MLB Hall Of Fame: A Look At Bert Blyleven

ping

I remember when Blyleven played for the Pirates (my home team). He was probably one of their best pitchers, but eventually, he moved on.

Glad to see he is being inducted into the Hall of Fame. He deserves it.

I remember when Blyleven played for the Pirates (my home team). He was probably one of their best pitchers, but eventually, he moved on.

Glad to see he is being inducted into the Hall of Fame. He deserves it.

I remember him along with Bill Stoneman of the Expos. Both had wicked curves.

I grew up in L.A. where the Dodgers back then had a great farm system. Since destroyed.
But it must be very hard in a place rooting for say the Pirates and along comes a star say a Bonds and he will not stay cause the market is so small they cna’t afford to pay him.
While year in and year out the Yanks can just buy whatever they want, they can afford it.

I remember him with Baltimore.

Blyleven never pitched for Baltimore....he was a decent pitcher for two decades...but I don’t think he belongs in the Hall...

decent isn’t fair...I’d say he was good to very good

Actually when Bonds left, I was happy to see him go. He was an ignorant, arrogant SOB. He treated fans badly, particularly young kids. And when he played for the Pirates, he basically went through the motions, possibly because he wasn’t being paid as well as he should. People talked about what a great player he was; I didn’t see it. Pirate fans wailed and gnashed their teeth when Bonds left. I said I would pack his bags and show him the door.

I always thought Bonilla and Van Slyke were more exciting players than Bonds.

I remember him along with Bill Stoneman of the Expos. Both had wicked curves.

The three best curve balls I've seen in my lifetime: 1) Sandy Koufax. 2) Dwight Gooden. 3) Bert Blyleven.

I wrote the following when Blyleven was elected to the Hall over the winter:

Blyleven's Finally Home By Eleven
I don't have to apologise any longer for championing Bert Blyleven for the Hall of Fame. (I've been doing it for, oh, about a decade.) The Dutchman is in, at long enough last, and on his final try before his case would have graduated from the Baseball Writers Association of America to the Veterans Committee.
The third most monstrous curve ball I ever saw (Sandy Koufax's was the most monstrous, and Dwight Gooden's was the second most monstrous) belonged to Blyleven. That's not why he should have been a Hall of Famer before now. Blyleven should have been a Hall of Famer on his career value. He was, as I noted in an earlier entry, kind of like Don Sutton. (Who just so happens to be his nearest match as a pitcher, according to Baseball-Reference.com.) His greatness kind of snuck up on you.
Or did it?
A lot of people argued that Blyleven wasn't half the Hall of Famer-in-waiting that Jack Morris has been. Well, now. Did they know that Blyleven won more games and posted a half-run lower ERA than Morris? Did they know that Blyleven pitched 1,146 more innings than Morris but walked 68 fewer batters? (He struck out 1,223 more, too.) Did they know that Blyleven's lifetime WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched), 1.20, is lower than Morris's 1.30? Did they know that Blyleven has a better strikeout-to-walk ratio by about one than Morris? Did they know that Blyleven threw sixty shutouts to Morris's 28? Even if you allow that Blyleven played four more seasons, that is a staggering difference.
Blyleven was prone to the long ball, one reason perhaps why Hall of Fame voters didn't look kindly upon him for so many years. He surrendered 430 of them in his career, giving up 0.8 per nine innings. But if they're going to compare him to Jack Morris, how does Morris get a pass for surrendering 389 bombs and 0.9 per nine, not to mention he averaged the same number of homers surrendered per 162 games (25) as Blyleven averaged?
Blyleven---I've said this before, too---was probably hurt most by his home parks when it came to compiling wins. I once did a breakdown on his home parks and figured out that if he'd played just three or four of his seasons in even a neutral park, never mind a pitcher-favourable park, he would have won 300 games. But not even his staunchest critics ever accused Blyleven of merely pitching to the score.
He's also hurt by never having won a Cy Young Award (well, neither did St. Morris, in fact), though he probably should have won the Cy in 1973. If they'd had the Wins Above Replacement calculation then that they have now, Blyleven would have won it: he was 9.2 wins above a replacement, compared to Cy Young winner Jim Palmer's 6.1. (Tom Seaver, who won the National League's Cy Young Award that year, was the only Cy vote-getter with a slightly better WAR than Blyleven, 9.6.). Come to think of it, Blyleven's 9.2 WAR in 1973 wasn't just the best among the league's pitchers, it was the best among any player in the American League.
If people are going to be fool enough to try comparing Bert Blyleven to Jack Morris, do they realise that, for all Morris's reputation as a big-game pitcher, Blyleven was deadlier in the postseason than Morris was? (Morris: 7-4 won-lost record; 3.80 ERA; 1.25 WHIP. Blyleven: 5-1 won-lost record; 2.47 ERA; 1.08 WHIP.) Morris looks better than Blyleven because of that Game Seven, ten-inning shutout in 1991, but not only did Blyleven outpitch him over the course of his postseason career, a Blyleven team actually faced a Morris team in the postseason . . . and Blyleven's team beat Morris's team.
As a matter of fact, in that 1987 American League Championship Series, Blyleven won twice (he won Game Two and the deciding Game Five)---and, in one of those games, in Morris's only start of the set, Blyleven beat him. Soundly. The Twins battered Morris for six runs---the Detroit bullpen wasn't even close to being any factor in surrendering runs chargeable to Morris in that game---on six hits and three walks; the Tigers pried three runs out of Blyleven, all on home runs, Chet Lemon hitting a two-run shot in the second inning and Lou Whitaker hitting a solo shot in the top of the eighth.
Ask yourself whether you'd want a guy with a 2.47 ERA and a 1.08 WHIP in postseason pitching going to the mound for that one game you absolutely have to win, over a guy with a 3.80 ERA and a 1.25 WHIP. Now tell me how Jack Morris earned a reputation as a big game pitcher and Bert Blyleven earned a reputation as nothing of the sort, when it seems according to the evidence that Blyleven was at least as valuable and perhaps slightly more so than Morris when it came to the big ones.
Morris's big-game reputation may well rest on his 1991 World Series performance. There's no question that he pitched like a Hall of Famer in that Series. There's no question that his Game Seven is one of the greatest Series pitching performances ever. It isn't quite the equal of Sandy Koufax's Game Seven in 1965; Morris didn't go to the mound with an arthritic elbow and nothing but a fastball to throw at the other guys, and eight strikeouts with seven hits isn't ten strikeouts with three hits, but Jack Morris did pitch a magnificent game.
Blyleven had a 1979 World Series (for the Pittsburgh Pirates) that was just as good if not quite as spectacular as Morris's 1991. He had a 1.80 ERA for the Series, starting Game Two and getting no decision in a game the Pirates won; and, relieving Jim Rooker in Game Five, with the Pirates down 1-0, and throwing four innings of shutout relief while the Pirates scored all seven of their runs in the final four innings.
When you look more closely at the evidence, you just might discover that Bert Blyleven actually was a better pitcher than Jack Morris, that Jack Morris actually was only as good as his teams (which were pretty damn good compared to many if not most of Blyleven's teams), that Blyleven was at least the equal and possibly the superior of Morris when it came to big-game pitching. (If you want something else to chew on, chew on Blyleven's having won more 1-0 games than any major league pitcher in damn near the last full century.)
To those who think Blyleven's was a low-impact career, I'm rather hard pressed to say a guy with a 2.47 lifetime postseason ERA who finished his career ninth on the all-time shutout list (and fourth if you're not counting the dead-ball era) was a low-impact pitcher.
He wasn't a spectacular pitcher; he doesn't have a gaudy, stick-it-in-your-face single season or single stat beyond those sixty shutouts. He really was one of those players where you had to look beyond the counting stats to see how great he really turned out to have been. On the other hand, he pitched a no-hitter against the Angels in 1977---in which he worked the final inning with an aggravated groin (he'd missed the previous three weeks with a groin pull) and threw the only pitch that didn't hurt him to throw: his voluptuous curve ball.
Blyleven may have hurt himself by a few gripes at the height of his career. He once fumed openly when some Minnesota writers, during his first tour with the Twins, accused him of trying to pad his strikeout totals, at a time when the Twins were scoring a total of eighteen runs in the fifteen games he lost one season. He openly resented Pittburgh manager Chuck Tanner's habit of going to his bullpens when the games were close despite Blyleven's notable-enough durability.
But you don't really have to compare him to Jack Morris to make his Hall of Fame case. Bert Blyleven had a Hall of Fame case already. It may have taken the better part of two decades to affirm it once and for all, but once and for all arrived at last.
"It's been fourteen years of praying and waiting," Blyleven said from his Florida home, when the news arrived at last. "I thank the Baseball Writers Association of America, I'm going to say, for finally getting it right."
They got a lot of help from a lot of other people who dug deep into the record and argued the case for this son of a Dutch immigrant whose mother hated to be with his father on only one occasion---at the ballpark, where father would heckle umpires calling his son's high school games.
A joke in Blyleven's household involves his children and stepchildren's amusement with their father's Minnesota fame. (Blyleven has been a Twins broadcaster for a good many years, now, doing 150 games a year and not minding the travel.) Fans invariably catch up to Blyleven hollering, "Circle me, Bert!" His family often has to urge him, "Bert, be home by eleven."
The writers finally made Bert being home by '11 something even more precious.

Blyleven credited Koufax for learning that monstrous curve ball---as a boy in southern California, Blyleven was listening when Koufax told Vin Scully in a radio interview that, if he were to have a son of his own, he wouldn't let the boy even think of throwing a curve ball until he was a teenager.

Koufax showed a blushing grin when Blyleven nodded toward him, "I don't know if you remember that interview, Sandy, but I've never forgotten it."

Did get inducted into the Hall? Thurman should be there also.

Did get inducted into the Hall? Thurman should be there also.

Assuming you mean Thurman Munson . . . no, he shouldn't. He had, really, only four seasons which could be described as Hall of Fame-caliber seasons in a career that lasted only ten full seasons (binding his 1969 introduction and his aborted 1979 as one), and his career was on a definite downslope, a downslope in its second season when he was killed in that plane crash.

If you should come upon an anthology called Top of the Heap: A Yankees Collection (edited by Glenn Stout), turn to a very eye-opening profile of Munson, "The House That Thurman Munson Built," originally published in Esquire in 1999, and written splendidly by Michael Paterniti. Paterniti revealed sides of Munson nobody, perhaps even his teammates, knew of the man, my very favourite of which was this passage:

There were five, six, seven Thurman Munsons, not counting his soul, and the one who mattered most was the private one, the one who came walking down a long hall like the one at the beginning of Get Smart!, with doors and walls closing behind him. When he walked over the threshold after a long road trip, he'd hug his wife and say I love you in German. Ich liebe dich. He wrote poetry to her. He scribbled philosophical aphorisms. He loved Neil Diamond---"Cracklin' Rosie," "I Am . . . I Said"---played the guy's music nonstop, incessantly, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, carried it with him on a big boom box. Thurman Munson, the grim captain, identifying with picaresque songs about being on the road, lost and along against the world, having something to prove, falling in love.
And the kids went bananas every time he came home, hanging off him like he was some kind of jungle gym. Two doe-eyed girls and a young, red-headed son who was afraid of the dark. Thurman Munson would sit at the kitchen table and eat an entire pack of marshmallow cookies with them. He'd take barrettes and elastic bands and disappear and do up his hair and then leap out of nowhere, Hi-yahing! from around a corner, wielding a baseball bat like a sword, doing his version of John Belushi's samurai. After the girls took a bath, Thurman Munson did the blow-drying. Then he combed out their hair. He never hurt us, remembers Kelly, the second daughter. I mean, our mom would kill us with that stupid blow dry and brush, and he said, I don't want to hurt you. And he took so much time and our hair would be so smooth and he'd take the brush and make it go under and comb it out. >When Michael, the youngest, couldn't sleep, his father went to him. As a kid, Thurman Munson was afraid of the dark, too, but in his father's world, Thurman Munson would lie there alone; you were humiliated for your fear, and you learned to be humiliated---often. On the day Yankee general manager Lee MacPhail came to sign Thurman Munson, the boy's father, Darrell, the truck driver, lay in his underwear on the couch, never once got up, never came into the kitchen to introduce himself. At one point, he just yelled, I sure do hope you know what you're doing! He ain't too good on the popups!
But Thurman Munson would sit with his own boy in the wee hours---at two, three, four a.m. Often he couldn't sleep himself, lying heavily next to Diana, his body half black and blue, his swollen knees and inflamed shoulders and staph infections hounding him awake. So he'd just go down the hall and be with Michael awhile. Just stretch out on the boy's bed. It's all right, he'd say. There's nothing to be afraid of.

Munson's father was even stupid enough to keep up the abuse even in his son's death. At Munson's burial, the old man not only told reporters his son wasn't a great ballplayer and the old man had the real talent but not the breaks. Then, he went up to Munson's coffin and said to it, "You always thought you were too big for this world. Well, look who's still standing, you son of a bitch." The old man had to be removed from the cemetery physically by police.

A good man. A solid ballplayer for a good while. If he wasn't really a Hall of Fame player, Thurman Munson turned out to be the Hall of Fame man we never really knew.

Being a Yankee fan since I was 10 I never read that story about Thurman's father and the funeral. I did know that Thurman loved his family and Neil Diamond. Diana never remarried he was the love of her life. I loved Thurman and I will always remember him. He was a big part of my childhood. BTW CC is pitching a perfect game and it was interrupted by rain tonight.

I just ordered the book on Amazon.

The editor, Glenn Stout, put together maybe the best anthology of Yankee writing you'll ever read. He did a similar excellent anthology for another club, Impossible Dreams: A Red Sox Collection. Strangely enough, both books appeared a year before the 2004 American League Championship Series . . . well, at least, that's when I happened to acquire my copies of each book . . .;)

The Yankee book also includes Ira Berkow's magnificent essay chronicling the ironic post-baseball deafness of Gil McDougald ("McDougald, Once a Quiet Yankee Star, Now Lives in a Silent World")---who'd taken one off the side of his head in a spring training exercise, a couple of years before his liner caught Herb Score flush in the face, causing an inner-ear fracture that led in time to McDougald's deafness (for which McDougald eventually underwent new corrective surgery, in part because of the Berkow piece).