McGwire’s peak was 7-9 years and included two World Series rings. Yes, the PED shit was bad but that doesn’t change what happened during the rest of his career.
I can’t see any 7-9 year stretch in McGwire’s career that could be considered a “peak”. And he only has one ring, by the way - not that that should be held against him.
What do you consider McGwire’s peak? He hit 49 homers his second year and the A’s won the Series in his fourth season (that was his only ring). Then his production tailed off because of injuries, which got so bad that in '93 and '94 he hardly played at all. He had four great years from '96 to '99, then fell off again and retired after 2001.
My mistake, the A’s didn’t win in 1990.
I consider McGwire’s peak to be 1987-1990, 1992, and 1996-1999, so nine years. A few of those are clearly arguable but the man set the rookie home run record and was the first player to hit 30 home runs or more in his first four seasons. He was a machine in those early years and saying that his peak was only in the late 90s is just crazy.
I think we might just have a difference of opinion as to what someone’s “peak” means. I’ve always considered it an uninterrupted span of playing (not counting injuries or going to war).
Right, I think a peak is the continuous period when the player was at his best (like Maddux from, I don’t know, 1992 to 1998?)- with maybe a brief exception for injuries. Otherwise it’s just cherry picking the guy’s best years. McGwire had some really strong years at the beginning of his career, then a bunch of years where he didn’t do much because he was hurt, then a few outstanding years when he was healthy and juicing like a motherfuck, then he faded fast. The argument is basically that those first few seasons in Oakland and the four PEDariffic seasons in St. Louis aren’t enough to make up for the fact that the rest of his career was not all that exceptional or consumed by injuries.
Yet some players have such a “scattered” peak (call it what you will, semantics bore me), such as Steve Carlton: never had more than 1 season of more than 3.0 WAR in a row.
What WAR are you using? Baseball-Reference shows plenty of consecutive seasons over 3.0 WAR.
This thread got me wondering… With all the talk about someone like Maddux not getting everyone’s vote, i wondered if the one player in my lifetime that I thought was a unanimous choice for the hall (Roberto Clemente) was actually unanimous…
No-brainer, right? After all the baseball writers themselves waived the 5-year waiting period after he died so they could enshrine him immediately. Did he get elected unanimously? Of course not.
He received 393 of the 420 available votes, or 92% of the vote.
Seriously, there were 27 writers didn’t vote for Clemente?
Why is that? HOW is that? And how do these sanctimonious assholes defend their behavior? Why is keeping someone from being unanimously selected a source of pride for some of these guys?
Every year, I am reminded why I hate the baseball HoF voting. This thread has reminded me what a strange process it is.
But with a player like that you might be able to say that he was consistently excellent and sometimes just awesome, and Carlton had a much longer career. McGwire wasn’t consistently great. Granting that he was great in nine seasons, he was not great in six others: he wasn’t good in '91, hardly played in '93 and '94 and almost retired, was good but not amazing in '95 while missing a third of the season, and played half-seasons in '00 and '01.
Brief return to Jack Morris.
I’m already on record as saying that Morris is unworthy of the Hall, but that he’s not going to be inducted anyway, so it’s not worth worrying about.
His detractors are almost unanimously convinced that he WILL coast to victory this year, despite being rejected 14 years in a row.
One of their prime arguments is that his vote total has been increasing each year, and that practically everybody who’s gotten as many votes as Morris has eventually made it in.
To which I reply, “Yeah, but…”
Know how many additional votes Morris picked up from 2012 to 2013? Three. That IS an increase, no question, but it’s not a tsunami by any means. Moreover, he failed in a year when there was far, far less quality competition.
With FAR stronger competition this year, including a bunch of pitchers who were FAR better than Morris and a few who were at least AS good, I don’t see where he can possibly make up the difference. Maddux, Glavine and Schilling are all better choices, and even the most old-school writer knows that. And I just don’t see 4 starting pitchers getting elected in one year, especially when there are ALSO so many great position players to choose from.
There are more than 10 worthy choices this time out, but writers are always reluctant to pick too many winners in one year. If six or seven guys were elected this year, that would be a lot. I don’t see the writers putting Jack Morris in the top 6 or 7.
Incidentally, Tom Verducci weighed in on Morris’ behalf, asking “How can it be that there are NO Hall-worthy starting pitchers from Morris’ era?”
My answer: That’s the way it goes, Tom. Between the late Seventies and the early Nineties, there were loads of pitchers better than Jack Morris, any one of whom MIGHT have put up Hall of Fame numbers. It just so happens that most of them didn’t stay dominant long enough to achieve the necessary milestones.
Dwight Gooden was MUCH better than Morris, but he self-destructed with drugs before he could achieve the greatness that seemed to lie ahead of him. Bret Saberhagen and Ron Guidry had a few seasons that were MUCH better than any Morris ever had. They just didn’t have ENOUGH great seasons to make it to the Hall of Fame.
Jack Morris had MANY contemporaries who were better than he was- it just turned out that almost none of them had ENOUGH great seasons to accumulate 200 wins, 3,000 strikeouts, 50 shutouts, or any of the other magic numbers. Dwight Gooden was brilliant for a little while; Jack Morris was quite good for a LONG while. That doesn’t make him a Hall of Famer in my book.
Still, that dynamic worked for Rice and Blyleven. That last-shot effect, after the momentum of a growing vote total in the few years before, put them both in. Why are you sure it won’t happen for Morris? The guy was over 68% in his next to last year, remember.
You seem not to be of the school that says the best few players of each position of their time should be in, and should not be penalized for the way the game was played when they played it. Well, that school is a large one. So, almost no pitchers of that time didn’t get 200 wins etc.? So what? Nobody is ever going to get 511 wins anymore, either.
I don’t see how Verducci can claim that Blyleven, Clemens, Ryan, Eckersley (okay, maybe stretching the starting pitcher requirement), and Maddux (early part of his career) aren’t in Morris’ era.
Fangraphs, too. I think John must have been thinking of another pitcher.
Seriously. Jack Morris’ entire career took place from 1977-1994, so he retired the same year as Ryan, who had been pitching in the Majors for a decade by the time Morris was a rookie.
astorian:
Really? Is Tom Verducci really that dumb?
What’s Jack Morris’s “era”? 1977-1994? Steve Carlton, Jim Palmer, Tom Seaver and Bert Blyleven pitched the first part of that articifically-delineated time period. Roger Clemens (Hall-worthy but for the PED issue), Randy Johnson, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz all pitched the last half of it. With the exception of 1994 (during which Morris sucked and isn’t a year any proponent of Morris’s induction would likely mention), Nolan Ryan overlapped all of it.
Morris pitched alongside many Hall-worthy pitchers, and does not look good in comparison to them.
astorian-You don’t believe" good for an extended time=great"?
If it did, then Jim Kaat’s exclusion is criminal. But it’s not, so it’s not.
I suspect you know this already, but I think the conventional wisdom is a few writers don’t believe anyone should get in on their first try (on “principle”, or some doublespeak like that).
Does anyone believe that? I think if you break it down there’s sort of an equation at work: greatness multiplied by time. At a certain level - amazing greatness for a handful of seasons, or really great but not super-amazing for a larger number of seasons - that might be Hall-worthy. But being good for a long time is certainly valuable, but it’s not the same as being great. The idea here is that we’re talking about the very best players, so we’re talking about people who really stand out.