HOF ballot

[Archive]

Posted By: Todd

but I wanted to chime in my two cents about Bert Blyleven. While I really like the guy--he's a died in the wool homer for the Twins (reason enough to vote him in), one of your points is not truly accurate, but is widely shared.

Bert did not play for really awful teams for much of his career. The teams for which he toiled played .500 ball or better during his tenures there, with the exception of Cleveland, and he only played three seasons for the Tribe (discounting the one season where he was 2-2 before getting hurt for the year), where they were actually 52-51 in the strike year of 1981. That hardly qualifies as terrible.

In addition, during Bert's first stint with the Twins, they finished below .500 twice and, in both cases, were 2nd in hitting and 3rd from the bottom in ERA. In his return tour, they finished 20 games below .500 in 1986; however, they were dead last in ERA for the AL while 2nd in BA and 3rd in runs scored in their division. In short, the "bad teams" appear to have been bad in ways that would not have helped him much anyway, at least in the 10 years or so he played in Minnesota.

Finally, don't forget that the the 1970 Twins won 98 games. While Bert was just a rookie that year, he was only 10-9 pitching against other teams' number 4 starters, even with Carew, Oliva, Killebrew, Tovar and, for one season anyway, Rich Reese, providing support. Also, the 1988 Twins were 91-71, yet Bert stunk up the place with a 10-17 record and 5.43 ERA.

In case you couldn't tell, I just get my back up sometimes when those old Twins teams are lumped in as terrible. They were not, and for many, many years were among the AL best in both offense and defense.
Still, I hope Bert makes it, because his numbers are fairly impressive, after all.

Todd