Mike Mussina retired after the 2008 season nearly at the top of his game. Despite a 20-win season, his first in the majors, a more-than-respectable 3.37 ERA, his seventh Gold Glove and a sixth-place finish in the American League Cy Young race, Mussina called it a career at the age of 39. The next step for a pitcher who has Mussina's résumé is typically a July speech in upstate New York. But in this case, he has struck out with Hall of Fame voters to the same degree that batters used to flail at his trademark knuckle-curve. And, unfortunately, the third time on the Hall ballot doesn't appear to be the charm.
The stunning thing about Mussina's case to make the Hall of Fame is how easy it is to support using either traditional statistics or modern analytics. Mussina is not Cy Young and he's not Greg Maddux, but the Hall of Fame hasn't been made up of players you can argue to be the best of all time at their position since the first couple of years.
Mussina finished his career with 270 wins, and while I personally go for the more analytical case, pitchers with 270 wins tend to end up in the Hall of Fame. Starting with the modern era's typical boundary of 1901 -- baseball's competition was inconsistent in early decades -- Mussina's 270 wins is the fourth-most of any non-Hall of Fame pitcher. One of those pitchers is Roger Clemens, who is outside of the Hall for reasons that have nothing to do with his career performance. The other two, Tommy John and Jim Kaat, were more accumulators than Mussina ever was: Kaat had 13 more wins in 89 more starts than Mussina; for John, those numbers are 18 and 164. That's not just due to team quality either -- Mussina's career ERA+ of 123 (a measure of park-neutral ERA relative to league, with 100 being average) is more impressive than Kaat's 108 or John's 111.
In other words, if you only go by traditional stats, wins and ERA, Mussina is the best pitcher not in the Hall of Fame who doesn't have any PED issues.
Isn't being the best player at a position not in the Hall a convincing argument for that player? It's not as if the Hall is overflowing with modern pitchers. I was born in 1978, nearly 40 years ago, and there are only five pitchers in the Hall who debuted during my lifetime (Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz).
The analytical case for Mussina is easy to make, as well. The negative aspects of a measure like wins above replacement tend to be fairly insignificant when looking at long careers -- issues like team defense become a smaller issue over the long haul. Of the top 30 pitchers in MLB history by WAR (baseball-reference), 26 are in the Hall of Fame. Mussina ranks 24th, with the other non-HoFers being the aforementioned Clemens, Curt Schilling, who should also be in the Hall of Fame, and Jim McCormick, who pitched mostly in the uneven early days of the National League. By WAR, Mussina ranks just above Bob Gibson and just below Fergie Jenkins.
Are you worried that career WAR greatly rewards quantity over quality? This is not a frivolous concern. Luckily, analyst Jay Jaffe has attempted to deal with this issue, developing a measure dubbed JAWS that mixes a player's career WAR with their seven-year peak WAR. Mussina still doesn't fall out of the Top 30, with the 28th-best JAWS rating of all time.
Maybe simply being one of the 30 best starting pitchers of all time doesn't make your personal Hall of Fame. That's not the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, which passed 30 pitchers many decades ago.
It would be wrong, however, to blame Mussina's lack of election to the Hall of Fame on the voters. The sad truth is that the Hall of Fame's non-guidance on issues such as performance-enhancing drug use have resulted in a situation in which there are far too many easy Hall of Fame candidates for far too few slots. The Hall has exacerbated this situation by refusing the pleas of the Baseball Writer's Association of America (BBWAA) to increase the number of slots on the ballot. Perhaps even more puzzling is the Hall's sudden decision to reduce the number of years on a ballot for a player to 10, the equivalent of a hospital deciding the solution to an overworked emergency room is to have security escort some of the patients outside.
You could literally induct 10 players this year and still have a ballot of 10 good candidates next year, with Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and Vladimir Guerrero debuting on the ballot.
And no, this still wouldn't dilute the quality of the Hall of Fame. In 1930, with 16 teams, there were 53 future Hall of Famers who appeared at the plate at least once. Today, there are 30 teams -- can you imagine there being 100 future Hall of Famers active right now? That's not a fluke, either. There were 44 active Hall of Famers in 1935 and 51 in 1925. Even with these bloated numbers, MLB still has a Veterans Committee that every third year focuses only on the pre-integration era.
Every year, there are too many good Hall of Fame candidates on the ballot, and with 75 percent of the ballot needed to induct a player, this results in writers having to leave players they think are Hall of Famers off the ballot, hindering their chances at induction. Some writers, such as Detroit News writer Lynn Henning, end up in a situation in which they feel it's better to abstain than be part of a broken process.
What the Hall's mess adds up to is the situation that author Bill James wrote about in 1994 in "The Politics of Glory." To paraphrase James, one of the biggest dangers the Hall of Fame faces is a system that no longer has the capability of truly honoring a player, an institution that becomes defined by doing a better job insulting the rejected than honoring the worthy.
As an institution, the Hall of Fame faces a serious problem, one it has made little attempt to address. Until a thorough overhaul of the voting process takes place to make sure as many players deserving of baseball's highest honor receive it, many of this generation's best players will not be giving one last speech to an excited crowd.
For this fan, with a love of baseball that borders on compulsive, that's truly sad. Baseball is awesome enough that we need to have an honor worthy of baseball's greatest players. And that list should include Michael Cole Mussina, the pride of Montoursville, Pennsylvania.