Well, there’s your problem, right there. I mean, I can barely - just barely - count on my own memory when it comes to remembering seven items on a grocery list dictated by my wife when I left the house this morning. Trying to use “what I remember” about a baseball player who retired more than a decade ago as a measure of how good that player was relative to other players who retired more than a decade ago is a fool’s errand, especially in a context as emotional as this.
To put it in more personal terms: in a purely subjective sense I remember Keith Hernandez as the greatest player who ever lived. I remember him as the clutchest hitter there ever was, the best defensive first baseman of all time, an RBI machine, a career .300 hitter, and a World Series hero for my favorite baseball team. Some of those things, it turns out, were true; some were not. But for an eight-year-old kid learning about baseball as a Mets fan in the mid-1980’s, Mex was the greatest - better than Straw, better than Doc, and certainly better than that cheap imitation you guys were admiring over in the Bronx. Keith Hernandez is a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer in the Hall That Exists Entirely in My Own Memory and Childhood Imagination, and that has a value and it’s real, and I don’t want to denigrate it or diminish it.
But when we establish a Hall of Fame in the real world, a Hall of Fame for all fans, relying on subjective impressions isn’t good enough, because subjective impressions are usually wrong. Keith Hernandez only hit .296 for his career, and drove in 100 runs only once. He was an on-base machine without real first-baseman home run power. But I saw fifteen or twenty Mets games in person between 1984 and 1988, and I remember a couple of well-timed line-drive home runs and a few runners thrown out at third on attempted sacrifice bunts; I can’t remember every time Hernandez came up to bat in 17 years.
Similarly, you remember Tommy John as a great pitcher who had “a simple thing like excellence,” and Bert Blyleven as a good pitcher who did not. But you’re a Yankees fan, and the Yankees are a famous team, and I’ll hazard a guess that you saw a lot more of Tommy John than you did of Bert Blyleven, so you’d maybe have to say that your memory is limited in reliability.
So we take the results of every single game that either man pitched, which are in and of themselves nothing more mystical than the outcome of every at-bat during which he was the pitcher, and we compile them, and we look at them. And then we can say things, objectively, about these pitchers free of the influence of unreliable memory.
For instance, you say this:
I submit that this statement is factually untrue.
Tommy John’s best season was probably 1968, when he was 10-5 with an ERA of 1.98 and an ERA+ of 161 in 177.3 innings. Blyleven’s best was 1973, when he was 20-17 with an ERA of 2.52 and an ERA+ of 158 in 325 (!!!) innings. John was a bit more effective when he pitched, but Blyleven pitched nearly twice as many innings so I’m calling it a draw.
So there’s the “one year” for each of them. Now let’s look at those years of excellence.
Tommy John’s next five best years, as measured by ERA+ (and excluding seasons where he pitched fewer than 100 innings):
1977 - (20-7, 220 innings, 2.78 ERA, 138 ERA+, 123K/55BB, 11 CG, 3 SHO)
1979 - (21-9, 276 innings, 2.96 ERA, 137 ERA+, 111K/66BB, 17 CG, 3 SHO)
1981 - (9-8, 140 innings, 2.63 ERA, 135 ERA+, 50K/39BB, 7 CG, 0 SHO)
1974 - (13-3, 153 innings, 2.59 ERA, 132 ERA+, 78K/42BB, 5 CG, 3 SHO)
1967 - (10-13, 178 innings, 2.47 ERA, 121 ERA+, 110K/47BB, 9 CG, 6 SHO)
These were Tommy John’s “years of excellence,” the years in which he was at his best. Now Blyleven’s five best years, not including his 1973.
1977 - (14-12, 235 innings, 2.72 ERA, 151 ERA+, 182K/89BB, 15 CG, 5 SHO)
1984 - (19-7, 245 innings, 2.87 ERA, 144 ERA+, 170K/74BB, 12 CG, 4 SHO)
1974 - (17-17, 281 innings, 2.66 ERA, 142 ERA+, 249K/77BB, 19 CG, 3 SHO)
1989 - (17-5, 241 innings, 2.73ERA, 140 ERA+, 131K/44 BB, 8 CG, 5 SHO)
1985 - (17-16, 294 innings, 3.16 ERA, 134 ERA+, 206K/75BB, 24 CG, 5 SHO)
So leaving aside the peak years of each pitcher, Blyleven’s 1977 was clearly better than John’s 1977. Blyleven’s 1984 was roughly comparable to John’s 1979, but I’ll give the slight edge to Tommy John. But there is absolutely no argument that Bert Blyleven was significantly better in 1974, 1989, and 1985 than Tommy John was in 1981, 1974, and 1967, respectively. So of their six best years, Blyleven was significantly better than John in four, roughly equal in one, and slightly worse in one.
How then can you justify characterizing Tommy John’s best years as “years of excellence” but refuse to credit Blyleven for the same?
I mean, those statistics mean things. Look at all those shutouts - those are marks of dominance in individual games. Look at all those innings; those suggest that his excellence was prolonged and sustainable, not the result of a few flukey years. All those strikeouts!
Bert Blyleven is a Hall-of-Famer.
At first glance and without really digging into the numbers, I’d say Blyleven eats Jim Kaat’s lunch (Tommy John does, too). Kaat seems to me to be a guy with three great years who was otherwise a somewhat but not dramatically above average starter for 22 years.