Which criteria might that be? The “gee, he won 20 games, he must be great” standard? Trammell was a far better shortsop than Morris was a pitcher. His inclusion is a joke.
Kevin Brown could be reconsidered by one of those committees as well. Very underrated, stats compare well to quite a few lower-tier HoFers.
Sounds right. Morris doesn’t meet the standard for any of those.
ETA: I should have said Morris doesn’t make the grade on the first two, which renders the others irrelevant.
I have to agree that Jack Morris does not belong in the HOF. I like the guy, but his stats are very pedestrian. Career ERA+ of 105. That is about as average as it gets. No Cy Young Awards, not even a runner up. There a heck of a lot of pitchers of that era that look like HOFers if Morris is the bar.
Elvis:
All those are good points, I was simply responding from the standpoint of roster composition, which is where you were coming from. An MLB roster split 50-50 between pitchers and position players has 8 or 9 position players who are good enough to be full-time starters, plus only 4-5 scrubs, while the pitching half is 5 pitchers good enough to be in a regular rotation (and only the first and maybe the second are good enough to not be adequately replaced by a minor leaguer if necessary) and 1 or maybe 2 who are good enough to reliably dazzle for an inning a game, which leaves fully 50-75% of the pitching half of the roster as scrubs.
Not the first time this subject has been discussed here, but at least it’s the last. I do have to wonder, though, what you think all those baseball insiders on the committee could have been thinking, since any random fan is better informed. 
cm, to continue the thought, if almost all the good pitchers are starters: If a position player gets 4 or 5 times as much opportunity to excel as a starting pitcher (or more, considering that CG’s are unusual), shouldn’t a pitcher have 8/4 or 8/5 or more times as much chance to be on the ballot as a position player?
Even today starting pitchers perform more than position players. They may play in fewer games, but they perform far more in those games than position players do.
In 2017, 29 starting pitchers faced at least 780 batters. No batter in the history of the major leagues has had 780 plate appearances in a season.
Okay, so are pitchers underrepresented on the HOF ballot, and among inductees?
Elvis:
I don’t think so - voters don’t compare pitchers to position players, they compare them to other pitchers. The ones who advance on the Hall of Fame ballot (pretty much anyone gets ON the ballot, if they’d been in the majors long enough), like the position players, are those who stood out head-and-shoulders among their own kind.
Since these committees made up of “insiders” also enshrined Rube Marquard, Bill Mazerowski and Phil Rizzuto, I hardly find that to be a compelling argument.
Yes, I’m aware that the candidacy of Morris has been discussed on this board before. I’ve yet to see a logical case made for him to be counted among the best. I guess I’m not going to, either.
Blank Slate:
From an outsider’s perspective, I agree. But if a committee that includes George Brett, Rod Carew, Dave Winfield and Robin Yount (and it’s not possible that none of these four voted for Morris), four Hall-of-Fame level hitters who faced Morris for a reasonable stretch of playing time, feel that he was a Hall-of-Fame level opponent on the mound, I find it difficult to argue the point.
That’s a solid ex post facto argument, even if the counter-argument is cronyism trumping unbiased judgement.
I’d like to hear a statistics based case for a guy whose 1.78 SO/W was 479th all-time and who had the same OPS+ as Denny Neagle.
What happens with the next panel? Or as Jay Jaffe puts it:
Being good at baseball doesn’t make one good at analyzing baseball.
The whole process undermines the writers vote. You can argue Trammell deserved a fairer shake, but Jack Morris’s case was absolutely heard, and the writers decided he fell short. There is no new information or changing sentiment here. That a small group can override that once again lowers the hall’s standards.
Also, you can’t seriously argue Mike Mussina wasn’t hall worthy now. There is just about nothing Morris was better at Mussina then and that includes postseason pitcher.
Hawkeyeop:
No, but if you’ve batted in major league baseball for a significant period of time, and there was a select few pitchers who you always felt were guys you hated to face, that feeling holds more weight if you were good at hitting baseballs in general against average pitchers than if you were bad at hitting baseballs against all pitchers.
It’s not “analysis.” By objective, dispassionate numbers, Jack Morris falls well short of Hall of Fame standards. But I’m willing to give voice to those who’ve stood in a batter’s box, looked sixty feet six inches in front of them, and said “Oh, crap, it’s him.”
How? They both got the same 15 years on the ballot, 13 of those years overlapping, so their cases were considered by pretty much the exact same voting bodies, with similarly analytic fan communities and media publishing pieces on their worthiness. I’m not saying Trammell isn’t more worthy than Morris, but certainly his case was no less heard than Morrris’s.
I think so.
If my count is correct pitchers represent 30.7% of all players who are in the Hall of Fame primarily for accomplishments on the field as major leaguers.
The number of pitchers on the ballot in any given year is somewhere between 20 and 30 percent.
Pitchers shouldn’t be half the total, but 30 percent is way too low, it seems to me.
ETA: Having said that, if you put in every pitcher better than Jack Morris, you’d have too many pitchers. Just skipping by a lot of guys with better analytical numbers, Andy Pettite is a no-brainer if Jack Morris is in. Pettite won more games, lost fewer, had a better ERA, and has a postseason resume as impressive as anyone.
I saw this chart on Twitter last week. I thought it was fascinating, and fit in pretty well with the conversation going on. Not only are pitchers a little behind in representation, the modern era as a whole is. Now, things like Veteran Committee inductees and things drive up the population of older generations being represented, but I think that we tend to view current players with a bias towards our heroes of old.
Who still alive has Freddie Lindstrom as a hero? Guys like Alan Trammell ARE our heroes of old. The damage was done long ago. The guys who elected Chick Hafey just blew it.
So is it too strict now, or was it too lenient before? PEDs have obviously had a pretty significant impact on guys whose careers started in the 80s and 90s, too.
The PED thing is specifically too strict. It’s just silly to leave out Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, but they’ll be in.
I think it clear that they were much too liberal in the past, just because I can rather easily name a whole bunch of really idiotic selections. Chick Hafey wasn’t as good a player as Shawn Green, Travis Jackson wasn’t nearly as good as Omar Vizquel, and Jim Bototmley wasn’t half the player Fred McGriff was. One could go on.
You could argue that today’s selections are too strict beyond the really silly PED exclusions but I think it’s just normal to have a backlog of players, and it will eventually sort itself out and they’ll get Mike Mussina and Edgar Martinez in there, and some committee will name a few overlooked guys. What I cannot help but notice is that the Hall inducts two or three guys a year. Leaving out non-players:
2018: Morris, Trammell, plus BBWAA inductions
2017: Bagwell, Raines, Rodriguez
2016: Griffey, Piazza
2015: Biggio, Randy Johnson, Pedro, Smoltz
2014: Glavine, Maddux, Thomas, Torre
It drops off a little after that but this strikes me as being a pretty correct clip of inductions. Historically the Hall of Fame has enshrined about two men per year of modern baseball, which kinda makes sense to me - maybe it’s on the low end. In the last while they’re averaging about four inductions a year, most aside from Morris very solid ones, which to me seems consistent with both keeping up with history and getting at the backlog.