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In a recent blog entry, Rob "Sweetspot" Neyer, spurred by an email from a reader, discussed Andy Pettitte's chances for being elected to the Hall of Fame. Neyer understandably writes to his audience -- discussing issues such as Pettitte's win-loss record, his postseason play, voters perhaps having problems with Pettitte's admission of PED use, lack of awards, "gut feelings" and so on. Still, I was surprised that Neyer, a guy whose sabermetric savviness has lead many of his readers to other ways of thinking about baseball and numbers, didn't at least mention Sean "CHONE" "Rally" Smith's recent posting of his Historical Pitching Wins Above Replacement (1953-), an excellent companion to his earlier posting of the same numbers for position players 1955-. Given some of my own recent posts about projected pitching wins above replacement (WAR), why don't we use the same methods to look at historical issues?

First of all, you should really check out Rally's new historical pitching pages, they are quite cool, as is his site in general. I really can't believe stuff like this is free. I'm a bit jealous, because I had wanted to do my own pitching WAR thing for a while, as if that was ever going to happen (to that extent)?

But why not do it an a smaller scale, anyway? After all, there are many different ways of judging the value of pitcher performance, such as I discuss here and here. I took some of what I liked best about those methods and applied them to this seasons pitching projections in this series. So to look at Pettitte, I'll do the same basic thing. In short, I use tools such as FIP, PythagenPat winning %, separate replacement levels for the AL and NL, Patriot's park factors, adjusting for the way the pitcher influences the run environment and more. I won't burden you with all the details again -- you can find them by clicking on some of the previous links to earlier posts of mine.

This differs from Rally's methods, but this should not be taken as as an implicit or explicit criticism of Rally's or anyone else's way of valuing pitching performance. It's simply a different way of doing it. One can debate these things, of course, but just oon face value the differences can simply be seen as varying perspectives (no, I'm not endorsing total relativism here, professor). I'm don't know what Rally does step-by-step, but he briefly discusses his methods here. Some differences between what he does on his pages and what I'm doing here is that he uses RA rather than FIP, but accounts for the "Fielding" portion of run prevention by adjusting for the defense behind the pitcher, instead of using something like FIP. He also figures pitcher fielding into WAR, which is very cool. I know that he adjusts replacement level for AL and NL, but I'm not sure how he does it exactly -- I just use different win%'s. Again, I'm not here to say one or the other is better, simply to "do it myself" and see where I end up.

Quick note: for ease of access, I generated the data (FIP, IP, etc.) using the freely available Baseball Databank data imported into MySQL (thanks, Colin!). So some of my numbers may differ from Rally's or "official" statistics (this may also due to the different ways of calculating FIP, if you compare my numbers to FanGraphs or THT). The differences shouldn't be too significant, though. Also, Pettitte does have some brief relief appearances here and there that I wasn't able to sort out in my database. I don't think they're so significant as to skew the numbers significantly for my purposes, though.

So here's Andy Pettitte's regular season numbers.

For a guy who always seemed to be "on the fence" with Yankees fans in his first run in New York (cf. the references to "Good Andy" and "Bad Andy"), that's not too shabby at all. I suppose someone might point out that Pettitte was at his "worst" during the "championship" years of 1998-2000, while having his best seasons in the "off" years of 1997 and 2001, and thus had an "unclutch" career, but, well, I assume such people probably don't read my stuff anyway (I'm not worried, my millions of fans worldwide make me feel just great!). Rally's page has Pettitte at 45.3 WAR through 2008. 10 wins difference is significant or not depending on how you look at it. I don't know enough about how Rally figures in fielding (aside from the pitcher's own fielding numbers -- Pettitte is at -13 runs over about 13 seasons, so slightly below average). FIP, of course, is supposed to eliminate that . I'd say we're in the same ballpark (har har), but 10 wins would make a difference in how you see Pettitte's Hall of Game case. And, as you know, Cooperstown's gatekeepers take WAR and whatnot  very seriously when voting someone in, or not.

Is 55 enough to "get in" to a truly merit-based Hall of Fame? Well, we haven't considered postseason impact. I'm sure sure how to do it fairly, although it seems it should "count" in some way. This and other issues about WAR and the Hall of Fame are helpfully discussed in this Book Blog thread. But for now, we'll stick just with regular season stuff. In that Book Blog post, Tango takes four pitchers of roughly the same generation as Pettitte (maybe a bit older), and gives their WAR according to Rally:

+70 Schilling
+67 Glavine
+65 Brown
+65 Smoltz

These guys, other than maybe Smoltz  and Glavine are considered borderline by most "regular" writers, at least that's my impression from what I've read. So if these guys are borderline with 65-70 WAR, even if they get in, Pettitte seems like a longshot even at my 55 WAR figure, although he's still working on it and might get to 60. Add in being on memorable teams... hmmm... still seems hard to say he should get in. And I'm speaking for myself, there. And no, I don't believe in the "if player x, let's call him J. Rice, no, that's too obvious, let's call him Jim R., is in, then [other player] should get in" arguments. Rock deserves to be in the hall whether Jim Rice got voted or not.

So the answer is... I dunno. It isn't as "evidential," but Neyer might be on to something when he writes

Essentially, your gut's telling you that Pettitte doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame because we think of the Hall of Fame as a place for great players, and the stark truth is that Pettitte has rarely been great.... Pettitte's a better candidate than I thought, but I don't believe I could vote for him because I don't believe he's done enough great things.

Neyer is perhaps touching on another issue that is important to "greatness discussions" (apart from the baseball Hall of Fame and all of its accompanying silliness): peak value. That's something I'll just leave aside for future discussion.

In conclusion, let's take a look at my WAR figures for a sometimes teammate of Pettitte who is mentioned as another potential Hall of Famer.

Um, yeah, that's a nice career. My career total for Mussina is quite close to Rally's, which is 74.8. If I wanted to take more time, I'd make little graphs, but this "short second bloggy post of the week" is more like the Full Monty already. This looks like a Hall of Fame career to me, and he didn't need that final 20-win season to justify it. So there's a guy fit for the Hall. Pettitte's not there yet, at least by this measure. But that's more than half of the fun: the arguments.