Clayton Kershaw

[the 'stache]

A. No, Awards are not meaningless. They have merit. Just because sometimes they've gone to the wrong player, based on analysis with newer tools, does not completely invalidate the awards that have been handed out, especially the MVP ad Cy Young votes. Gold Gloves are more subjective; until recently, voters have not had a great set of metrics to draw knowledge from. I would assume that with early Gold Gloves (and, apparently, when it came to Derek Jeter), reputation and bias played a large role. And even now, defensive metrics are not what I would consider great. But voters weigh things like Cy Youngs and MVP awards, right or wrong, in considering induction to the Hall of Fame. And there have not been a lot of pitchers with more than three Cy Young Awards.

Say he didn't win in those three seasons. He only finished second, or third. That's five top three finishes in five years, and an historic half season in 2016 where he was the best in the game. When examining his numbers, he still clearly deserves heavy consideration for Cooperstown.

B. Where did I say that there should not be some standard? Did you read what I said? 3,000 is the benchmark for hits. Does a great player who ended his career 50 hits short of 3,000 hits get excluded because he came up short? Does a good, but not great player automatically get into Cooperstown because he got 500 home runs? You're going to see fewer and fewer players hitting 300 wins, or 3,000 hits, going forward. These old benchmarks are becoming less important with today's advanced evaluation methods.

C. Of course longevity matters. I didn't say it didn't. But longevity alone does not merit induction to the Hall of Fame.

Anybody who plays 18 years in the Major Leagues has obviously done something right. Making the Majors, alone, is hard. Playing nearly two decades is a feat in and of itself. It means some team, or teams, thought you could contribute enough where the team would be improved. But a long career of good play should not warrant a place among the immortals. Jim Kaat played 25 years. He was obviously good enough to stay in the bigs. He won 283 games. Hell, if a few things had gone differently for him, he might have crossed that magical 300 win threshold (meaning you'd automatically put him in based on your "solid gauge" argument, right?") But the guy was never a truly great pitcher. He had a couple very good seasons; finished in the top 5 of the MVP once, and 4th in a Cy Young vote. But I don't see a lot of greatness. Every player being considered for baseball immortality needs to be carefully examined. As I have said repeatedly on this forum, context is everything. A pitcher that only wins 140 games might warrant induction if he dominated the game, but played on an average team. So, too, might a guy that got 3,000 hits not warrant induction if he played 22 years, and averaged only 140 hits a season.

And I don't see any cherry picking when it comes to Pedro Martinez. He was the best pitcher in the game, and pitched at an historic level, for seven seasons. And for two years after that, he was still a top ten pitcher in the Majors. That's about a decade of greatness. This isn't Dwight Gooden in his first couple of years, we're talking about. Martinez had a 213 ERA + from 1997 to 2003.

Originally Posted by bravos4evr

A- awards are a meaningless measurement as they are based on the opinions of people who often make awful judgments (see the gold glove for example)

B- 2000-3000 innings isn't some arbitrary number, it's a solid gauge to use due to the number of prior pitchers in the HOF. If you don't set some sort of standard what then? put in a guy who had 3 great seasons then his arm fell off?

C- Longevity matters, I can see the Koufax argument being made for Kershaw (even if I am not 100% sold on it ) but at the same time supporters of it must admit that it is hedging the bet as the player never had to deal with the inevitable decline once 31-32 rolls around which makes a player's numbers appear better than they might have otherwise. The larger the sample size the more it tends to regress toward the mean, peaks are nice and all, but tend to only be used by people who have an agenda so they can ignore all the other stuff they don't like. It's also why Pedro isn't a top 10 pitcher. cherry picking the parts of a career you like and ignoring the other parts is intellectually dishonest.

D- to buttress above, who was more valuable in his career? a guy who pitches 10 years with an amazing 8 year peak? or the guy who pitches 18 years without ever posting sub 2 WAR seasons even in his late 30's and early 40's?