consistently voted for Morris through the years, and I cast one more for him this time, his last year on the ballot. I can see why many voters and fans, especially younger fans, might not see the point. But he definitely has my support as a Hall of Famer.

I do have one challenge, which I have never seen addressed anywhere, for those who denigrate the Morris case because of his rate stats, which have done him no favors in 15 years of debating his Hall of Fame candidacy. It has become quite common, in fact, to point out that Morris's 3.90 career ERA would be the highest in the Hall of Fame. But we shouldn't blow off the fact that Morris pitched a lot of innings at the rates that he produced, particularly for his time and place, because there is real value in those innings.

Just to illustrate: During the 1980s, Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan produced a 3.14 ERA, and Morris produced a 3.66 ERA. We'll ignore the fact that Ryan worked all but 1989 in the NL, where scoring was lower without the DH, and that he worked in the run-stingy Astrodome on top of it. For the sake of argument, we'll just say that Ryan pitched at a much better rate. In fact, Ryan has an ERA-plus of 111, compared with 109 for Morris during the 1980s.

But Morris pitched 2,443 2/3 innings during the 1980s, compared with 2,094 innings for Ryan. Thus, Morris pitched 350 innings more than Ryan during the 1980s. And here's the question: Who pitched those 350 innings for Ryan's teams while Morris was pitching those innings for the Detroit Tigers? How likely is it that Ryan's teams received anywhere near the same value during those innings that Morris produced for the Tigers?

The point here isn't to say that Morris should be in the Hall of Fame and Ryan shouldn't, but to pose a challenge for those who privilege rate statistics and make out as if volume of innings for a pitcher of Morris's quality shouldn't be seriously taken into consideration. Those who argue that way must answer the burden of accounting for those 350 innings, because one thing the rate stats do tell us is that there is real value in those 350 innings that Morris pitched and Ryan didn't. Chances are, those innings on Ryan's team went to the 10th or 11th pitcher on the staff. Chances are, they went to various flavors of relievers and  spot starters. Would you rather have the innings from that guy, or would you rather have them from Morris at 3.66?

Jeff Bagwell/Craig Biggio: I'm putting these guys together, conceding a measure of hometown sympathy after living in Texas for 13 years and developing very high regard for Houston Astros fans, who, as often as not, consider these players in tandem. I won't add to what I already said about Bagwell when discussing my Hall of Fame votes two years ago.

As to Biggio, like Bagwell, he'll get my vote every time. Forget about Biggio's 3,060 hits. Well, don't. They matter. Statistics are important, of course. They give us measures of performance and productivity. But baseball doesn't begin and end with statistics. The game is much too wide and much too deep for that. The bottom line on Biggio was that he did whatever that franchise needed him to do, and he did it all well, or, at least, well enough. I'm saying he did it at a Hall of Fame level. Along with all that, Biggio catalyzed the Houston offense from the top of the order for all those years. He and Bagwell also ran a professional clubhouse that defused difficult personalities, quite ably assisted during many of those years by catcher Brad Ausmus, the new Detroit Tigers manager.

It's difficult to quantify Biggio's contributions to the Astros. He came up full-time to the Astros in 1989 as a catcher, and he wasn't absolutely great behind the plate, but he did make an All-Star team from there in 1991 for his offensive contributions. Because he could hit some and run some, the Astros didn't want him getting too beaten up, so they moved him to second base in 1992. During his first seven years as a second baseman, he made six All-Star teams while winning four Gold Gloves and four Silver Sluggers.

In 2003, the Astros brought in Jeff Kent, a second baseman who happens to be on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this year. So, the Astros put Biggio, in his age 37 season, in center field, where he had last played a handful of games a dozen years earlier. He wasn't great out there, but he didn't kill them, either. For a 37-year-old guy basically new to one of the most athletically demanding positions on the field, not at all bad.

Two years later, Kent left and the Astros put Biggio back at second base. By then, he was 39. That was 2005, the year the Astros finally went to the World Series. For 10 years before then, the Astros were always pretty good. From 1997 through 2001, they were better than that, winning four divisions in those five years. As it happened, three of those teams were bounced from the first round of playoffs by the Braves of Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz. Could have happened to anyone.

Tim Raines: Bill James once wrote something to the effect that you could cut Rickey Henderson in half and come out of it with two Hall of Famers. If so, one of them would be Tim Raines.

Raines came up as a full-time player to the Montreal Expos in 1981. From 1981 through 1989, Raines slashed .304/.392/.443/.835 for an OPS-plus of 133. Henderson slashed .290/.401/.440/.842 for an OPS-plus of 137 during those same years. Raines knocked out 1,466 hits and Henderson knocked out 1,328. Raines had 2,141 total bases and Henderson totaled 2,018 bases. Raines stole 578 bases in 668 attempts (86.5 percent) and Henderson stole 738 bases in 902 attempts (81.8 percent). Raines walked 699 times and struck out 517 times. Henderson walked 845 times and struck out 643 times.

Each was the pre-eminent leadoff hitter in his league at the time. Raines kept playing through 2002 and was reasonably productive. Henderson kept playing through 2003 and was even better. Henderson's raw career numbers ended up much higher -- about 700 more runs, 600 more steals and 400 more hits. Per 162 games over the course of his career, however, Raines slashed .294/.385/.425/.810 with 52 steals in 61 attempts (85.2 percent) and a 123 OPS-plus, while Henderson slashed .279/.401/.419/.820 with 74 steals in 92 attempts (80.4 percent) and a 127 OPS-plus.

Once again, I'd say James had it right.

Curt Schilling: Here's where my votes begin to get a little shaky and I start saying things like, "Maybe I could have left this guy off and voted for someone who I didn't pick." But it's too hard to forget what Schilling was for the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001 and for the Boston Red Sox in 2004.

Schilling never won a Cy Young Award and he claimed only 216 victories during his 20-year career. Yet, he gives the impression of being a big winner because, for about four years, he was as big of a winner as you could find -- 22-6 for Arizona in 2001, 23-7 for Arizona in 2002 and 21-6 for Boston in 2004. He was an extraordinary control pitcher with 4.38 strikeouts for every walk, the best such ratio for any pitcher since Tommy Bond, who retired in 1884. And he won World Series starts for World Championship clubs in 2001, 2004 and 2007, which isn't even to mention that he was instrumental in getting the Philadelphia Phillies to the 1993 World Series, during which he won a start.

As a postseason pitcher, Schilling was 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in 19 starts, compiling a 0.968 WHIP in 133 1/3 innings. That's what he did with the lights on against top competition. Not saying I can't be talked out of voting for Schilling in the future, but he really made an impression. I almost wouldn't even care if the bloody sock game was a fraud. If that's what it was, then Schilling put on a hell of a show in, probably, the most historically significant start of this century. Without it, the Curse of the Bambino might still be alive today. Who can tell?

Mike Piazza: If I should ever leave Piazza off of a ballot, it probably wouldn't be because I suspect steroids. It would be because he wasn't a very good catcher. Perhaps I couldn't steal a base against him, but my grandma could, and she's been dead for 46 years. Ten times during his career, Piazza allowed more stolen bases than any other catcher in the National League.

But who didn't love watching him hit? That's what put him on a dozen All-Star teams. From 1993 through 2001, Piazza never batted lower than .300, never had an OPS-plus lower than 135, he produced 42 homers per 162 games and he never struck out 100 times. He produced so much offensively that you could live with his deficiencies as a backstop, and this is coming from a guy who is defense first behind the plate all the way. Well, apparently not all the way. Let's say most of the way.

Lee Smith: This big reliever always receives about 45-50 percent of the vote and never moves up from there. Now comes his 12th year on the ballot, and, because he makes no progress and these ballots keep getting more crowded, it's really looking like he won't ever make it.

Here's my discussion about Smith from a couple of years ago, so we can move on to another discussion about him. It goes back to the early 1990s, when Smith anchored the St. Louis Cardinals bullpen. The Cardinals went into Cincinnati to play the Reds, whose ace reliever, Rob Dibble, was known to be a big fan of his. So, I asked Smith about Dibble, who was, to say the least, a distinctive personality. Dibble also wielded a distinctive fastball, and he loved to show it off.

In a rather knowing, mature and well humored way, Smith pointed out that the younger Reds reliever might want to dial it back a bit in the bullpen, maybe to save his arm from a little wear and tear. At the same time, Smith understood what Dibble was doing.

"He likes to pop the mitt down there more than he needs to," Smith said with a smile, "because he knows the kids are watching. I used to be like that. I get it. You learn to take some off down there and have it for when you need it, maybe so you can hang around a little longer. But he likes to pop the mitt for the kids."

It's one of those little episodes that made you remember why you liked being around baseball. Just the idea that a big leaguer with millions at stake in his arm would "pop the mitt" for little other reason than to make the kids go ooh and ahh.

Mike Mussina: Maybe Frank Thomas played a little more designated hitter than I'd like for a Hall of Fame vote, but there is no doubt about the numbers and I shall be more than happy if he makes it in this year without me. If he doesn't, then I definitely owe him a vote next year. I also maintain much love for Fred McGriff, who I have picked in the past. There's a part of me that's always wanted to vote for Larry Walker and has never gotten around to it. And back when this vote was a little more fun and games, I often enjoyed throwing one to a guy who had absolutely no chance of making it, but who I thought made the game a better place. That would have been Sean Casey this time.

I gave the last vote to Mussina because I'm a little worried that he won't get to the five percent he needs to remain on future ballots, and he really should receive some consideration. Again, pitchers who spend their entire careers in the American League against the DH aren't going to make the benchmark Hall of Fame numbers. None has. The best chance right now is Morris. All the rest either wore out or moved over and spent significant portions of their careers in the National League, where they don't have to deal with that extra hitter.

Mussina won 270 games in his career, which puts him ahead of Morris (254). Unlike Morris, though, Mussina doesn't have a World Championship, whereas Morris anchored three World Championship pitching staffs and, of course, had Game 7 in 1991. I'm not calling Mussina a Hall of Famer. I'm just saying it's a discussion worth having some time.

I'm thinking that about a year from now would be a good time for that discussion. And for more discussion about Bonds and Clemens. And for discussion about next year's first timers, who will include Smoltz, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson and -- why not? -- Everyday Eddie Guardado.

How to get an American League starter into the Hall

On the way to arguing in support of our vote to put Jack Morris into the Hall of Fame, we've got a little more to say. Maybe we need to rethink how we assess American League starting pitchers in these days of relief pitching and designated hitters, lest we should be unlikely to ever put another such performer into the Hall again.

Jack Morris went 3-0 with a 1.80 ERA for the Detroit Tigers during the 1984 postseason (Image from http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Jack-Morris-Detroit-Tigers-with-84-WS-Champs-Inscription-Posters_i8736516_.htm. It is believed this low resolution, cropped and watermarked image of a poster to identify the subject of this story is fair use in the absence of a public domain image of the subject.).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

What follows is some fallout from a separate piece in which I will discuss the reasons for which I've given Jack Morris still another vote for induction in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and why I shall again cast that vote next year if it comes to that.

That case will not be made here. However, it seems as though we've settled on a peculiar way of deciding which pitchers are Hall of Famers, and that peculiarity does not favor Jack Morris. We've apparently decided that anyone who hangs around for 25 years and wins 300 games is in, and we don't care if he threw a spitball, pitched in the easier league or wheezed through the last few years of his career to enhance his numbers. The only other way in is a case like Bert Blyleven, about whom it was finally appreciated two years ago that he would easily have reached 300 wins if those Minnesota Twins teams of the early 1970s paid a little attention in the batter's box on the days when he pitched. Blyleven lost 99 quality starts during his career, 48 of them during those first seven years with the Twins.

Blyleven made his debut in 1970. And that remains the most recent debut year for a starting pitcher who is in the Hall of Fame. The next most recent debut year for a Hall of Fame starting pitcher was 1967, Tom Seaver's rookie year. The Hall includes eight starting pitchers who debuted from 1964 through 1967.

The Hall of Fame includes 64 starting pitchers, with their debut years ranging over exactly 100 years, 1871 through 1970, and the pitcher debuts are spaced pretty evenly across those 100 years. Most of the gaps are two or three years, though there are a couple of five-year gaps (1931-35 and 1943-47) in which no starting pitchers who are in the Hall of Fame threw that first big league pitch.

It now is 2013, of course, and we haven't inducted a starting pitcher who debuted in 1971 or later. Now, every starting pitcher who debuted from 1971 through 1983 has come and gone, barely without acknowledgement on any Hall of Fame ballot, except Morris. The next debut year up for discussion is 1984, the year Roger Clemens broke in, and that one is going to be deferred, at least for a while. The next debut year that stands to have launched a starting pitcher towards the Hall of Fame is 1986, the year Greg Maddux began with the Chicago Cubs.

So, we're looking at a window of 15 years, 1971 through 1985, a full generation of starting pitchers, that we have deemed unsuitable for the Hall of Fame. Obviously, no pitcher from that generation produced obvious Hall of Fame numbers. Morris is the only one who has even come close, and the case for him can't be said to rest easily in the statistics. One would believe that our great nation produced a crop of complete pitching deadbeats in the birth years 1952 through 1965. And it is true that in the 1980s, managers and pitching coaches began complaining about a shortage of quality pitchers.

Perhaps, though, that shortage arose not so much from limited supply as from heightened demand, because managers of baseball teams in those years became increasingly risk-aversive, just like the managers of everything else across the country. Unlike the manager of just about anything else, though, the baseball manager's risk is very heavily scrutinized in public. Indeed, the rapid-fire media landscape taking shape in the last 40 years has magnified and dramatized the baseball manager's risk beyond any degree to which ordinary business elites could hope or fear. Thus, the aversion to risk, the leaving of nothing to chance, so commonplace across the American managerial class, is intensified in the case of the baseball manager. (Football coaches are an even more obvious case, which is why quarterbacks never call plays anymore.)

By the early 1980s, the ultimate baseball manager risk averter emerged, the relief closer, who removes from the manager any responsibility for what happens in the decisive ninth inning. But why stop there? After all, it is a risky move to face the best left-handed hitters in key situations without a left-handed reliever. Best to add a left-handed reliever or two to the mix. Along with that, everyone knows that the easiest second guess against a manager is for leaving the starting pitcher in for too long. The starter could be going along great, then he suddenly gives up a couple runs on bouncers, rollers and bloopers to fall behind. It's not the pitcher's fault, and it's not the manager's, either, but the manager will surely catch hell for it. If, in a similar case, the pitcher survives the rough patch for a complete-game victory, all of the glory will go to him, and none will go to the manager for knowing and trusting his guy. Anyway, we almost never get to see that. There's nothing in it for the manager. He is going to make the pitching change.

In 1974, big league pitchers completed 28 percent of their starts. By 1984, that was down to 15 percent. In 1994, it was down to eight percent, then down to three percent in 2004, which is where it stood in 2012. It really can't get much lower than that. In the early 1980s, it was common for a baseball team to carry 10 pitchers. By the early 1990s, it became common to carry 12, and the only reason it has stayed there is because you really do need four or five guys on your bench who can pinch run, put on a glove, hit, something like that.

The risk aversive use of relief pitchers is one huge factor keeping starting pitchers from hitting Hall of Fame numbers. But there are others, and the most evident of all, which passed for a burning controversy 20 years ago, is all but ignored today. In 1973, the American League introduced the designated hitter rule. Now, the AL pitcher has no soft spot in the bottom of the opposing lineup where he can just blow his way out of trouble. The DH in the American League created unprecedented difficulties for pitchers. And that ends up meaning the broad majority of pitchers, because, during these designated hitter years, we've also seen the launch of free agency and the removal of interleague trading restrictions, so pitchers change leagues freely.

Obviously, the general weight of productivity within the game is going to shift towards hitters and away from pitchers when we add a hitter to the lineups of half the teams or more. (During the broad majority of seasons pertinent to the 1971-85 pitching cadres, the AL had 14 clubs and the NL had 12.) Just from following as much baseball research as one could reasonably expect of a hardcore fan, it's not obvious that the shift of this weight has ever been quantified, and it appears to not have been sufficiently accounted for in the Hall of Fame votes.

But there's got to be something to it. When we're leaving 15 years of starting pitchers out of the Hall of Fame, we need to ask ourselves what's wrong with this picture. The guess here is that the designated hitter and management's turn to relief pitching have made it extraordinarily difficult for pitchers who spend significant portions of their careers in the American League to reach the old Hall of Fame targets. It's just harder than ever for starters, and it's going to get worse as we consider starters from the offensively bloated years of unchecked steroid use.

Many would, and should, protest that the 1930s were, in fact, the days of the highest scoring in big league baseball before steroids entered the game. But a good scoring environment is not the same thing as a tough pitching environment. The American League ERA in the 1930s ran from 4.28 to 5.04, with a midpoint of 4.66. The NL ran an ERA of 4.97 in 1930, but from 1931 to 1939 the low was 3.34 and the high was 4.06, putting the NL midpoint between extremes for the decade at 4.15. But it was still possible for good pitchers to work through lineups successfully and consistently in both leagues, and have long careers, in part because there was always a way out at the bottom of the lineup.

Lefty Grove, pitching for the Philadelphia Athletics and Boston Red Sox, won seven American League ERA titles just in the 1930s. Lefty Gomez, pitching for the New York Yankees, won two of the other three. Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants and Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals dominated the NL in the 1930s. All four are in the Hall of Fame. They are clearly the best pitchers of the 1930s.

The 1971-85 generation produced no pitchers of that achievement. The best it could do is Jack Morris, who is, statistically, more along the lines of Ted Lyons and Red Ruffing, the other two pitchers of the 1930s who are in the Hall. It is often noted, in opposition to the Morris candidacy, that his induction would give him the highest ERA in the Hall of Fame at 3.90, surpassing Ruffing (3.80) and Lyons (3.67). But putting Ruffing and Lyons into the Hall really amounts to a recognition that the times were tough on ERAs. That same understanding would have to inform a case for Jack Morris.

We might point to a time in history, a specific, separable slice of the American League that starts in 1977, when the league expanded to 14 teams with new franchises in Seattle and Toronto, until the players' strike in 1994, the year before the first wild card playoffs. It happens that the career of Jack Morris spans precisely those years, all of which he spent in the AL, and he remains, in many respects, the definitive player of that league in that time.

It might be hard for younger fans to grasp how truly separate and different these two leagues were before Bud Selig homogenized everything in the late 1990s and almost every club moved into a new stadium during the last 20 years. These two leagues were different in every way, except they both played a game called baseball, and even that game was substantially different. Each league had its own president and administrative staff, each league had its own set of umpires (who called different strike zones because they took different positions behind the catcher), each league had its own method for scheduling the season (the AL balanced the schedule and the NL played more within the divisions), and each league had its own style of play.

The AL was slow-footed sluggers in pill box ball parks with grass fields. Junk ballers prospered in the AL because they could keep it in the park. The NL was foot speed and power pitching to the distant walls of multi-purpose stadiums with artificial turf. It's not just that there was more incentive to run in the NL. It was absolutely necessary. It also was understood that if you had an assignment in the AL or NL, either way, you were walking into a whole different culture. (The NL guys tended to be solid and professional, while the AL guys tended to be narcissistic and precious.) The two leagues never saw each other except for spring training, the All-Star Game, the World Series and the winter meetings. Oh, and the AL had that damned DH.

So, one wants to be very careful about comparing players across the two leagues from those times, because they were barely playing the same game. Case in point (on another Hall of Fame issue): For about the first ten years of their careers, Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines were practically the same guy, but Henderson’s running game stood out as an anomaly in the AL, while Raines’s running game made him more like first among equals in the NL.

We do have pitchers in the Hall of Fame who worked those years, and exactly none of them can be said to have built his Hall of Fame case on his work against the DH. Blyleven worked six seasons in his 20s without ever facing a DH. He certainly can't be said to have built his case on his later work in the 1980s. Seaver never saw a DH until very late in his career with the White Sox and the Red Sox. Nolan Ryan pitched for 27 years and only had to worry about the DH for 12 of them. Don Sutton pitched for 23 years, five of them, late in his career, in the AL.

Steve Carlton lasted for 24 years, the first 21 of them in the National League, where he took 95 percent of his career starts. Catfish Hunter spent his entire career in the AL -- eight years and 115 wins without the DH and seven years and 109 wins with it. Ferguson Jenkins pitched seven of his 19 seasons in the DH-era American League, but he made his case during his earlier seasons with the Chicago Cubs. Jim Palmer and Blyleven are the only Hall of Fame pitchers who worked the majority of their careers against the DH. And Palmer won 100 games before the DH showed up. Pre-DH, Palmer's 2.72 ERA gave him an ERA-plus of 125. Post-DH, his ERA rose to 2.93, and that made his ERA-plus even better, 126.

Phil Niekro lasted 24 years with his knuckleball, and he never saw a DH until he was 45 years old. Gaylord Perry lasted for 22 years with his spit ball, but only faced the DH in eight of them.

We have some other guys coming up the ballot, the new generation of pitchers that debuted in the mid-1980s, and they follow the same pattern. Not one of the slam dunk guys is an American Leaguer through and through. Chemical Clemens would be a slam dunk guy, of course, and he spent only three of his 24 years in the NL. But we also believe now that the second half of his career was hatched in a laboratory. Maddux will go in on the first try for 23 seasons of greatness, every one of them in the National League. Tom Glavine spent his whole 22 years in the NL. John Smoltz made 723 big league appearances -- 715 of them in the National League. Curt Schilling will never be forgotten for helping to break the Curse of the Bambino, but it already has been forgotten that he spent 13 of his 20 years in the NL. In a similar vein, Pedro Martinez pitched for 18 years, and who knows if he would have lasted that long if he had spent more than seven of them in the AL? Randy Johnson worked for 10 of his 22 years in the National League.

Then we come to Mike Mussina, who raises the same kinds of questions as Morris. Mussina spent his entire career in the American League, and what do you know? He couldn't last 20 years, couldn't get to 300 wins. He and Morris, both finished after 18 years, count for survivors in that American League environment. By the rate stats, we would have to say the best exclusively American League starting pitchers during the Morris years were Dave Stieb and Ron Guidry. But Stieb lasted only 15 years, and he stretched it hard to get there. Guidry was done after 14 years. A couple of other excellent pitchers from the time, Bret Saberhagen and Frank Viola, each pitched 12 years in the AL. But Saberhagen spent five or six years tuning over every rock to reach 16 big league seasons, and Viola hung on tight for three years to reach 15 big league seasons.

Pitchers just do not last in the American League. We should not be one bit surprised by this. Facing a DH instead of a pitcher every day is tantamount to taking a little more than ten percent off of one's career. The difference does not arise for relief pitchers, obviously, because they never face the pitcher, anyway. But it is deadly for American League starting pitchers.

It would behoove us, one believes, to reconsider how we look at American League starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame voting. The way we're voting right now, what we're saying is this: "If you're a starting pitcher and you spend your entire career in the American League, you can forget about the Hall of Fame. Even if you are good enough, you won't last long enough to reach the numbers."

That is surely not good news for the American League.