Enough Games in the Hall of Fame—Induct Bert Blyleven!

Another year, another Baseball Hall of Fame vote, another snub for Bert Blyleven.

All it takes is a player's name to make it onto 75% of the ballots, and he's in the Hall. So why hasn't he got the call yet? He fell a little short this year, only collecting a 62.7% vote from the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Bert has been on the Hall ballot for over 12 years now, and this past month he was snubbed once again.

At a glance, Bert seems like a player on the fringe, but that is a gross misconception of Bert's 22-year career.

All of the ten eligible players atop the career strikeouts list are in the Hall of Fame, except Bert Blyleven. Here is the list of the 12 most all-time strikeout leaders.

Nolan Ryan- 5714*

Randy Johnson- 4789 (and counting)^

Roger Clemens- 4672

Steve Carlton- 4136*

Bert Blyleven- 3701

Tom Seaver- 3640*

Don Sutton- 3574*

Gaylord Perry- 3534*

Walter Johnson- 3509*

Phil Niekro- 3342*

Ferguson Jenkins- 3192*

Bob Gibson- 3117*, tied with Pedro Martinez^

* denotes member of the Hall of Fame                                                                
^ denotes an active player

That's pretty impressive, Blyleven ranks fifth all-time in strikeouts. In his career, he fanned more batters than quite a bit of Hall of Fame pitchers, and that's not even where it begins. May I note it is not only these pitchers, but every other eligible player with over 3,000 strikeouts has made the Hall of Fame, except Blyleven.

However, this isn't the only area where Bert amassed great success over his career. He was ninth all time in career shutouts with 60. In Major League history, every player with 50 or more shutouts has made the Hall, excluding Blyleven. These other pitchers include guys from Warren Spahn to Vic Willis.

Blyleven is very high among all-time ranks in neutral wins, a statistic that projects a pitcher's amount of wins if he was given average run support in every game. He finished 14th all time with 313 neutral wins. However, this is not a perfect world, and Blyleven only finished with 287 wins.

But, 287 wins are far from bad. There are plenty of obvious members of the Hall above Bert on the list, but there are also many more players below Bert on the wins list who got the call.

Catfish Hunter, Bob Feller, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Jim Palmer, and Ferguson Jenkins are just some of the men in the Hall of Fame with fewer wins than Blyleven.

Noteworthy baseball analyst Bill James created four Hall of Fame standards: the Black Ink Test, the Gray Ink Test, the HOF Standards Test, and the HOF Monitor Test.

Here are Blyleven's scores on each test:

Black Ink: 16 (Average HOFer = 40)

Gray Ink: 239 (Average HOFer = 185)

HOF Standards: 50 (Average HOFer = 50)

HOF Monitor: 120.5 (Likely HOFer >100)

Also, Baseball-reference.com, an encyclopedia of sorts, which keeps track of the basic and advanced statistic of every Major League player, has a nice feature on the page of every player. This feature finds and lists ten comparable players to whatever player you are viewing.

Say you're on Bert Blyleven's page. Similar pitchers listed include: Don Sutton, Gaylord Perry, Ferguson Jenkins, Robin Roberts, Tom Seaver, Early Winn, Phil Niekro, Steve Carlton, Tommy John, and Jim Kaat. Kaat and John are the only players on the list not in the Hall of Fame.

In 1973, Blyleven won 20 games. However, he also had 17 losses. Why? For most of his career, he was a victim of low run support. His peripheral stats—which, unlike wins and losses, are controlled by the pitcher—greatly support this claim.

In Bert's '73 season, a lot of things went right, but some things went wrong. For example, here is his stat line from that year:

20-17, 2.52 ERA, 1.117 WHIP, 258 K, 67 BB, 91 ER, 16 HR, 325 IP

Blyleven pitched fantastic that year. "Then why did he lose so many games?" one might ask. Well, Blyleven got 4.18 runs per game on average, and the team scored zero to three runs on 22 occasions. Blyleven pitched in 40 games that year.

Throughout his career, Blyleven had trouble with run support. For his career, Blyleven averaged 3.99 runs of support. That's not horrible, but on average not enough to set the league on fire. The Twins kept up that trend—scoring an average amount of runs per game en route to an average finish—81-81, good for third place in the then American League West.

Lousy run support explains 250 losses. For the sake of argument, in baseball-reference.com's group of comparable players to Bert Blyleven, they averaged 239 losses, so Blyleven is not far off.

The Twins weren't the only team Blyleven played for. In his career, Bert has played on a team to win its division only three times in his 22-year career. He has played for the Twins, Rangers, Pirates, Indians, Twins again, and the Angels.

What excuse is there for not voting a guy who ranks fifth all time in strikeouts, ninth all time in shutouts, meeting Hall of Fame credentials as per Bill James' tests, and who has better numbers than many members into the Hall of Fame?