Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz pitched in a time when crooked numbers filled the scoreboard and home runs filled the sky.
Just not on the days when they pitched.
So on Tuesday, more than 400 Hall of Fame voters told them, loud and clear: They noticed. We noticed. You couldn't help but notice what true pitching greatness looked like when you saw it, especially back then.
That was undoubtedly the most important thing we learned Tuesday, on the day the Hall of Fame election results were announced and, incredibly, four players made the cut in the same election for the first time in six decades: Johnson, Martinez, Smoltz and Craig Biggio.
But that wasn't all we took away from this process. So here are five things we learned from the 2015 Hall of Fame election:
1. Starting pitchers are back on the radar screen
In the 14 Hall of Fame elections from 2000 to 2013, a total of 21 players were anointed as Cooperstown material: six outfielders, three shortstops, two first basemen, two second basemen, two third basemen (if you count Paul Molitor), two catchers and three relief pitchers (if we consider Dennis Eckersley to be mostly a bullpen megastar). ...
And exactly one starting pitcher (Bert Blyleven).
Well, if you thought you saw a trend in there someplace, ummmmm, never mind.
Over the past 12 months, we've now had four starters elected: Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine last year, the Big Unit and his little buddy Pedro this year. (And obviously Smoltz got in mostly for his work as a starter, too. So you could argue that's five.) Now here's why that's so incredible:
• We'd seen only four starting pitchers make it in the previous 20 elections combined: Blyleven, Nolan Ryan, Don Sutton and Phil Niekro.
• We've had only two whole decades when more than four starting pitchers were elected by the writers -- the 1990s (8) and 1970s (6). Before that, though, there were only six pure starters elected in all the elections between 1938 (Grover Cleveland Alexander) and 1972 (Sandy Koufax) put together.
• But, of course, Johnson, Martinez, Maddux and Glavine weren't merely elected. They all rolled in on the first ballot. And that's amazing, considering there had been only five starters elected on the first ballot in the previous 41 years: Ryan (1999), Steve Carlton (1994), Tom Seaver (1992), Jim Palmer (1990) and Bob Gibson (1981).
• Oh, and one more thing: Before last year, we hadn't seen multiple starting pitchers make it as first-ballot Hall of Famers in the same year since the first election, in 1936 (Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson). And now, naturally, it's happened two years in a row. Hey, of course it has.
So is this some kind of fluke or crazy coincidence? Sure, to some degree. Clearly, it's a fortunate act of timing when five starting pitchers this historically great retire and reach the ballot this close together. But ...
What's not a coincidence is that all five of these aces did their thing in an age of offensive insanity. We've had a tough time, as voters, knowing what to make of many of the hitters responsible for all that offensive madness. But obviously, it's clearer than ever now that voters don't harbor the same uncertainty when it comes to evaluating the greatest starting pitchers of that era -- as long as they're not named "Clemens," that is.
2. We've come a long way since 2013
So is it possible we all overreacted to the seemingly momentous election in 2013, when voters looked at one of the most historically accomplished group of Hall candidates ever -- and elected none of them?
Hmmm. Apparently.
In the two elections since, we've seen a total of seven players elected -- all of them except Biggio on the first ballot. And how often has that happened in the past? How about never -- not under the modern voting system (which was implemented in 1958), anyway.
There has been only one other time in that period when multiple first-ballot candidates were elected in back-to-back years. And that was a quarter-century ago, in 1989-90, when Johnny Bench, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Palmer and Joe Morgan earned those honors. But never has there been six first-timers elected that close together.
And even if we toss the first-ballot factor aside, we'd seen only five previous instances where five players were elected by the writers in any two-year span, on any ballot. But never six. Let alone seven.
So thankfully, we no longer have to worry about the prospect of years and years of empty podiums in Cooperstown. And that's a relief. But does that mean the issues we reacted to so strongly in 2013 have now disappeared? You're kidding, right? (More on that later.)
3. Randy and Pedro are the best tag team since ...
Uhhh, the Wild Samoans?
Wait. Wrong sport. What I meant to say is that Johnson and Martinez might be the two greatest starting pitchers to get elected in the same year since Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson -- in the aforementioned first Hall election.
Or possibly since, well, last year (Maddux/Glavine).
But I thought it would be fun to try to figure that out. So start here: Pretty much by any standard, the best four rotation duos elected by the writers in the same year would be these four:
Mathewson-Johnson (1936)
Lefty Grove-Carl Hubbell (1947)
Maddux-Glavine (2014)
Johnson-Martinez (2015)
The tough part, however, is putting them in some sort of order of greatness. So I ranked all pitchers in history who worked at least 2,000 innings in these three advanced categories: ERA+ (which adjusts for eras and ballparks), Adjusted Pitching Runs (which converts a pitcher's contributions to Runs Above Average) and Lee Sinins' Runs Saved Above Average (self-explanatory). Here's how that turned out:
If we then average out those rankings, the top four ranks this way:
1. Johnson-Mathewson
2. Johnson-Martinez
3. Grove-Hubbell
4. Maddux-Glavine
You'd get the same rankings if you added up career wins above replacement, incidentally. So the only way you'd get a different order is by totaling up wins. That would bump Maddux and Glavine (660 wins combined) up to second place, and knock the Unit and Pedro (522) all the way down to fourth.
But we have so many better ways to evaluate pitchers these days, right? Why not use them? And if we do, we find that Randy and Pedro really are the best pair of starters elected together since the first election. Think about that for a minute. Wow.
4. Magic numbers aren't what they used to be
If there had been any doubt before this that the magic Hall of Fame numbers of yesteryear -- 3,000 hits, 300 wins, 500 homers, even 600 homers -- were no longer the meaningful guideposts of old, this election sure sealed that deal.
Gary Sheffield hit 509 home runs. He got 11.7 percent of the vote -- barely avoiding the lowest total ever for a first-ballot, 500-homer man. (Rafael Palmeiro, at 11.0, still holds that prestigious record.)
Sammy Sosa hit 609 home runs -- and had more 60-homer seasons (three) than any player in history. This was his third year on the ballot. He got 12.5 percent his first time around. He got 7.2 percent last year. He was down to 6.6 percent this year -- meaning he's in jeopardy of falling off the ballot forever. That would have been incomprehensible once. Not anymore.
Mark McGwire mashed 583 homers -- and broke the most romantic record in sports. It's not going to earn him an all-expense-paid trip to Cooperstown anytime soon. He got 23.5 percent of the vote in his first year on the ballot. He has now sunk all the way to 10.0 percent. Anyone see that coming in September of 1998?
Biggio wasn't a home run hitter. But he did get 3,060 hits. That used to be a ticket for automatic first-time induction. But not for him. He finally made it Tuesday -- on the third try. Before him, no member of the 3,000-hit club without a large performance-enhancing drug cloud hovering over them had gotten elected later than the first ballot since Paul Waner in 1952. The only other members to take three ballots or more are Waner and Eddie Collins (elected in 1939).
So what does that tell us? That 3,000 hits used to be a stat for legends. Now it's just another "counting stat." Incredible.
But it isn't merely the magic numbers for hitters that aren't the same. The world is changing for pitchers, too, as voters finally get the memo that "wins" don't tell the same story they told for more than a century.
So Pedro Martinez, who wound up with only 219 "wins," still breezed into the Hall with an eye-popping 91.1 percent of the vote -- as well he should have, by the way. But just so you recognize the historic context of this, you should know that only two other pure starting pitchers whose careers began after World War II have been elected by the writers without winning 220 games. One is Sandy Koufax (165). The other is his old Dodgers cohort, Don Drysdale (209). And that's it.
But here's the true indication of how voters are looking past "wins" all of a sudden: Let's bump up the number to 250. Or 275. Or even beyond. You know the last pure starting pitcher before Martinez to get elected without winning at least 287 games? How about Catfish Hunter (224) -- in 1987.
So maybe Martinez will also turn out to be a special case, à la Koufax or Hunter, a guy who was elected for his peak and not his win total. But tell that to Mike Mussina.
5. The system is still flawed
Just because four great players rolled into Cooperstown on Tuesday, you should not read that to mean the process doesn't have significant issues. And they need to be addressed. Immediately.
I spent much of my column Monday discussing the impact, on my own ballot, of the 10-player limit we've come to call the Rule of 10. But here's the impact that rule continues to have on players like Edgar Martinez and Alan Trammell.
Players like Blyleven, whose cases were greatly aided by the insights modern baseball metrics provide, used to be able to build momentum toward election from year to year. Not because they got better. Or trendier. But because time can lend greater perspective. And that's OK.
But that was a lot easier when worthy candidates weren't piling up on this ballot like used fenders in a junkyard. Nowadays, those candidates on the fringes tend to go backward, not forward. And Tuesday was one more reminder of that.
Only a half-dozen candidates on this ballot saw their vote totals rise by more than a handful of votes. And players like Tim Raines (plus-39), Mike Piazza (plus-29) and, especially, Curt Schilling (plus-48) were the biggest beneficiaries. But on the other side of that spectrum, the candidacies of players like Martinez, Trammell, Fred McGriff and Larry Walker are now in grave danger.
Just two years ago, Edgar got nearly 36 percent of the vote. He's lost 56 votes since then. Despite a four-vote jump this year, he's still wallowing at 27.0 percent. And he has only four years left on this ballot.
Trammell is stuck in an almost identical bog, but with only one year of eligibility to make up nearly 300 votes. He got 36.8 percent in 2012. He's now lost 74 votes since then. And even though he picked up 4 percentage points in this election, he's still down to 25.1. And that's trouble.
McGriff and Walker once were attracting 23.9 and 22.9 percent, respectively. They found themselves at 12.9 and 11.8 Tuesday. Without making a single out!
Now you can easily argue that a player who still needs 200 to 300 votes to get elected wasn't ever going to get elected anyway. Except that's not true.
Once, Blyleven got 14.2 percent of the vote, in his second Hall of Fame election. That's a lower percentage than all of these players have gotten in multiple elections: Schilling, Mussina, Edgar, McGriff, Trammell and Walker. Jeff Kent did better than that last year. And I'm not even going to get into McGwire, Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens.
The difference is: Blyleven had time, in a different climate, to change minds and build steam toward election. Will any of the players I just mentioned have that chance -- even though the stampede of great first-year candidates is about to slow over the next few years?
I don't see how, not as long as the Rule of 10 remains in effect, anyway. And even a change making it a Rule of 12, as has been proposed by the baseball writers, won't help some of these men.
What needs to happen here is a more fundamental change, to a voting system like the one proposed by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post Dispatch: No more check boxes next to the names on this ballot. Just a yes box and a no box.
That sort of system would return Hall of Fame voting to what it used to be, what it's supposed to be. All we should be asking ourselves is: "Was this player a Hall of Famer or not?" Not: "Am I up to 10 names yet?"
Let's right that wrong. Not for the sake of voters like me. For the sake of Alan Trammell, Edgar Martinez and Fred McGriff. Before it's too late.