Bert Blyleven Comes Up Short Again

It's not very surprising, but Bert Blyleven missed the Hall of Fame again this year. The good news for Bert, and people that want to see him elected into the Hall, is that his vote percentage increased again (all the way to 62.7 percent) and he has three more cracks at election before being turned over to the Veterans Committee. If it falls to them, they may eventually put him into the Hall, but likely long after all of us are dead.

Rather than brain you over the head with a ton of statistics on why Blyleven should or should not be in, let's start with the debate. When he broke on to the ballot in 1998, he only received 17.55 percent of the vote. Since 2001, his vote total has trended upward and a heated debate has sprung up along with it.

Some have argued for his inclusion by pointing to his 3,701 strikeouts (fifth all-time) or by citing more unconventional statistics, while others have argued against him by claiming that his long career helped him compile impressive stats without ever having a true Hall of Fame peak.

This sort of debate is what the Hall of Fame is all about. It's why players can stay on the ballot for 15 years. Not only is there a yearly vote, but there's a debate that plays out in newspapers and across the internet yearly.

It's possible that Blyleven has plateaued at 61 or 62 percent, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Someone has to be the best pitcher not in the Hall and Blyleven's as good a place as any to draw the line (though there are worse pitchers than him in the Hall). What irks me about the situation is that it seems like since support for Blyleven's vote began to grow, the rationales for voting against him have become more and more subjective.

In 2005, Gene Collier of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette famously rationalized his decision not to vote for Blyleven thusly:

Here's my formula. If I'm managing a decent club that's going into Pittsburgh for a weekend series in July of 1979 and the Pirates are sending Bert Blyleven, John Candelaria and Bruce Kison to the mound, is there a pitcher among them that I think I might not be able to beat?

Yes, and it's Candelaria, who is not a Hall of Famer.

Blyleven was a very good pitcher for a long time, but he had only one 20-win season and lost 250 games.

This sort of argument is made all the time and it really seems like it's what's currently keeping Blyleven out of the Hall. If you watched the MLB Network show about the election, SI.com's Jon Heyman gave a similar argument. To those who refuse to vote for him, Blyleven isn't good enough for the Hall because he wasn't an "ace," or because he failed to meet some other half-remembered subjective qualifier 20 years after the fact.

Here's what I can tell you about Blyleven. In 1971, he finished fifth in the American League in ERA+ (that's ERA adjusted for league performance and ballpark factors) finishing behind (among others) Wilbur Wood and Vida Blue. In 1989, he finished fourth in the AL in ERA+ (the seventh time he finished in the top five over the intervening 18 years) behind Bret Saberhagen, Chuck Finley, and one place ahead of Roger Clemens. If Blyleven had 13 more wins, he'd be at 300 and he would've been inducted years ago without complaint.

To me (someone who was only eight when Blyleven retired), those kinds of numbers far outweigh someone's subjective recollection of who may or may not have inspired fear more than 25 years ago.