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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."