I don’t really have much time at all for Hall of Fame outrage these days and I don’t want to spend much time spilling digital ink over whether or not PED users belong in the Hall of Fame or not, because I feel like I’ve done that a million times and I’m as tired of writing it as you are of reading it. I don’t want to let this Hall of Fame class go completely ignored this year, though, because the four guys inducted this year (Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, and Craig Biggio) were always among my favorite players to watch. At first I wasn’t entirely sure what it was about these four players that speak to me in particular in a way that, say, the three from last year (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas) really don’t, but after some thought, it dawned on me: each of these four players significantly changed the way that I think about baseball in some small way, in a way that really only great players can.
Everyone has a favorite Randy Johnson story. I remember this game in particular, because I got to PNC Park with some friends from Duquesne right around the first pitch, and by the time we got food and made our way up to our seats, it was the third inning. That wasn’t because it took a long time, that was because the game flew by. Johnson dominated the Pirates; Jack Wilson and Jason Bay hit home runs and Wilson added a single and those were the only three times a Pirate reached base all day. Fogg was pretty solid himself, holding the Diamondbacks to one run on six hits with no walks in eight innings. Even with a trademark Jose Mesa roller coaster save, the whole thing was done in less than two hours.
What always really sticks in my mind about Johnson, though, was a Kevin Young quote in the Post Gazette (at least, I think it was Kevin Young and I think it was the Post Gazette) sometime around 1999-2001, when Johnson was at the absolute peak of his career with the Diamondbacks. The purpose of the story was to talk about how different hitters prepared to face the most unhittable pitcher in baseball, and Young said something along the lines of, “He’s practically impossible to hit, because those long arms and that motion makes it feel like his knuckles are in the batter’s box when he releases the ball.” Up to that point, my understanding Johnson’s success was pretty simplistic: he was tall, which helped him throw hard, which lead to all of the strikeouts. That quote from Young, though, stuck with me: it’s not enough to just throw 97 to fool a hitter, Johnson’s cartoonish wingspan, the three-quarters motion, the late lunge, all of it helped build just enough deception into his delivery to make his 97 harder to hit than anyone else’s 97. I think a lot about pitcher deception these days (this is because I think the Pirates think about it a lot, which is something that I want to talk about as the winter stretches on), and a lot of it has its roots in Kevin Young’s description of how hard Randy Johnson was to hit.
My Pedro Martinez realization is probably the most mundane of the bunch, but maybe that’s because everything Pedro Martinez did dwarfed the world around him. When Madison Bumgarner took the mound in the fifth inning of Game 7 of this year’s World Series, I was immediately back in the attic of my parents’ house, watching Pedro Martinez come out of the Red Sox bullpen in Game 5 of the 1999 ALDS to shut the Indians down.
You don’t need me to recite Martinez’s numbers from 1997-2003 here, but I’ll link to them in case you want to marvel over them for a second. He was incredible, he was head and shoulders above everyone else in baseball in those seasons, even the aforementioned Johnson. In the craziest offensive environment in baseball history and in a hitter-friendly ballpark, he put up numbers that are barely being approached by 2014’s best pitchers in the one of the most depressed offensive environments since the 1960s. Pedro put up Koufax and Kershaw numbers in an era when a 4.00 ERA was better than passable. This is the part about it that always amazes me and sticks with me: he did it because he had insanely long, thin fingers that stayed on the baseball forever, letting it spin like crazy. Think about the plight of the baseball scout. You could spend your whole career identifying every Gerrit Cole in the country — all of the solidly built 6’4″ high school guys with with the potential to fill that frame out and blow radar guns up. If you could do that, you’d be a pretty good scout, and you’d probably draft a few All-Stars in your time. And you’d have to do all of that work knowing that the best pitcher of your lifetime was a skinny 5’11” guy with freakish fingers.
John Smoltz is a little bit of a different case. Truth be told, I didn’t think about Smoltz much in the early part of his career. As a passionate Atlanta Braves hater, I focused a whole lot of my personal vitriol on Tom Glavine and spent a whole lot of time fearing and thinking about Greg Maddux, while Smoltz was just the third guy. His late career taught me a lot about the value of starting pitching and relief pitching, though. Smoltz had quite a few arm issues and missed all of the 2000 season with Tommy John surgery. He wasn’t quite right as a starter when he returned in 2001, so the Braves moved him to the bullpen. From 2002-2004, Smoltz was lights out as a closer, and then in 2005 he returned to the rotation. At the time, I had a bit of trouble understanding why they’d want him to be a starter again after he was so good as a reliever. This, I think, is one of the most common and easiest to fall-into fallacies amongst baseball fans, and answering my question about Smoltz helped me understand that. The reality is this: if you are good enough to start, you should be starting. The high-leverage situations that best relievers face blows their usefulness way out of context in our memories; it’s no comparison for the sheer number of batters that a starter faces over the course of the season.
Finally, we come to Craig Biggio. I don’t have a lot of pleasant memories of the Bagwell and Biggio Astros, because I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons at Three Rivers Stadium watching them beat the snot out of bad Pirate teams. I remember Biggio hitting a ton of doubles (it’s because of him that the name Earl Webb means something) and I remember him getting hit by a ton of pitches, but he was generally just a really good player on a good team that beat up on the Pirates a lot. That was until I first read The New Bill James Historical Abstract. In the 2003 edition, James argues passionately for Biggio as one of the best second basemen of all-time and one of the best players of the 1990s; on par with the Griffeys and Bondses of the decade. I thought that was hyperbole when I first read it in 2004 or 2005, but James laid out such a compelling argument based on defensive value and park adjustments and positional adjustments that I had to at least consider what he was saying. Beyond learning about all of those things, which are all hugely important when evaluating players, I feel like that that whole thought process for me helped me understand the ultimate expression of sabermetrics (or working in science, or life as a human being in general): don’t dismiss any argument unless you can completely understand why the argument is being made.
Obviously a lot is being made about the guys who didn’t get into the Hall of Fame today, and rightly so, but this group of four players is a pretty spectacular one. That’s true from a general baseball perspective, and it’s true from a personal one, as well.
Image credit: Todd Warshaw/Allsport
