Five Underrated Pitchers in My Lifetime

EN ROUTE TO NEW JERSEY — As mentioned yesterday, to celebrate today’s release of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL and our JoeBlogs two-year anniversary, I’m doing a daily Brilliant Reader Challenge all week long.

Today’s challenge comes from Brilliant Reader Tom: “Since you started watching baseball, name the top five pitchers who (1) Never won a Cy Young; (2) Never won a World Series ring; (3) Never were named a Postseason MVP.”

Tom’s idea is that these pitchers are uniquely and grotesquely underrated, and if we don’t talk about them, then the next generation will forget about them completely.

Obviously, none of these pitchers can be in the Hall of Fame, either, so, for example, no Mike Mussina.

All right! Let’s do this! I’ll add one more thing: By “in your lifetime,” Tom specifically said these need to be players who I (more or less) saw from the beginning. So I’m starting around 1972 or so, when I was 5 years old.