The Unfounded BBWAA Love for Jack Morris

Jack Morris once again failed to gain entrance to Cooperstown today. He finished with 53.5% of the vote, about 150 shy of admission. He probably won't make the jump in one year, and the ballot gets overloaded in 2013 and his last year of 2014, so he's probably going to become a VC hopeful.

Still, Morris finished with the 4th most votes of anyone on the ballot finishing ahead of the far more deserving: Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, Edgar Martinez, Alan Trammell, Larry Walker, and Kevin Brown among others.

Brown is an interesting case because he got less than 5% of the vote making him a one-and-done player. But if you look at it, Brown was a vastly superior pitcher to Morris. Lets look at it, shall we?

Brown threw 3256.1 innings with a 3.28 ERA, 1.22 WHIP, 901 walks, and 2397 strikeouts for a 64.8 WAR and a 127 ERA+. Morris threw 3824.0 innings with a 3.90 ERA, 1.30 WHIP, 1390 walks, and 2478 strikeouts for a 39.3 WAR and a 105 ERA+threw d. In order for Brown to match Morris's innings, ERA, strikeouts, and walks, he would need to make a comeback and throw 568 innings with a 7.48 ERA, walk 489 and only strikeout 81. He would have to be pretty damn awful. Morris also put up lesser stats while pitching in a much easier era. I have tried to find a good article defending Morris, but the best may be Jayson Stark's piece:

"if we look back on Morris' career, it sure looks as though the teams he pitched for, and the people he played with and against, were trying to tell us something.

This man started on Opening Day 14 years in a row (1980 to 1993) -- for three different teams. The only pitcher to start more openers than that since World War II was Tom Seaver (16). Just real aces are allowed to do that. Don't you think?"

He goes on to say that Morris started 3 all star games, and 6 playoff series game ones. His argument seems to be that since Morris's teams/peers viewed him as the man, that he must have really been that good. This is akin to people basing their vote on past Cy Young/MVP/Gold Glove results which are obviously flawed. Yet, this is the BEST argument I've found for Morris. Morris's streak of opening days began in 1980, mostly due to a lack of options. He had a solid, but not spectacular 1979 and was clearly the best starter the Tigers had. Over the next 11 seasons with Detroit, while he did nothing to lose his role as opening day starter, he also didn't do a whole lot to cement the role. The Tigers just didn't ever have anybody jump up and take it from him especially after a great postseason in 1984 when he helped lead the Tigers to a World Series title. After his time with the Tigers, he was a veteran who would have been unhappy with not getting the ball on opening day. Even so, this is not a good way to judge his Hall of Fame merits.

Some writers even had the audacity to vote for Morris over Bert Blyleven. Jon Heyman was one of these. Like Stark, I respect Heyman as a writer. He is great at getting inside information and reporting it. But I flat out disagree with him here. His argument is basically that Morris was perceived as great while he was playing, but Bert was not. While he doesn't come out and say it, his arguments are largely predicated on the flawed statistic of pitchers wins. He talks about pitching to the score and how Blyleven "didn't win all that many more games than he lost".

To me, you either have to have great career totals or several great individual seasons. Preferably both. Morris has neither and thus Heyman champs his career impact, but does not go into career totals or individual seasons. With the exception of the 1984 and 1991 postseasons, Morris was never elite for a distinguished period of time, nor was he good-to-great for a long enough time to build up great career totals. Again, we can't put guys in the Hall of Fame for having a great run or two in the postseason. That's what postseason awards are for. No matter how much you were in awe with game 7 of the 1991 series, it does not make Morris a Hall of Famer.