This is the most common error people make in assessing HoF candidates. Carlton is not barely in the HoF, he’s one of the dozen or so best pitchers ever. No one’s saying he’s at that level.
It makes as much sense as saying a 500 HR guy shouldn’t go in because Babe Ruth hit 700.
As always, any pitcher’s HoF qualifications come down to health. Every pitcher is a major injury waiting to happen.
Really? Do you think 184 wins is as difficult an achievement as 500HRs?
Do you think Rafael Palmeiro (551 and counting) will get in?
How about guys like Fred McGriff (493) or Canseco (462)?
Bagwell, Frank Thomas, Juan Gonzalez and a few others are getting close. Do any of those guys deserve the Hall?
It’s hard to imagine him consistently putting up numbers to top this year’s. So I took his numbers for the last three years in Minnesota and put 'em in a blender to come up with an average per 200 IP season. Based on the last three years, he’d average 16 wins and 231 K per 200 IP. If he averaged 200 IP per season until he’s 40, he’d end up with 283 wins and 4126 Ks. Probably good enough for the HOF, but hardly jaw-dropping. He’d be tied with Jim Kaat for 29th all-time in wins, and in fifth all-time in Ks, between Carlton and Blyleven. In case you don’t think it’s possible to put up those kind of numbers and be left out of the hall, consider Blyleven – he’s got more wins than that (287) and is currently fifth in Ks all-time, and he’s not in.
If Santana managed to average 235 IP/season until he’s forty (which is about what Clemens, Maddux, and others with that kind of success and longevity managed) and put up wins and Ks at his current rate, he’d end up with 328 wins and 4733 Ks, which would tie him with Clemens (if he retires again this year) and John Clarkson for 10th all-time in wins and put him second only to Ryan in Ks.
But that’s a whole lot of speculation to build on two half-seasons and one full season as a starter. Plenty of guys look like HOF shoe-ins two or three years into their career. Come back in ten years and we’ll talk.
It’s irrelevant. The only statistical question that has real bearing on the question is “are most players with stats comparable to Schilling already in the hall?”
There are clearly some pitchers who weren’t as good who are in; there are clearly some who were better who aren’t. Which way the balance leans is an interesting question, especially of you assume (as the OP did) that he has 2-3 more decent seasons.
But comparing him to Steve Carlton is irrelevant. More meaningful are comparisons to Hal Newhouser, Bob Lemon, Don Drysdale, Lefty Gomez and the other HoFers he will likely be passing on the win list.
FWIW, I think Palmeiro may eventually make it; 551 (+) is a lot to ignore but it will depend on the rest of the other polayers of his era; how long they can keep being productive and if they can finally win a championship. McGriff and Canseco won’t.
Not that I see how any of it has to do with Schilling.
No they are not.
The problem with this response is that there really AREN’T any players with stats comparable to Curt Schilling. And actually, one of the few pitchers who is similar to him, Dazzy Vance, is in the Hall of Fame. All the pitchers with generally similar stats were in fact not quite as good as Schilling has been… please see my earlier post on the subject.
Having said that, I have done some more research and must say that I don’t think Schilling is as good a candidate as I previously thought he was, at least up to this point. His career Win Shares now stand at 226, which is about the same as Larry Jackson, Mickey Lolich, Rick Reuschel and Bobo Newsom, and a good season behind Don Drysdale, who is often held up as a bad Hall choice. The relative shortness of his career is a big handicap at this point. If he stays healthy and pitches well for 3 more seasons he’ll be in.
And gosh, I certainly think Frank Thomas deserves the Hall. He was the best hitter in baseball for a good chunk of time. Great player.
God, I love you Rick. Let’s run off and get married.
No.
No No No.
No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No
Down this path lies madness. It’s the ‘He’s the player with the most XXX that isn’t in the hall.’ argument. And it’s a fallacy. And it’s the very definition of the slippery slope. While Schilling might go in…what about the next guy who’s almost as good? Then the guy after HIM?
Also, I feel pretty confident that we can all agree that there are players in the Hall who are undeserving.
Try these lines:
.273 38 563 149 FPct = .968
.281 28 734 29 FPct = .984
That’s two Hall of Famers there. If that’s the standard then Shawon Dunston should start polishing his speech.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying you look to see is there is any single player worse than him that’s in … Nor am I saying that if most of the people comprable to you are in, you ought definitely be in. I’m saying if you reach a point where most of the people similar to you are in then you certainly deserve serious consideration.
To ignore it is to pursue the equally fallacious line of “well, X just doesn’t seem like that kind of player.” Since the HoF has failed to define its admission criteria, IMO the only way to look at it is “Is he more like the players who are in, or more like the players that are out?”
What do you suggest?
That’s about what I thought, it’s the reason the OP stipulates he gets over 200 wins.
IMO he’s now reached a certain level of “Stardom,” and for the next 2-3 years every time he pitches, the announcers and the beat writers will be talking about him in those terms, and bringing up the sock, and it will make the impression indelible.
Interesting stat on Schilling is he’s never had more than three winning seasons in a row and he’s done that only once in 17 seasons.
He’s also never had more than three straight seasons of 200+ innings. He also did that only once in his career.
Those are interesting stats but they don’t strike me as being IMPORTANT stats. They’re statistical anomalies. Schilling may only have had three winning seasons in a row but that doesn’t strike me as being an important fact, as opposed to things like ERA or the length of his career or contributions to winning teams. I would be more interested in the fact that he has the greatest strikeout-to-walk ratio of any pitcher in the history of baseball, because that speaks to his skills. that he’s never had more than three straight winning seasons is largely a reflection of his teammates’ lack of hitting skills in 1996, 2000, and 2003.
I mean, you can dig up weird stuff like that for any Hall of Famer. Willie McCovey never managed 500 at bats in a season more than two seasons in a row. Did you know Robin Yount only went to the All-Star Game THREE TIMES in his entire career? That’s amazingly few, fewer than anyone I can think of who played in the era of All-Star games. Hell, Dave Stieb went seven times. Jesus, DEVON WHITE has been to three All-Star games. So is Robin Yount an undeserving player, or was it just kind of a fluke?
I think consistency and durability have helped several pitchers* make the Hall. As examples Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Fergie Jenkins all had fairly low winning percentages but pitched a lot of innings and consistently had winning seasons.
I mentioned Carlton winning 27 for the last place Phils earlier but someone complained I set the bar too high 
. Gaylord Perry won 24 games for Cleveland in 1972 when they scored only 3.03 runs a game. He won 21 for San Diego when they were the worst hitting team in the league.
None of them pitched for any outstanding teams (4 playoff games between the three players) but they consistently won and they consistently pitched a lot of 200+ inning seasons. So on that basis I think they are IMPORTANT stats.
BTW Jenkins only made 3 All-Star games and Perry and Niekro 5 each. I don’t think All-Star appearances carry that much weight with the BBWAA.
*With the ridiculous exception of Blyleven.
I assume “4 playoff games” is a typo. Carlton by himself started 14 playoff games.
But none of those pitchers had as good a winning percentage as Curt Schilling. I mean, if you’re going by how often these guys WON, Schilling wins more often per decision and per start than any of those guys. Schilling’s disadvantage is not in ability - per inning and per game he’s a better pitcher than any of those three men, though I grant they pitched many seasons in a day when pitchers could have more impact within a season, and Carlton has the distinction of having put up the best season a pitcher has ever had. Schilling’s big disadvantage is in the length of his career. That’s significant at this point because he’s just barely on the edge of career weight for HoF consideration, but let’s give Schilling credit where it’s due. He could pitch with any of those guys.
When you get past randomly grabbed stats like “Schilling has never had four straight winning seasons” it comes down to this:
a) Schilling’s effectiveness and skill is BETTER than the established Hall of Fame standard.
b) His CAREER LENGTH is slightly below that standard. (Yes, some HoF pitchers have had short careers, but not many.)
The issue is whether item A trumps item B.
Well, there’s clearly a factor of ‘peak seasons’ in HoF consideration by the BBWAA. Haivng a four or five year continuous run of dominance can do wonders for one’s HoF admission possibilities.
It’s sort of the argument that was made against Don Sutton several years ago. Sure, he won 300 games but the argument was made that he accomplished that not by being HUGE but by hanging around forever (23 seasons, to be exact).
Note that I’m not saying the argument is worthy…just that it’s something that pops up when a player doesn’t have that several year stretch of dominance. Barring some other factor it hurts one’s chances.
That other factor can be things like becoming a GOD like Nolan Ryan did, of course.
It’s not a typo but poor editing on my part. If you flip the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs it may be a little clearer. When I wrote " 4 playoff games between the three players" I was talking about Perry, Niekro and Jenkins.
I did say their winning % was low. But they won consistently from season to season. They won with good run support and they won with poor run support.They didn’t have the short peaks and valleys of Schilling. Perry might not been as skillful but he must have had something else that made helped him overcome his team’s weakness. Maybe he just hated losing more or one of those other “intangibles”? Who knows?
I’m not sure 17 years is just barely on the edge. Ferguson Jenkins pitched 19. Marichal 16, Gibson 17, Drysdale 14, Catfish Hunter 14, Palmer 19 are several examples.
After 17 seasons Palmer had 263 wins, Jenkins had 264, Gaylord Perry had 267. Palmer was the only one of them who pitched for consistently good teams.
Randomly grabbed? They are obvious when you take a look at his lifetime stats chart. Put his chart beside any of the guys I mentioned above and they don’t look random.
That may very well be true but is ability or skill alone enough to get a guy in or do they need to be combined with accomplishment? Ron Guidry was a very good pitcher. He probably had more skill than Perry or Niekro. His stats were very impressive…651 winning %, 170 wins, (just 14 less than Schilling in 3 less seasons), a career 3.21 ERA. Plus his killer 25-3, 1978 season. But they weren’t enough. He has about as much chance as Neurotik of making the hall.
I get criticized for saying this but IMO, considering the length of his career, Schilling’s win total is too small by Hall of Fame standards.
Well, at least one of the “intangibles” was a heck of a lot of starts, by comparison with most pitchers today. From 1966 to 1978, Perry failed to make 35 starts only twice, and his average number of starts per season during those years is somewhere around 37 or 38. He also finished around half of those starts. The same is true for Jenkins and Niekro and Marichal and Gibson and almost anyone else who was a number 1 or number 2 starter in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Starting 40 or 41 games a season wasn’t at all uncommon for those guys. Starts per season begin to decline in the mid 1970s, except for the outliers like Carlton who was the only viable option the Phillies had to put on the mound some seasons. By the mid-1980s, most of the league leaders in wins were making 34-35 starts per season, and only completing about a third of those in most cases. As is implicit in your acknowledgement of their low winning percentages, they also lost a lot of games – Perry lost between 12 and 19 games every year from 1967 to 1977, and 15 or more in a lot of those seasons. Between 1967 and 1974 Jenkins won twenty games every year except 1973. He also lost at least 12 every year, and more than that every year but two.
Those pitchers got lots of wins because they got lots of starts and lots of decisions. Which is yet another reason most of us resist using total wins as the measure of quality of a pitcher – it’s a data point, to be sure, and you don’t get to keep going out there 40 times a year if you’re not pitching reasonably well, but it skews comparisons with guys today who seldom make more than 34 starts a season and who rarely (if ever) throw a complete game.
But those guys were healthy almost all of those years. Gibson, for instance, in the peak years of his career, from 1961 to 1974, failed to make 30 starts only three times, and each of those times he made at least 24. Ditto for Hunter, who started fewer than 34 times only in his first two and last three season (he made at least 19 starts each of those years). Schilling has pitched in at least parts of 17 seasons, but he’s only made more than 30 starts 5 times, and has six seasons when he didn’t even make 20. He’s started 370 games in his 17 seasons, as opposed to 476 for Hunter in 14 seasons. That’s what people mean when they talk about his career being barely long enough to be in consideration. Right now, I agree that he’d fall just slightly short of being HOF-caliber if he retired today. With two or three more seasons comparable to his best years, however, I’d say he’d have a good shot at it. Which is what most people have been saying throughout this thread.
You keep coming back to the NUMBER OF DIFFERENT SEASONS Schilling has pitched in, which is not a meaningful way to measure how much of a career he’s had. He started his career with cups of coffee in two years, then was a relief pitcher for two, so there’s four years right off the top he can’t compile wins.
What’s more indicative how how much of a career a player has had is the number of games he’s played in, and in Schilling’s case he’s way behind the guys you’ve cited. Just look at the number of games these guys have started:
Schilling: 370 starts
Hunter: 470
Drysdale: 465
Gibson: 482
Marichal: 457
Palmer: 521
Jenkins: 594
370 starts is simply not a Hall of Fame standard of career length. As I said, there are a few Hall of Famers with fewer starts than that, but few, and the great majority have more. Schilling has about a hundred relief appearances too but most of those guys have 40 or 50, and the aggregate difference in pitching time isn’t significant.
Some of this is attributable to Schilling being injured and that would be a fair criticism, because staying healthy is part of a player’s job. But let’s not continue to pretend that he hasn’t had a shorter career. He has. Schilling wins as often as those guys do when he pitches, and continuing to insinuate that he doesn’t “consistently win” is false. If he wins a higher percentage of his starts and a higher percentage of his decisions as Ferguson Jenkins, how can you say Jenkins was a consistent winner and Schilling wasn’t? Considering the LENGTH OF HIS CAREER, measured by a meaningful standard (e.g. starts or innings pitched) his win total is just dandy by Hall of Fame standard. Schilling helps his team win games as much as any of those guys, save maybe Gibson. His one disadvantage against all of them is that he’s pitched significantly less.
Personally, I think he needs 2 more full seasons of effective pitching to be a Hall of Famer.
Guidry would be a better Hall of Fame choice than Dizzy Dean, anyway.
But even then, Schilling has pitched more games, more innings, with a better ERA than Ron Guidry.
That’s one way of looking at it and it certainly makes sense. But there is another way of looking at it that is also valid.
The pitchers also pitched much deeper into games than they do today. Conventional wisdom says that the deeper you go the less effective you are, the only time starting pitchers are still around in the late innings now is if they have a low pitch count. Pedro Martínez is a good example (and with him it’s still risky, just ask Grady).
So it can be stated two ways.
If Schilling; Martinez etc. pitched deeper into the game would their stats be as good as they are? Would their winning % be as high or their ERA as low?
But instead of asking “what if”, another way of looking at it is how did all those long innings and starts effect winning percentages and ERAs of some of the guys in RickJay’s list. They would have still been on the mound when Pedro had already showered and had his curls done.
A few examples:
Jenkins: 1970 27 CHC NL WINS 22 LOSSES 16 Starts 39 CG 24 Innings 313 ERA 3.39 WL% ** .578**…AT LEAST 2 CG LOSSES
Gaylord Perry: 1969 30 SFG NL WINS 19 LOSSES 14 Starts 39 CG 26 Innings 325 ERA 2.49 WL% **.575 ** …AT LEAST 7 CG LOSSES
Gaylord Perry and Ferguson Jenkins had more complete games than wins in their careers. Niekro had around a 90% cg/win percentage. But all of them had an ERA equal to or better than Schillings. So it could also be argued that the more starts/innings pitched made it MORE difficult to get a win.
In a 13 year period (beginning after their respective cups of coffee) Jenkins won a higher percentage of his starts. And Jenkins had more winning seasons in that time frame.
A lot of good pitchers don’t get many starts at the beginning of their careers. And Perry, Niekro and Jenkins all had seasons at the end of their careers that skewed their WL% down. Something that Schilling’s stats don’t suffer from…yet.
Several posters including you hold the opinion that Schilling needs a few more good years to make the Hall. I really can’t argue with that. But with his past inconsistencies that isn’t a sure thing.
You perhaps ought to consider only the career he’s had so far. He’s 38 and will be coming off major ankle surgery next year. It is not a given that he can return to this year’s form.