It's Not The Hall of Very Good

With the addition of Andre Dawson and Jim Rice, Cooperstown's transition to the "Hall of Very Good" is in full swing. However, there may still be time to reverse the trend. We need to return to the days where only the truly elite players get the honor of being called Hall of Famers.

My general requirements for Hall of Fame induction are a career peak that landed the player in the top five for multiple years, elite overall stats, and longevity. Obviously, there are balancing tests that also apply, but in the broadest sense, those are my criteria.

The recent retirement of Andy Pettitte, and subsequent HoF arguments being presented for him, has given us a chance to begin returning to the elite standard. Pettitte had a very good career, but it was far from elite. Through 16 seasons, Pettitte was a top 10 pitcher three times. He finished in the top 5 once. That in itself shows that Pettitte lacks the career peak necessary to be considered elite. As you can see in the table below, his career stats are also far from elite.

	Innings	ERA	FIP	K/9	BB/9	WHIP	WAR
Andy Pettitte	3055.1	3.88	3.75	6.63	2.83	1.36	66.9
Kevin Appier	2595.1	3.74	3.81	6.91	3.24	1.29	55.2
Kevin Brown	3256.1	3.28	3.33	6.62	2.49	1.22	77.2
Mike Mussina	3562.2	3.68	3.57	7.11	1.98	1.19	85.6
Curt Schilling	3261	3.46	3.23	8.60	1.96	1.14	86.1

The important to focus on in this table is Kevin Brown's career. Brown failed to gain enough votes to make the Hall, and he is now off the ballot. Notice that Brown's stats are much better across the board (minus the .01 difference in K/9), and to add to that, Brown gave up the fewest HRs of any pitcher with 3000 innings in the last 50 years. If Kevin Brown isn't good enough to be a Hall of Famer, Andy Pettitte sure as hell isn't.

Another interesting comparison is Kevin Appier. While obviously not equal to Pettitte, Appier does come pretty close. Have you ever heard a Hall of Fame argument in favor of Appier? Exactly.

Hopefully this table will also put to bed the comparisons between Pettitte and Schilling/Mussina. As Keith Law would say, one of these things is not like the other.

Pettitte supporters have managed to hang their hopes on his postseason success. They claim that his stats in the playoffs give his career enough of a bump to earn an induction. Are they really that impressive? Take a look at the table below.

	Innings	ERA	FIP	K/9	BB/9	WHIP	WAR
Career	3055.1	3.88	3.75	6.63	2.83	1.36	66.9
Playoffs	263	3.83	4.17	5.92	2.46	1.30

Most baseball statisticians don't consider playoff performance when looking at Hall of Fame candidates because of sample size issues. The vast majority of players don't play enough postseason games to provide a sample large enough to draw any conclusions about their performance. The prevailing sabremetric theory is that postseason performance will mirror the rest of a player's career when his postseason sample size approaches a full season's worth of stats. That would be around 162 games for hitters and 34-36 starts for pitchers. Of course, there are still issues with that sample because it would be a seasons worth of stats accumulated over ten to fifteen seasons. For this discussion, we'll assume that the sample size is acceptable in Pettitte's case.

Andy Pettitte seems to be the perfect example because he has reached a season's worth of starts in the playoffs with 42. He has an acceptable sample of starts, and his postseason stats are remarkably similar to his career numbers. So, if his career numbers weren't elite, why would his postseason numbers be any different? The answer is that they aren't. He was basically the same pitcher in the playoffs as he was in the regular season. Not surprisingly, Pettitte supporters rely on pitcher wins and World Series rings to prove his case. Of course, both of those are measures of his team's performance and thus, useless when talking about his Hall of Fame credentials. Pettitte was lucky enough to have been on a team that was good enough to consistently make the playoffs, and he has the bulk stats to prove it. Unfortunately for him, that's the entirety of the argument in his support. His actual playoff performance isn't elite, and definitely isn't enough to bump his overall career performance into Hall of Fame territory.