The Official Mike Mussina for the HoF Thread

[dell71]

It is my firm opinion that Mike Mussina is a no-brainer Hall of Fame worthy player. Yet, his candidacy starts off on shaky ground due to a logjam of other worthy players. A number of them have even more solid resumes than he does and played the same position - starting pitcher. This year alone, 300 game winners Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine will likely be inducted. Curt Schilling is still on the ballot and will possibly see his support grow (another HoF worthy pitcher, in my opinion). Jack Morris keeps inching towards the needed 75% to be inducted and may get the push he needs since it is his last year on the ballot. None of this even counts the elephant in the room that is 354 game winner Roger Clemens.

Keep in mind that HoF voters can only vote for a maximum of 10 people. With that in mind, and the knowledge that the ballot also contains legit candidates from other positions such as Frank Thomas, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, and others including a number of steroid guys, it is easy to see that there is a high probability of Mussina not gaining election this year. There has been much speculation that he may not even be able to get the required 5% to keep his name on the ballot going forward. Should he avoid that fate, he will still have to contend next year with more starting pitchers: Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and John Smoltz.

In a way, it is very apropos that his road to the Hall begins this way. These same pitchers have overshadowed him for virtually his entire baseball career. Honestly, they deserve it. For one reason or another they all became bigger names and with good reason. None of this changes the fact that Mussina should be inducted.

Enough of this crap, let's get down to the nitty-gritty on why he should make the Hall of Fame...

I'll start with the inspiration for making this thread...

Bert Blyleven made it.

Sabermetricians and curve-ball lovers united to finally get ol' Bert elected back in 2011. The real-deal truth is that Mussina compares very favorably to him.

Let's begin the mathematical part of this exercise with the more traditional numbers...

Blyleven: 287 Wins, 3.31 ERA, 3701 Ks, 4970 IP,

Mussina: 270 Wins, 3.68 ERA, 2813 Ks, 3562.2 IP

At first glance, it's all in Blyleven's favor. There are a few things to note, though. Blyleven pitched for 22 years to Mussina's 18. Blyleven also pitched most of his career during a pitcher's era while Mussina toiled through the steroid era. Also directly comparing them against their peers in traditional black ink/gray ink categories, Mussina was better...

Category            Blyleven         Mussina    
Top 5 Wins             2                  7         
Top 5 ERA              7                  7 
Top 5 SO               13                 6
Top 5 Cy Young       3                  6

The only significant area of these pitching glamour stats where Blyleven wins out is striking batters out. Mussina just got them out in different ways. How about numbers that are a little more advanced. After all, this is where the case was most strongly made for Blyleven's candidacy...

Category            Blyleven             Mussina
ERA+                    118                   123
WHIP                  1.198                 1.192
SO/9                     6.7                   7.1
SO/BB                  2.80                 3.58
WAR/Pitchers        96.5                 82.7
WAR7                  50.7                 44.5
JAWS                  73.0                 63.8
Black Ink                16                    15
Gray Ink                237                  250
HoF Monitor           120                  121
HoF Standards         50                    54

Again, in most categories, Mussina comes out on top. I would argue the gap of .006 in Mussina's favor in WHIP should really be looked as a much larger discrepancy based on the differences in their eras. Likewise, the 6.7 SO/9 should probably viewed as a wash, at worst, if not something outright in Bly's favor because even though it was a more offense-friendly period in baseball, guys in Mussina's era simply struck out more. From WAR7 and JAWS, we can see that Bly had a better peak. However, even that doesn't look so bad on Mussina. In JAWS, he rates higher than a number of Hall of Famers such as Nolan Ryan, Carl Hubbell, Mickey Welsh, Bob Feller, and Jim Palmer. Just for good measure, he's also ahead of potential future HoFers Tom Glavine, Roy Halladay, John Smoltz, Andy Pettitte, and CC Sabathia.

Since I mentioned Jim Palmer, let's just throw this little doozy onto the fire...

Service    W   L	W-L%       ERA   ERA+     WHIP
18 Yrs	 270	153	0.638	   3.68   123      1.192
19 Yrs	 268	152	0.638	   2.86   125      1.180

If you couldn't guess, Mussina is the top line. Either way, the two are eerily similar and Palmer's already in.


Some common knocks on Mussina...

He didn't win a Cy Young. Neither did Blyleven.

He didn't win 300 games. Again, neither did Blyleven. It's certainly possible he would have had he elected to stick around. After all, his only 20 win season was his final one. And it wasn't one in which his offense propped him up for a bunch of wins, either. He finished top 10 that year in ERA, ERA+, WHIP, SO/BB, and WAR/Pitchers.

Won 20 games in a season only once. Guess who also did that.

Never won a World Series. Not his fault, but he did what he could in the post-season...

ERA     WHIP     H/9     SO/9     SO/BB     
3.42    1.103     7.8      9.3        4.39

All of those numbers are better than his regular season career numbers, by a wide margin in some cases. This is over 23 appearances, by the way. I know, a player's post-season career is usually a small sample size. However, in more playoff games than most, he performed extremely well. He just usually had nothing to show for it.

That's all I've got...

for now...

[Guest]

Mussina just misses a lot of big benchmarks for counting stats, but the guy was a model of consistency and was very good in the post-season.

As far as I'm concerned, the only debate is whether or not he goes into the HOF as an Oriole or Yankee. Considering how dirty Angelos played him during his FA off-season, I would be expect he may want to be enshrined as a Yankee. I would be disappointed but I can't say I would blame him.

[dell71]

Even better than being a model of consistency, he was consistently among the best in the game.

[Guest]

Even better than being a model of consistency, he was consistently among the best in the game.

Oh yes, definitely. The problem is, because he doesn't have those counting stats, his name doesn't register with Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling or Pedro Martinez who are his contemporaries. It might be a while for Mussina, which is a shame.

[Leftwich]

If he goes in i hope he goes in as a Yankee. One of the few former orioles i don't want associated with the team.

I'm being unreasonable about my hatred towards him i know.... but i just fucking hate him.

[Guest]

If he goes in i hope he goes in as a Yankee. One of the few former orioles i don't want associated with the team.

I'm being unreasonable about my hatred towards him i know.... but i just fucking hate him.

Hate the owner for lowballing Mussina until the last possible moment, but I understand completely.

[MVPete]

If he goes in i hope he goes in as a Yankee. One of the few former orioles i don't want associated with the team.

I'm being unreasonable about my hatred towards him i know.... but i just fucking hate him.

One of the themes we hope to explore in our ongoing look back at the 1997 season is nostalgia for that last good year, reminding ourselves of what it was like to live through that wire-to-wire season. Assuming, of course, you were alive and old enough to remember it. If you are as old now as I was in the 1997 season, you weren't even alive the last time the Orioles were good.
Whenever I think about this fact, I grow sad. A whole generation of kids has only known bad baseball in their home town. The O's are probably losing the border places. Nats hats cropping up in Columbia, Phillies in York County, PA. Did it have to be this way? Many of my contributions to the series will be looking through press accounts of the day, trying to see if the reporters were - whether by keen insight or luck - presaging the decade and a half of doom that still engulfs us.
My suspicion is that there is enough on the record to show that the fall from grace to come was an inevitability, and I will try to explore this throughout the current season. With the recent announcement that Mike Mussina will be inducted into the Orioles Hall of Fame, the circumstances of his departure to the Yankees, and residual fan anger, were brought back to light. Mike Mussina's exit via free agency was inevitable, not so much because he wanted to leave as because the Orioles did not want him. The Orioles saw to that as far back as that 1997 wire-to-wire season.

Thinking back to 1997 is looking back on a landscape so different it may as well be alien. The top song on the top 40 chart for April was R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" - which if you're around my age you probably still associate with the November 1996 release, Space Jam; No Doubt's "Don't Speak" and "Song 2" by Blur were also in the top 10, and down at #38 was "Hypnotize" by the Notorious BIG, whom had just been killed on March 9. The #1 grossing movie in the country the weekend prior to Opening Day was Liar Liar, starring Jim Carrey, with Selena and the special edition re-release of Return of the Jedi also in the top 5. If you gazed into the heavens, you saw the Hale-Bopp comet - the appearance of which led to the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult in California.
If you had Internet access in your home, it was probably dial-up, maybe thanks to an AOL 500 free hours CD. You might get to watch them on television, if you got HTS, where you'd hear Michael Reghi, in his first season, along with Mike Flanagan or Jim Palmer. If you listened on the radio, you might still hear the legendary Chuck Thompson now and again, but more likely you heard Jim Hunter - the replacement for Jon Miller - and Fred Manfra. So if you were following the Orioles, you were probably reading The Sun.
1997 was the heyday for the Angelos-era O's, and it may well have been for Baltimore's newspaper also. Sun baseball writers included current national baseball writers Ken Rosenthal of Fox and Buster Olney of ESPN. John Eisenberg was still at the paper. Roch Kubatko was the new guy, and Peter Schmuck wrote actual articles, not columns full of bad jokes. These guys were your objective Orioles coverage, and since there were that many of them, they could cover angles beyond just game stories, injury news and roster rumors. What were they saying through spring training? We've marveled at the surface of this time capsule. Let's look at what's inside.
One of the ongoing stories of the spring of 1997 was contract drama. All three of Cal Ripken Jr., Brady Anderson and Mike Mussina were entering the final year of existing contracts. Anderson was already 33, and at the end of the season he would become a free agent. The Orioles then gave him a 5-year contract worth about $30 million. He was released prior to the final year of the contract.
Cal, age 36, would settle his contract prior to the regular season, getting about $6.4 million a year until he retired after the 2001 season.
That leaves Mussina, who was 28 in 1997, and his story was the one that got the most press. In a Sun story from March 23, Schmuck talked to Jim Palmer, who asked, "What are the Orioles waiting for?" Referring to Camden Yards,

"It's a wonderful place to broadcast because every fly ball is a potential home run. It's a tough place to pitch. I remember Sterling Hitchcock saying, 'They ought to bomb this place' and Alex Fernandez told me, 'This place is a joke.' Mike wants to sign on.

The story notes that Fernandez had signed a 5 year, $35 million contract with theMarlins, setting the market for talented young pitchers at $7 million per year. Mussina was asking for a 4-year deal from the Orioles worth $28 million; the Orioles did not even initially offer three years, dallying with a third year on a vesting option.
Rosenthal also wrote about Mussina, a March 25 story headlined, "O's failing history class with Mussina." The history that Rosenthal referred to included an anecdote from 1979, when the Angels failed to re-sign Nolan Ryan after Ryan posted a 16-14 record. Then-GM Buzzie Bavasi (father of Bill, of Bedard trade fame) is reported to have said, "We'll just sign two 8-7 pitchers." The explicit message from Rosenthal was that letting Mussina escape would be the Orioles making the same mistake.
Though this would not ultimately happen until following the 2000 season, things looked to be headed that way in the spring of 1997. Rosenthal was left wondering why:

So, what's the Orioles' problem? The most logical explanation is that owner Peter Angelos apparently is fed up with the game's economics, and is determined to reverse the trend on salary growth. Of course, he'd be doing precisely that by signing Mussina below market value.

This quote is hilarious when you consider that the answer to the trivia question, "What was the last team in baseball other than the Yankees to lead the league in payroll?" is the 1998 Orioles. But it seems in 1997 Angelos was driving a hard bargain, pleading poverty with anyone who would listen. The O's raised ticket prices by about 19% from 1996 to 1997, with Angelos claiming that the Orioles lost $5 million in that wild card season. Then, as now, Angelos declined to comment for the Sun's story.
Somehow, the Orioles found money for the twilight of Cal's career, and they found money for Anderson, perhaps because, as Rosenthal noted, "there's no one in the farm system to replace him," but there was no money to secure the prime years of a great pitcher. Mussina ultimately would take that below-market deal, getting paid less than $7 million a year from 1998 to 2000. Maybe this sort of thing is where the notion that Angelos is a cheap owner originates.
It is clear that the Orioles organization did not appropriately value Mussina, neither in 1997, when it took so long for the team to agree to a below-market extension - and even then, it was Mussina who budged more than the Orioles - and certainly not in the 2000 season, when it was so apparent he would be leaving that the O's tried to trade Mussina at the July 31 deadline.
Though he took the team-friendly contract in 1997, it seems clear that was more out of a desire for stability than anything. Three years later, when the Yankees came in with 6 years and $88.5 million, after the Orioles had refused to go higher than 5 years and $60 million, when the Yankees had Joe Torre calling Mussina a week after the World Series ended, when the Yankees gave his wife a box of roses and gave presents for his kids, when Yankees players were calling every day to woo Mussina, is it any wonder he left? The seeds of that departure were sown in the hard line drawn by the Orioles in those 1997 negotiations. We just didn't know it at the time.
Mussina had a 19-11 record in 1996. Perhaps the Orioles felt they could go out and sign two 10-5 pitchers and they would be even up. Perhaps Angelos really was trying to make a stand on player salaries - although, again, why did he lead the league in payroll the next year? Certainly, Angelos' name should not have even been in the process; he should have just let Pat Gillick and Davey Johnson run the team. We know he did not do this, and that is surely part of what led to the disastrous fall. Much like Bavasi's Angels in the 80s with Nolan Ryan, the Orioles have yet to replace Mussina, though they have now had more than a decade to do so.
As the 2012 season progresses, I will be looking for more stories from the day that showed signs of rotten cracks in the foundation, even if at the time we were too busy enjoying the wire-to-wire AL East run, as well we should have been. Sadly, the inevitable departure of Mike Mussina was only the beginning.

[MVPete]

Here is the link to that mess. Just read and change your opinion on Mussina. He should get in the hall though at some point imo for sure.

http://www.camdenchat.com/2012/4/4/2922848/the-inevitable-departure-of-mike-mussina

[Guest]

That's the thing I'll never get about Angelos. The dude has more money than he knows what to do with from his law firm, both current work and what they've done in the past with high profile cases. He's got the lions share of MASN, and he makes more money from people coming out to games if the product on the field plays at a high level and wins.

The Orioles are a small market team with a large market owner, and I just don't understand it. He has no motivation to sell the team either or do anything except accept the status quo.

The story also leaves out Angelos budging at the last minute, and giving Mussina an 11th hour offer increase that was eventually declined. If he had made that offer originally, the speculation is that Mussina would have given the Orioles a discount and re-signed.

[Guest]

Short but solid comparison of Mussina to Glavine minus wins

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/eye-on-baseball/24391928/comparing-the-career-resumes-of-tom-glavine-mike-mussina

[dell71]

Another look at Mussina's HoF candidacy...

http://mlb.si.com/2013/12/19/jaws-and-the-2014-hall-of-fame-ballot-mike-mussina/

[dell71]

Dusting this thread off because it's that time of year.

Update on his candidacy:

In his first year on the ballot, he received 20.3% of the votes.

On the plus side, Jack Morris is no longer on the ballot.

On the minus side, the new additions are Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and John Smoltz. That's not to mention a position player with a strong case - Gary Sheffield. And then we have to add the holdovers like Biggio, Piazza, Bagwell, Raines, Smith, and in particular, Schilling.

Since 14 or 15 guys have a legit case for HoF induction, expect another low vote count. Hopefully, he stay in that 20% range to stay on the ballot again. He has a better shot next year for at least serious growth in his support, if not outright election. I'm expecting three, possibly four inductees this year lessening the glut a little bit. Next year, the only slam dunk sure-fire HoFer joining the ballot is Ken Griffey Jr.

[Guest]

Yeah, this is going to be a tough year for a lot of the names you mentioned to just stay on the ballot. Mussina has his supporters, I think that will be enough to keep him on the ballot.

I will admit, I was surprised at the low turnout for Mussina last year. I realize Glavine and Maddux were on the ballot, but I was surprised that Moose didn't get more play.

[dell71]

I wasn't surprised he didn't get much support because of who else was on the ballot. Expecting the same thing this year.

[dell71]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/sports/baseball/hall-of-fame-should-not-be-one-of-mussinas-almosts.html?_r=0