From the Archives: Educating Twitter, Kluber for the Hall of Fame?
This being Tom Glavine’s birthday, today’s unlocked archive edition is from February of last year, when I examined Corey Kluber’s case for the Hall of Fame after he announced his retirement. Glavine was featured a bit in the discussion of two-time Cy Young Award winners.
Only 22 pitchers in the history of baseball have won multiple Cy Young Awards. That’s a bit misleading, for two pretty big reasons:
The Award didn’t exist until 1956.
Only one Award was given for all of baseball until they split it and awarded one per league starting in 1967.
If you chop the first 80 years off the sport’s history, including the entire history of the Negro Leagues, and only hand out one per year for another 11 years, there’s going to be some scarcity among the award winners.
Still, any club with only 22 members in the history of a sport is a pretty exclusive club. One of the members of that club, Corey Kluber, announced his retirement last week, and the speculation about his case for eventually being elected to the Hall of Fame began immediately.
Before getting into Kluber’s specific case, let’s do a quick review of the other multi-Cy Young winners and how they’ve been treated by Hall of Fame voters:
Seven Awards: Roger Clemens. Not elected, but obviously not because of his performance on the field.
Five Awards: Randy Johnson. Elected on the first ballot with 97.3% of the votes cast.
Four Awards: Steve Carlton, first ballot, 95.6%. Greg Maddux, first ballot, 97.2%.
Three Awards: Sandy Koufax, first ballot, 86.9%. Jim Palmer, first ballot, 92.6%. Tom Seaver, first ballot, 98.8%. Pedro Martínez, first ballot, 91.1%. Then three’s active guys who aren’t eligible yet, but are almost certainly first-ballot guys as soon as they hit the ballot (Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander).
Okay, so if you win three or more awards and aren’t implicated in PED issues, you’re not only going to be elected, but you’re going in on the first ballot. That group is 7-for-7 and will be 10-for-10 in a few years when the still-active guys become eligible.
But…
The two-time winners have a decidedly hit-and-miss track record.
Bob Gibson, first ballot, 84.0%.
Tom Glavine, first ballot, 91.9%.
Roy Halladay, first ballot, 85.4%.
Gaylord Perry, third ballot, 77.2%.
Denny McLain, not elected, lasted 3 ballots, never got more than 3 votes.
Tim Lincecum, not elected, one ballot, 9 votes.
Bret Saberhagen, not elected, one ballot, 7 votes.
Johan Santana, not elected, one ballot, 10 votes.
Not yet eligible: Kluber, Jacob deGrom, Blake Snell.
That’s a pretty distinct split, isn’t it? If you’re a two-time Cy Young winner, you’re either sailing into the Hall of Fame, typically on the first ballot, or you’re not going in at all.
So, to evaluate Kluber’s case, all we have to do is compare him to the group of 2-time winners who have been elected, and then compare him to the group of 2-time winners who were passed over. First, the elected group:
No offense to Kluber, but this is a pretty clear case of One of These Things Is Not Like The Others. I mean, he’s got a marvelous strikeout rate compared to the others, and his ERA+ is a touch better than Glavine’s and Perry’s, and he had a good walk rate, but the rest of his accomplishments fall short of the rest of the group. He just didn’t have the durability to approach their other numbers. Even Halladay, whose career was significantly shorter than Gibson’s, Glavine’s, and Perry’s, was far more durable than Kluber.
Now for the group that was passed over:
Yeah, that’s a little more like it, right? Kluber pitched a similar number of innings to Lincecum and McLain, but with a much better ERA+, fewer losses, and more WAR. He compares well to them. But then there’s Santana and Saberhagen, whose careers were significantly longer than Kluber’s, with more wins, better ERAs, and more WAR. Kluber has no case at all for having a better career than either of them, and yet each of them was bounced off the first and only Hall of Fame ballot on which they appeared.
Corey Kluber ain’t getting into the Hall of Fame, folks. In fact, if he makes it to a second ballot, it would be pretty miraculous.
The HOF may not happen, but Klubes is one of the few people in this world who can use CYAs as bookends. A tremendous competitor, it was great to watch him pitch during his Cleveland years.