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Earlier, the Class of 2015 for the baseball Hall of Fame was announced.\u00a0 Some guys were no-brainers like Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson, and I was pleased to see John Smoltz make it on his first try; I always assumed he\u2019d get in, but it would be some convoluted debate on why he shouldn\u2019t get in on his first year, but whatever.<\/span><\/p>\n Ultimately, the train of thought led to general happiness that John Smoltz got in, since while at the peak of my Braves fandom, John Smoltz was still the heart and the ace of the Braves pitching squad, but also looking at both sides of the debate, namely the statistics.<\/span><\/p>\n Long story short, I don\u2019t hide the fact that I think baseball\u2019s HOF criteria and process is pretty flawed and nothing is as easy as it should be as long as a bunch of entitled writers hold the keys to the Hall, so admittedly, I was a little bit surprised to see Smoltz make it on his first year.\u00a0 What this says to me is that the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) really love a good narrative, and really put a tremendous amount of weight into the comparison to Dennis Eckersley, another Hall of Fame pitcher.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The narrative would be that with Smoltz inducted, the trifecta of the legendary Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz troika of Braves pitchers are all ensconced in the Hall of Fame as first ballot inductions.\u00a0 This was the dream that was dreamt by the franchise and all its fans, during the 90s when the trio won 369 games, took five Cy Young awards and won a World Championship together.\u00a0 This was the dream that was dreamt six years ago, when Greg Maddux retired, then Tom Glavine retired, and then a year later when John Smoltz announced his retirement.\u00a0 And this was the dream that was dreamt last year, when Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine were inducted in their first ballot, and everyone would have to wait one more year for John Smoltz\u2019s eligibility to kick in.\u00a0 And now it\u2019s been fulfilled.<\/span><\/p>\n I say the BBWAA also put a ton of weight into the comparison to Dennis Eckersley as well, because John Smoltz amassed a nice pile of saves in the three years he served as the Braves\u2019 closer, just as Eckersley went from being a starting pitcher to a closer before him.\u00a0 Usually, relief pitchers in general aren\u2019t given enough credit by the Hall of Fame, which is no more obvious than the fact that guys like Lee Smith is not in the Hall of Fame, despite the fact that he was the all-time leader in saves for quite some time, before he was ultimately passed by both Trevor Hoffman and Mariano Rivera, both of whom will probably face a good bit of debate being \u201cjust\u201d relief pitchers.<\/span><\/p>\n The saves are a bit point of contention to what spurred this train of thought, because aside from the narrative of Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz, the BBWAA still needed to justify John Smoltz\u2019s induction on the first try.\u00a0 Now Smoltz wasn\u2019t necessarily lacking in the wins department, as he retired with 213 wins in his own right, but I can\u2019t believe that 154 saves on top of that is enough to justify ignoring guys like Curt Schilling who won more championships than Smoltz did with a comparable amount of wins, and Mike Mussina, who had 270 wins in his own illustrious career.<\/span><\/p>\n Like I believe, the BBWAA loves a good narrative, and although they\u2019ll never admit it, the narrative probably had more to do with John Smoltz\u2019s induction over anything else.\u00a0 However, ultimately, what it all boiled down to in the end that despite the fact that I\u2019m pleased with Smoltz\u2019s induction, I can\u2019t help but feel bad for a guy like Mike Mussina, who is probably about as deserving as John Smoltz was, but without narrative, without a side of saves, and without any rings, simply doesn\u2019t get the BBWAA\u2019s subjective favor in the end.<\/span><\/p>\n The most incredible thing about that list of shortcomings is the fact that Mike Mussina never won any championships.\u00a0 Didn\u2019t he play for the Yankees?\u00a0 He sure did.\u00a0 But he couldn\u2019t have possibly played for the Yankees at any worse stretch than the one he played in, and that\u2019s pretty much exactly why it must suck to be Mike Mussina.<\/span><\/p>\n And this might be one of the longest introductions I\u2019ve ever written in my brog.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve always kind of been a Mike Mussina fan.\u00a0 Back when I was a casual baseball fan, I was kind of a casual fan of the Baltimore Orioles, because growing up where I did, there was no Nationals yet, I hadn\u2019t moved to Atlanta and become a Braves fan, and the O\u2019s were literally the only show in town.\u00a0 Not to mention it didn\u2019t hurt that they had Cal Ripken, Jr. playing for them then, who is basically Baseball Jesus, the Ironman and one of the best players in history all wrapped into one.<\/span><\/p>\n But ultimately, one player does a team not make, and it wasn\u2019t until I was watching some playoff games in the late 90s, did the name Mike Mussina make its way onto my radar.\u00a0 Notably a game against the Cleveland Indians in which Moose struck out 15 Indians in a lineup that had guys like Sandy Alomar, Manny Ramirez and David Justice.<\/span><\/p>\n Ultimately, I always remembered Mussina, when I couldn\u2019t remember anyone else on the O\u2019s back then, and I didn\u2019t quite grasp baseball politicking and why guys left teams and so forth, not to mention there was a time in which I was more of an anime dork to pay attention to sports as much, so it flew under my radar that Mike Mussina had left the O\u2019s following 2000, and joined the Yankees.<\/span><\/p>\n Even when I started watching baseball again, and when I was actually surprised when I saw Mike Mussina taking the hill for the Yankees, I couldn\u2019t help but wonder what went through his head whenever he was pitching.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t help that FOX was super into zooming into the face of the pitcher before every single pitch, so overthinkers like me would always try to inject narrative into facial expressions, and I would always believe that deep in that complex mind of Mike Mussina, he didn\u2019t feel like he belonged on the Yankees, although I would later learn that it was pretty much the O\u2019s or the Yankees no matter what, because he always wanted to be close to his hometown in Montoursville, PA in the offseasons.<\/span><\/p>\n Whenever I thought about Mike Mussina, I always thought about a guy that was always an awesome pitcher, but someone who just always kind of fell short.\u00a0 Often times, it wasn\u2019t always by any fault of his, because pitchers only pitch once every few days, and the team\u2019s still got to go out and win the games when they\u2019re not pitching.\u00a0 Like falling short of the World Series numerous times with the O\u2019s, all the times he was close to no-hitters, and never getting one, and the nagging subjective criteria of the 20-win season that literally eluded him until his very last season in 2008, when he won game #20 on the last game of the season.<\/span><\/p>\n But I actually had to stop and think and ultimately look up numbers to discover that in spite of his eight year tenure with the Yankees, those were all the years in which the Yankees did not win a championship.\u00a0 Meaning that even in spite of all the money and all the regular season successes, even with the Yankees, Moose still couldn\u2019t win a ring.<\/span><\/p>\n What makes things worse, and justifies why it sucks to be Mike Mussina is that the Yankees won the World Series in 2000, the year before Mike Mussina, and in 2009, after Mike Mussina had declared retirement, the Yankees finally broke through and won the World Series then.<\/span><\/p>\n Ultimately, I say that it sucks to be Mike Mussina, because in spite of the fact that pitchers can\u2019t always control whether or not they win championship rings, the oldhat and narrative-loving goons of the BBWAA still hold it against a player for not having any rings under their belt.\u00a0 With that in mind, there\u2019s a very good chance that in spite of having 270 wins, and being one of the better pitchers of all-time, a guy like Mike Mussina may never make it into the Hall of Fame, while guys like John Smoltz and probably eventually Curt Schilling do, thanks to circumstances not necessarily always in their control.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier, the Class of 2015 for the baseball Hall of Fame was announced.\u00a0 Some guys were no-brainers like Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson, and I was pleased to see John Smoltz make it on his first try; I always assumed he\u2019d get in, but it would be some convoluted debate on why he shouldn\u2019t get … Continue reading It must suck to be Mike Mussina<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,15],"class_list":["post-40091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-baseball","tag-og"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40091"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40093,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40091\/revisions\/40093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}