Captain Ned wrote:Compare Schilling's stats to Catfish Hunter's stats. Roughly comparable, with Schilling looking a bit better IMO. Catfish is in the HOF with Schilling-level stats while from an era that usually looked for much better stats.
Schilling's closest comparables are Kevin Brown and Bob Welch, who aren't ever going to be in the HOF, and Orel Hershiser, who is borderline, as well as John Smoltz, who will be. Among those already there, Catfish Hunter is in the conversation but Don Drysdale and Dazzy Vance are better comparisons. So, that doesn't tell us much.
But you look at some of the rate stats that impress the HOF voters and set the minimum IP high enough to reflect a long career, and Schilling looks pretty good. Career K/9, minimum 2500 IP, the list goes: Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Nolan Ryan, Curt Schilling (followed by Roger Clemens, David Cone, John Smoltz). That's some good company to be in.
derFunkenstein wrote:The talking heads on ESPN today were saying that he may not get in because he has a relatively mediocre win total - low 200s. So I started looking around. Wins depend on your team scoring runs, which they weren't all that good at in Philly in the 90s. Yes, his win totals aren't all that impressive, but he consistently posted an ERA that was close to a full run below the league average - which is fantastic. And he didn't do that over a few innings, either...he had lots of seasons pitching more than 220 innings. That's superhuman today, and it was still above average for the time.
Wins really are a stupid way to evaluate a pitcher precisely because, as you say, it's really a team stat. For that matter, ERA is pretty bogus since it's partly a team stat too, in the same way that RBIs are. There are much better metrics these days for defense-independent pitching and actual offensive production.
But the HOF voters mostly don't use them. Mostly they don't even know about them. So when we're trying to gauge a player's HOF candidacy, we have to evaluate not how good a player he actually was, but how good he looked to the HOF voters.
Bill James has concocted a variety of evaluations to try to calculate this the way the HOF voters seem to. (In other words, not evaluating the performance in real terms, but in terms of the perception it creates in HOF voters: the goal is not to say how good the guy would be compared to some other guy you could add to your team, which is the point of most other stats, but to predict how likely his numbers get him into the HOF). The "Bold Ink" test gives points for leading the league in various categories (four points for leading in wins, ERA or Ks, three points for leading in innings pitched, 2 points for complete games, etc). This is obviously weighed towards having long careers and playing in earlier eras when the leagues were smaller. The average HOF pitcher accumulates a 40 by this measure, and Schilling has 42. James broadened that to a "Grey Ink" test to include ranking in the top ten in those categories in any year; Schilling hits 205 on that while the average HOFer is 185. James eventually elaborated that into a huge calculation he called the
Hall of Fame Monitor that does a pretty good job of predicting who gets into the Hall. Anyone who scores above 100 on that calculation is likely to get in, and anyone over 130 is a virtual lock. Schilling sits at 171.
So yeah, I'd say there's no doubt he gets in. But first ballot? Now you get into a bunch of crap where the voters treat the HOF like an onion or a russian nesting doll -- with inner sanctums inside ever-holier "sub-Halls" -- and play their own stupid reasoning games "If X wasn't a first ballot HOFer then nobody is" or "Y didn't get in on the first ballot so Z doesn't get in either." Just look at the Rickey Henderson vote. So trying to predict the first ballot is more an exercise in cranky-old-man psychoanalysis than anything else, and that makes it pretty meaningless.