Andy Pettitte, now retired

Of course Andy Pettitte is no Hall of Famer, no matter how much someone with the sound motive of sheer contrarianism works through the numbers, and the only reason anyone thinks he is one is because of the blind moral squalor of the population of New York City, which has convinced itself that it lives in a finer place than any other much as any number of Turkmen were doubtless convinced in 1985 that they lived in the grandest and most technologically advanced of all democratic empires. His one sound qualification is that nearly all pitchers with 200 wins and a winning percentage of .600, both numbers he much bettered, make the Hall of Fame, but then that is neatly answered with the name 'David Wells,' as he also bettered those numbers by similar persistence and similar good fortune in pitching for terrific teams in a time when it is easy for a starter to win a high percentage of his games because of improvements in relief pitching technology. The one item that might almost make you think, though, is that in the playoffs Pettitte pitched nearly ten per cent as many innings as he did in the regular season, and did it well. Whether or not other players had the same chance to play as much in October, he actually did this, and those games counted, wore on his arm, and collectively comprised something like his third-best season. There isn't much honest or true in pretending that he didn't pitch these games—the ones he would tell you are the most important he ever pitched, and the ones that will be remembered best and longest by everyone who ever watched him—or awarding him some marginal credit for them, and doing that just because of accounting rules that break out one class of important games played with every effort to win from another is really no different from joining the cult of the save, which is, as the famous talking point reminds us, just an accounting rule itself. The sound criticisms of Pettitte are that he was no better than Billy Pierce, who is remembered by nearly no one outside of Chicago; that as nice a career as he had there were only two or three seasons where he was ever much more than serviceable, and that even in those he was guilty of the hideous crime of lending his slightly wall eyed visage to the manufacturers of Power for Living, a creepy Christian pamphlet masquerading as a 'self-help' book that was advertised on every other inch of the New York subway system for a period of years. His unsettling and apparently drug fueled friendship with Roger Clemens also serves as something of an antitangible. Still I would hope that saberists don't treat that part of the public that recognizes his 260 or so playoff innings were of great consequence and surprisingly close to being enough to make the difference between a fondly remembered dude and a barrel scraping Hall of Famer as some great unlettered mass and fit subject for derision, if only because that would make saberists look nearly as absurd as the uninterrupted ascent of Mark Shapiro toward a place lined with large, pillowy bags of money has.

BY THE WAY: More numbery stuff about Pettitte here.

Comments

[Steve H]

Wells actually pitched much better in the playoffs than the regular season (almost 1 pt lower ERA), where Pettitte was essentially the same pitcher. Anyone who thinks Pettitte's playoff "legacy" gets him in, has to think Wells is in too. I love Pettitte, but he's just not a Hall of Fame pitcher.