Baseball Hall of Fame Vote

[Irwin Fletcher]

I'm glad that Larkin was elected - I think he is a deserving HOFer at his position. I would also like to see Raines and Trammell get in.

Jack Morris, however, is not a Hall of Famer. The argument that he was the best pitcher of the 1980s is based on an arbitrary span of years that basically gives Morris credit for having his career begin before 1980 and end after 1989. There is simply no reason to use this temporal criteria to evaluate a player's skill and performance. The bottom line is that Morris was above average, but not by much (about 5 percent). There are so many other clearly superior pitchers who have gotten much less HOF consideration than Morris just because their period of quality pitching didn't occur between years ending in a 0, including David Cone, Jim Kaat, Chuck Finley, Orel Hershiser, Luis Tiant, and Rick Reuschel. None of these pitchers deserve to be in the HOF, but all of them were better than Morris.

Take a look at Baseball-Reference's list of WAR leaders for pitchers. Morris has a lower career WAR than Javier Vasquez, Tom Candiotti, and Bob Welch (and I would also argue that Welch was better than Morris in the 1980s).