Hall of Fame Ballot: The Contenders (Part 2)

It's Hall of Fame Day, so let’s talk about the remaining contenders!

Hall of Fame Day! As a reminder, I’ll be going live tonight at 7 p.m. ET to talk about the ballot, surprises and expecteds, Ichiro and CC and Beltran and Billy Wags and all the rest. Would love to have you join in with questions and comments and whatever else.

Let’s talk about the remaining Hall of Fame contenders and, throughout, I’ll tell you the 10 players I voted for this year and how I feel about those votes. (As usual, we’ll go in the order of the players’ percentages on NotMrTibbs’ essential Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker.)

Andy Pettitte (32.2%) and CC Sabathia (92.5%)

OK, let’s do this again. Let’s look at those two left-handed pitchers from roughly the same time period.

Pitcher A: 251-161, 3.74 ERA, 3.78 FIP, 61.8 bWAR, 66.5 fWAR

Pitcher B: 256-154, 3.85 ERA, 3.74 FIP, 60.7 bWAR, 68.2 fWAR

Hmm. Who is who? Which one is the better pitcher?

The voters have decided that Pitcher A—CC Sabathia—is not only the better pitcher, he’s the MUCH better pitcher. The voters will be electing Sabathia on the first ballot this year; he will likely get the highest vote total for any starting pitcher since Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez a decade ago.

The voters have decided that Pitcher B — Andy Pettitte—is a marginal Hall of Fame candidate; this is his seventh year on the ballot, and while he will likely make a decent-sized jump in the voting, he will probably end up with about one third of the vote, a long, long way from the 75% needed for election.

Is this right? Well, I have two thoughts on this. One is pretty direct: I don’t really think anybody has forgotten Pettitte’s human growth hormone admission. It’s funny, a lot of people grumped at the time that Pettitte seemed to be one of the very, very few to quote-unquote “get away” with PED use; people seemed overly eager to forgive and forget with him, and there were all sorts of hot takes about this at the time and what it said about society.

But, you know what? In the end, I don’t think Pettitte got any more forgiveness than the rest. David Ortiz, yeah, everybody raced to forgive him because he’s Big Papi and the drug test was leaked and he’s awesome and all the rest. But Pettitte? Nah. Sure, folks focused most of their righteous outrage at Clemens and Bonds and McGwire and Sosa because they were the bigger stars, but it seems to me that the PED thing has always stuck to Pettitte, and so his 275 wins—including a big-league record 19 of them in the postseason—and 18-year career of sustained high quality and being at the heart of five World Series championships has never really moved the voters. Eh, there was that HGH thing, right?

The second thought is that, once again, timing is everything. Pettitte came on the ballot in 2019. You remember who else came on the ballot in 2019? Mariano Rivera. Now, who from those dominant Yankees teams are you going to vote for… Mariano Rivera or Andy Pettitte? Obviously it’s Mo, and he was unanimously selected. Roy Halladay debuted on that ballot, too, and he was clearly a better pitcher than Pettitte, and he was elected. Mike Mussina was a leftover on that ballot; Mussina was also clearly a better pitcher than Pettitte, and he was elected.

Curt Schilling was ALSO on that ballot. Schilling wouldn’t stop mouthing off and spewing garbage and insulting the sportswriters who were voting, and he managed to talk his way out of Cooperstown, but there was never a doubt he was a better pitcher than Andy Pettitte.

Oh yeah, Pettitte’s old pal Roger Clemens was on the ballot, too.

And so Pettitte got 10% of the vote.

The next year was Jeter’s year and COVID and there seemed no compelling reason to reconsider Pettitte’s case. Clemens and Schilling were still there, a growing contingent of voters were becoming dazzled by Billy Wagner’s case, and Pettitte stayed in place.

The next year, Mark Buehrle joined the ballot. There wasn’t much to choose between Buehrle and Pettitte—a couple of (relatively) soft-tossing lefties who won more than 200 games with basically the same ERA. Heck, Buehrle had a no-hitter and a perfect game on his record. For four years, they were in that same netherworld; they each got enough votes to stay on the ballot but nowhere close to enough votes to be considered actual contenders.

And then, this year, BLAMMO, Sabathia comes on the ballot, and while his overall numbers are scary-close to Pettitte’s, he did it with more style. He won a Cy Young Award. He struck out 3,000 batters. All of the all-time great pitchers are gone from the ballot, no starter has been elected since that Mussina-Halladay year way back when, and Sabathia has fully captured the imagination of us voters.

And what of the pretty clear evidence that Pettitte was probably every bit as good a pitcher as Sabathia, possibly a better one when you take the postseason into account? Well, again, timing is everything. And how did I vote?