Blyleven And His Contemporaries

Tomorrow, Bert Blyleven will be officially inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, after finally getting enough votes on his 14^th year on the ballot. Rich Lederer of Baseball Analysts did a great job of explaining why Blyleven is worthy of the honor and rallying support for him, and if you have not read any of his pieces I would suggest doing so. I thought I would compare Blyleven to two of his contemporaries, Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, and see how he compares.

Many writers initially left Blyleven off their ballots because he seemed more of a “good for a long period of time pitcher” as opposed to a “great pitcher.” I think part of this has to due to an initial unflattering comparison between him and Ryan and Carlton (although the fact that many of these writers voted for Jack Morris might mean I am giving them too much credit). Blyleven won a lot of games—287, but not as many as Ryan (324) or Carlton (329). Blyleven struck out a lot of batters—3701, but not as many as Ryan (5714) or Carlton (4136). Blyleven threw a lot of innings—4970, but again, not as many as Ryan (5386) or Carlton (5217.2). The same phenomenon occurred with ERA—Blyleven’s 3.31 career mark is higher than both Ryan’s 3.19 and Carlton’s 3.22. From these statistics, it would seem Blyleven was clearly an inferior pitcher compared to Ryan and Carlton (although still fantastic). But you could make the argument that Blyleven was just as good, if not better, than Ryan and Carlton.

While Blyleven has the highest ERA of the three, when you normalize it for park factors and run scoring environment (ERA+), he has the best ERA+ of 118 (compared to Ryan’s 112 ERA+ and Carlton’s 115+). This is because Blyleven’s home parks were usually more hitter-friendly, and that he missed the late 1960s run depressing environment that Ryan and Carlton were able to start their careers in. Also, Blyleven was significantly better at not walking batters. While everyone knows Ryan has the most strikeouts of all time, he also gave up the most walks of all time, giving 2795 batters a free pass to first base. Carlton “only” walked 1833 batters, while Blyleven gave free passes to 1322 batters. This led Blyleven to have the best WHIP (walks and hits/innings pitched) of the three (1.198 vs. 1.247 for both Ryan and Carlton) and best K/BB ratio (2.80 vs. Carlton’s 2.26 and Ryan’s 2.04).

Due to these factors, Blyleven ends up with more Wins Above Replacement (WAR) according to Baseball-Reference (90.1 vs. Ryan’s 84.8 and Carlton’s 84.4). Now, this does not definitively mean that Blyleven was better than Ryan and Carlton, but it does show that he is an equal to Ryan and Carlton. Which means he is a very deserving Hall of Famer.