Hall of Fame Mock Ballots

Okay I checked. Verlander has 262 wins, so even though he'll be 42 next year he should make 270. Next is Scherzer with 216 at age 39 (40 next year) and Kershaw with 212 at age 36, but those guys are constantly getting injured these days and I can't see them getting there. Then you drop down to Gerrit Cole with 153 at age 33. He may well be the last pitcher to ever win 200 games, but 270 seems like a real stretch the way the game is played now.

Taking off my Yankee hat, I guess I'm the lone Rolen vote. I think they are fairly comparable but Nettles had the advantage of playing in the post season more which helped his reputation since he had some really remarkable performances. Overall though, Rolen has the higher WAR, OPS, BA. Nettles is known for his glove but so was Rolens who actually won more GGs and made more allstar appearences. He was also ROY. Nettles did hit more HRs. If Rolen would have played in pinstripes I bet we would have appreciated him as much as we do Nettles.

       There is long, detailed conversatiion waiting for us in the offseaon exploring how pitchers are deployed.  The changes in baseball philosophy have had a major impact on win totals.  Even an elite starter like Cole or Rodon is easily replaced in the 5th inning. In my youth that would have been the backpage headline of a New York tabloid !  I am not clear why today's pitchers cannot log more innings. Is it pitch selection ?   A tighter strikezone ?  The emphasis on veloity ? Spin rates ?   Are hitters better prepared ?   
       I do know that fewer and fewer pitchrs will approach the levels that starting pitchers once did. This season only 4 players logged at least 200 innings. A decase ago that number was 33.  It is hard to get a win when you leave the game in 6th !   That gives us something to discuss.   

I'm always up for that conversation! The diminution of the role of the starting pitcher is one of my major complaints about the direction of the game. I suppose it's more "efficient" to have a starter go all-out for four or five innings (the number keeps dropping) and then cycle through four or five anonymous, nearly interchangeable flamethrowers most of whom will never be remembered by baseball fans. Go through 30 pitchers a year, 20 of them spend time on the IL. Even if this sad soulless formula is in some way more productive -- and I'm not certain it is since it results in being dependent on so many inferior pitchers being used -- it still drains the life out of an enormous component of the game. I'd much rather watch Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson dueling for nine innings than two bulk guys give three or four innings and then a procession of unknowns.

I remember when it used to be considered an insult to call a guy a seven-inning pitcher.

Thanks for the kind words, pipps.

Regarding Collins' defensive play, I had not recalled that when I wrote about him. I pulled out my original edition of the The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, and sure enough, James had written in detail about Collins' remarkable defense, especially on bunt plays. I had forgotten that about him, so thank you for reminding me. Likewise, I had confused Kell with Ernie Harwell, who was the long-time Tigers' play-by-play men on radio (actually, he and Kell worked in radio a few years, then Kell took a year off). Kell came back to the the Tigers' TV broadcaster for many years, while Harwell stayed on radio. The long time Pirates radio play by play men for almost all this period were Bob Prince, and after he retired, Lanny Frattere. 

As for the SBS book; it's possible we're both right. It might have been Baseball's Best when you were a kid and maybe mine was a later edition re-titled The Best in Baseball. But it did have black-and-white portraits of the players, just like yours did. Or maybe I'm remembering the title incorrectly.

In my opinion, the trend IS caused by the desire for efficiency, fewer runs allowed for the game, and fewer big HRs. The mechanism forcing this most recent drop in complete games was the swing-angle change trend that began 10 years ago or so with players like Justin Turner turning their careers around. Hitters started swinging for power with every swing, and with the decline of PED use, home-run hitting and strikeouts increased again.

The overall trend since almost the beginning of major league baseball that starters have gone from complete games in almost every start, to maybe 10 or 20 complete games, total, in a season in each league, accelerated. Even in the 1990's, league leaders in complete games regularly pitched 10-15 complete games in a season. The hitting explosion due to PED use knocked those leaders in the 5-9 range in the 2000s, but PEDs were taken out of the game, and the swing-angle change put the power back in. Pitchers and pitching coaches found a game-wrecking HR could now occur on any at bat. Their counter-move was to train pitchers to throw as hard as they could for as long as they could and increase spin and movement on breaking pitches and fastballs, to prevent the barreling contact that created the big home runs. This put significantly more strain on the pitching arm. Aside from causing the avalanche in arm injuries, (because pitching arms, even well-trained ones, weren't meant to the throw that hard on every fastball), because of the constant threat of the big HR, most pitchers couldn't afford to save some stuff for a pinch and most terms agreed with this strategic adjustment. Pitchers with naturally elite stuff, like Verlander could afford to pitch that way, but most starters couldn't. Cole learned to save top fastball velocity for critical spots from Verlander, and has tried to teach it to Rondon this year with some success. But unlike decades long past, saving stuff for the key situations is for getting through the 6th and the 7th, and not the 8th and 9th, as Christy Mathewson described in some detail in his book on pitching, Pitching in a Pinch.

In order to squeeze 13 pitchers (including 8 relievers) onto a pitching staff, teams have chosen to go to rosters with multiple players who can play multiple positions rather than a fixed lineup and 5-6 bench players with specific roles. This gives them enough relievers to have a chance of soaking up the extra innings from an average start of 5.2 innings.  (That's 5.2, not 5 2/3 innings.) Each pitch has become that much more important, and that requires pitchers to throw harder, with sharper breaking stuff, and also to try to learn to throw and command 5, 6, 7, and 8 pitches instead of 3 or 4, as they used to when we were younger. Back then, a 5-pitch assortment was thought to be too big a variety; pitchers didn't wat to get beat on their 4th- or 5th-best, much less a 7th- or 8th-best. So a lot of starters aren't trained to face a batting order a 3rd time with sufficiently good stuff to not get clobbered and knocked out. And if 7 innings is considered a "deep start" nowadays, and needs usually 2 relievers to close it out, then it follows that complete games are a near-impossibility. And so they are, the last 5 years or so. 1 or 2 complete games have becomes the yearly league-leading total, and the only place left to go to is absolute zero.

Today’s game is primarily based on “handedness”. It’s actually sort of simple…