By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/12/10/jack-morris-hall-of-famer-at-last-but/
Jack Morris, in his prime with the Tigers . . .There are plenty of great pitchers who weren’t quite Hall of Fame great and didn’t get in. There are
more than a few Hall of Fame pitchers who got in despite not quite being
truly Hall of Fame great.
Jack Morris, who’s been elected to the Hall by the Modern Baseball Era Committee with his longtime
teammate Alan Trammell, belongs to the latter category.
Morris was as tenacious a competitor as I ever saw pitch, and that’s
without remembering a certain
World Series-winning game. But the Modern Era Committee just wasn’t right to elect him to Cooperstown,
and there’s no disgrace in being a great pitcher who falls just short of Hall of Fame greatness.
I sat on the fence about Morris for most of the time he was on the Baseball Writers Association of
America ballot, until a proper combination of what I saw versus what the results were, net and
otherwise, told me that he really doesn’t belong. And it’s not something you like to say about any
man you remember as being genuinely great.
“[T]here’s no real joy in turning away Morris,†writes Jay Jaffe in his remarkable
The Cooperstown
Casebook: Who’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Who Should Be In, and Who Should Pack Their
Plaques. (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press; 446 p, $25.99.)
Many of us who devoted time and energy to arguing against his case
grew up watching his no-hitter, Game Seven shutout, and other highlights
from his eighteen-year career. We know he was a very good pitcher for
a long time . . . It takes a hard heart to avoid acknowledging the man’s
pain in being close enough to taste his inevitable election, yet falling
short due to forces unseen at the outset of his candidacy. He didn’t
ask to become a battlefront in a cultural war.
That would be the war between “old school,†which thinks statistics aren’t the life blood but the
blood poisoning of baseball, versus the “new school,†which sometimes does come across as if
we’re talking about machines and not men. The old school forgets that statistics are a way to
measure men you didn’t see play the game or to conjugate what the real results were for those
you did see; the new school occasionally forgets the evidence of things not seen. I hope that
makes sense, for now.
Funny thing, though. The same Modern Era Committee that seems to have gone old-school in
electing Morris seems to have gone new-school in electing Trammell. (Two of the committee
members: Sandy Alderson, now the Mets’ general manager; and, Jayson Stark, one of the first
daily sportswriters to embrace the sabermetric advent.)
Trammell, too, fell off the writers’ ballot after fifteen years. Morris gained support before his
falloff more steadily and to a larger extent than Trammell did. And Trammell’s is a Hall case
that depended even more on statistical re-analysis.
Both men but perhaps Morris especially may have been helped big by the makeup of the Modern
Era Committee this time around. George Brett, Rod Carew, Dennis Eckersley, Dave Winfield,
and Robin Yount competed against Morris’s and Trammell’s Tigers. Nothing against those
distinguished gentlemen, but you do know what’s often said about old players and their
recollections.
The older I get, the better they were is one way to put it.
The old school disdains the wins above a replacement-level player measurement; the new school
uses WAR as a significant but not quite be-all/end-all measurement. Trammell’s WAR is above
that of the average Hall of Fame shortstop; it also isn’t the sole reason why Trammell really
belongs in the Hall of Fame.
Morris’s is well below that of the average Hall of Fame starting pitcher. That isn’t all you need
to know to determine that Morris’s isn’t
quite Hall of Fame greatness, but it matters greatly
enough. â€I think the image of the man and what we remember is a bit different from the career
numbers,†wrote the
Dallas Morning News‘s Tom Cowlishaw in 2011, explaining why he was
then pulling his former longtime support for Morris.
Morris seldom had the lowest ERA in his own rotation, and was over 3.50 eleven
times in his eighteen-year career . . . Facts, not memories. That should be the
priority in determining how we vote, and the facts say Morris comes up just short.
There are a pair of facts that should have jarred even Morris’s least flexible supporters. Fact one:
Joe Sheehan of
Baseball Prospectus once tracked every inning Morris pitched in his career and
discovered that he put his teams behind in—wait for it—344 of his 527 career starts. Think about
that.
Sixty-five percent of the time Jack Morris put his team in the hole, either by giving up the
game’s first run or by surrendering a lead.
Fact two: Morris’s ERA when his teams scored four or more runs for him was around 3.70 or
thereabout but when he had one, two, or three runs to work with, it was 4.08. And, for those
who still thrive on pointing to Morris’s career wins as a should-be Hall of Fame ticket, be advised
that in games where he had three or less runs to work with, his won-lost record was 32-87.
The higher his run support, the better pitcher he was, if you’re talking about a spread of four runs
to work with. But look him up when his team gave him six or more runs to work with: He lost only
nine times in 186 such games . . .
but his ERA in those games was 4.24. And that’s
despite opposing hitters having only a .314 on-base percentage and .397 slugging percentage against
him in those games.
We know from the record as it is that Morris benefitted tremendously from superb defenses, part
of which is going to Cooperstown with him, but that’s just a little too much. What about his reputation
as a big-game pitcher? It really rests on that one unforgettable Game Seven.
You can measure Morris’s biggest games—meaning, those he pitched in the heat of a pennant race
a) against the team(s) his team most needed to beat to stay alive or get into the postseason; and,
b) when beating the opposition no matter where they stood meant his team staying alive, gaining
ground, or clinching a title. And he doesn’t come out as good as his reputation.
If you measure him in total in the postseason, remove that Game Seven from the picture entirely,
and his lifetime postseason ERA overall would be 4.63, with a 4.58 lifetime World Series ERA. That
isn’t a Hall of Fame disqualifier, necessarily; we know that some of the greatest pitchers of all time
didn’t perform well in the postseason. But if big game pitching is one of your Hall of Fame qualifiers,
Morris is short enough.
Morris today looks almost like a university scholar solving economics riddles. Let me
not be misunder-
stood. Whenever I watched this guy pitch—he lived on a slider and a split-finger fastball, though the
latter sometimes escaped his catchers—I watched a stubborn bull of a pitcher who wouldn’t bend if
you threw everything including the kitchen sink, the bathroom sinks, two bathtubs, and three toilets
at him, even as he aged and wasn’t quite the pitcher he’d been in the bulk of the 1980s.
You could bend Morris but not break him without a fight. And that’s a guy who also got screwed twice
during the collusion of the 1980s, in case you’ve forgotten. It doesn’t mean Morris really belongs in
the Hall of Fame. But it doesn’t mean he’ll be the worst pitcher in Cooperstown, either, by a long
enough shot.
At least he’ll be going in next to a teammate who was a big reason in his own right why Morris had
any Hall of Fame case in the first place. But will Trammell’s election open the way for his double play
partner Lou Whitaker on a future Modern Era Committee ballot? A consummation perhaps devoutly
to be wished, because Whitaker has a Hall case as strong as Trammell’s and
stronger than Morris’s.
You tell me who got a bigger screwing—Morris, who lasted fifteen full BBWAA ballots with a not-quite-
real Hall of Fame case, or Whitaker, who went one-and-done with the BBWAA but who has a real Hall
of Fame case. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with something to provoke even more of the
debates baseball lovers genuinely love.
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