Bert Blyleven - Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Baseball writers are voting on who gets into Valhalla and Blyleven is busy banging the drum of his candidacy as loudly as possible.

Again.

For the 13th time.

Now, I don't want to be mean, but really...what do we know about Bert Blyleven now that we didn't know when his career ended? What possible argument can he make now that he hasn't made previously? By what statistical measure can he finally persuade the writers (and, by extension, the readers) that he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown?

I would like to present my own measuring tool for Hall-of-Fame eligibility, and it sez so right here that it is foolproof.

A Hall of Fame player will be precocious and prodigious, and will produce for longevity. That's as close as I get to alliteration, but the method is sound, as you will see.

The first leg of a Hall of Fame player's journey is precocity. No one "develops" into a great player. Greatness is evident right away, in startling measure. Greatness stands out in bas-relief from being merely above average. This is inexact, Mr. Sabrmetrician, but a great player looks like a great player right away. Let me put it another way: Derrick Lee, or Ryan Howard? Adam Dunn, or Albert Pujols? This is not to denigrate either Lee or Dunn, because both are above-average players. But you stop what you're doing to watch a Ryan Howard at-bat; you put your beer down when Albert Pujols steps into the box.

But, since we're talking about pitchers, let's make the comparison more germane to Bert Blyleven. Which pitcher made the bigger splash: Tom Seaver, or Bert Blyleven? For those lacking a historical frame of reference, make it Tim Lincecum or Rich Harden. Harden ain't bad, but Lincecum is something special. That's my point. Nothing about Blyleven jumps out at you as being great from the beginning.

The next leg of a Hall of Fame player's career is prodigious production. The simple fact is that great players put up great numbers, period. We remember Hank Aaron, not for the fact that he never hit 50 home runs in a season, but for the fact that he hit 40 home runs in a season so many times. We don't just remember Nolan Ryan's fastball, but we remember how many times he led the entirety of baseball in strikeouts with that fastball; we remember Randy Johnson as the only true heir to Ryan's legacy for the same reason. Great players lead their leagues in certain meaningful categories, like batting average or earned run average. I know that all the UV-deprived math-magicians out there can denigrate E.R.A. all they want; I also know that Bob Gibson posted a 1.12 E.R.A. in 1968, and I don't need an abstract mathematical formula to know that Gibby flat-out owned hitters for that season like no other pitcher before or since.

Performance-enhancing drugs have somewhat clouded the issue of prodigious performance (Brady Anderson's 50-home run season, anyone?), but only somewhat. If everyone in baseball is juicing now, Alex Rodriguez is still better than anyone else, just like if no one was juicing in the '50s, Mickey Mantle was better than anyone else. Besides, there are other reasons (the DH, bandbox parks, inflated foul territories, armored batters, etc.) for numbers going up or going down. My point is that a great player will outproduce anyone he's playing against, and that his numbers will put him into that hypothetical discussion with players from another era.

This is what stands out about Blyleven's career: nothing. Not a stinkin' thing. Everything about him screams "third man in the rotation." Unlike your average HOF'er, Blyleven's career isn't littered with bold black numbers indicating leading his league or setting a record. To be sure, he was pretty good for a pretty long time...but we call it the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Pretty Good...

...which leads me to the last leg of my argument: longevity. Most Hall-caliber players did what they did better than anyone else and longer than anyone else. However, longevity can also cloud the issue as much as performance-enhancing drugs can. What if a pretty good player (Craig Biggio, anyone?) hangs around long enough to get a meaningful career achievement?

Much of what Blyleven accomplished was due to his rather unnatural longevity, and this is perhaps the only part of his resume that says Hall-caliber. Blyleven was as good as he was ever going to get after his second season, but he stayed that way for the better part of 20 years. He was a guy that would take the ball for 30 starts a season, and usually hover somewhere around a couple of wins over or under .500 (call it 15-18 wins/losses per season), with around 230 innings of service per season in that span. He was reliable. You gave him the ball every four days and you knew your team had a shot, whether it was a 0-0 pitcher's duel or a 15-13 beer league softball score.

What you weren't going to get was utter dominance. Blyleven wasn't the guy to stop your team's losing streak in its tracks by throwng a nine-inning 2-hit shutout like Greg Maddux could. Blyleven wasn't going to blow away his era's greatest hitters with a fastball that everyone in the Kingdome knew was coming like Randy Johnson, and he wasn't going to use that pitch to lead the league in K's like the Big Unit did. Blyleven wasn't the guy for whom you juggled your rotation, just to make sure he could start Game 1, Game 4, and if necessary Game 7.

Blyleven was good, even pretty good.

But he's not a Hall of Fame player.