NEW YORK -- Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz -- baseball's three newly minted Hall of Fame pitchers -- had a flair for demoralizing hitters during their illustrious major league careers. Now that they have officially reached the pinnacle of the profession, they're happy to dispense with that whole "game-face" nonsense and display their less intimidating sides for public consumption.
There was a fraternal bond on display during a news conference at the stately Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday. It was evident when Smoltz stood on a chair to plant the Hall of Fame cap on Johnson, right before the Big Unit needed multiple attempts to get the buttons on his ceremonial jersey aligned properly. When Johnson wasn't poking fun at Martinez for being "5-8 or 5-9," Pedro was poking fun at himself for being a 43-year-old guy with a plaque and a legacy to maintain.
"I'm extremely honored to be part of this and be looked at as an 'old goat,'" Martinez said, laughing. "That's what we've all become."
Boys will be boys -- except when they're breaking down barriers and helping to blaze trails.
Before the Baseball Writers' Association of America broke down and elected Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine to the Hall of Fame as a tandem last year -- and voted in Johnson, Martinez and Smoltz along with former Houston Astros mainstay Craig Biggio on Tuesday -- the pitching fraternity was badly in need of some love and understanding from Cooperstown. In the 14 Hall of Fame elections from 2000 through 2013, Bert Blyleven and Dennis Eckersley (a pitching hybrid in the truest sense) were the only starters to receive the requisite 75 percent for induction. As ESPN's Jayson Stark points out, this year's onslaught of inductees is a morale booster for pitchers in a variety of ways.
Now it will take time and a willingness for the electorate to keep an open mind for the momentum to endure. Johnson and Martinez were slam-dunk choices. But are voters willing to cut other starting pitchers some slack for numbers amassed during the performance-enhancing drug era, during which six of the eight 60-plus home run seasons in history went into the books and offense was off the charts? The new electees certainly hope so.
"It's about diving into the information and changing the outlook of how you view that information," Smoltz said. "Each era is different. Certainly today is a lot different than it was 20 years ago. If [the voters] make the time and effort to do that, I think it's going to be beneficial for some pitchers.
"Honestly, it was one of the most challenging, difficult times to pitch. For each guy who did it and held his head up high, it was rewarding. Never once during that time did I think of anything other than, 'How do I get it done, how do I get better and how can I win games?'"
With five elite starters having graduated to Cooperstown in two years, attention now shifts to Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina, three pitchers with impressive résumés and the inevitable reservations and roadblocks affecting their candidacies.
Clemens' 354 wins, seven Cy Young Awards and 139.4 career WAR make him an obvious choice, but he's a central character in the same PED morality play that's kept Barry Bonds out of the Hall. Mussina won 270 games, but he has no Cy Young in his portfolio and suffers from the perception in some quarters that he belongs in the "Hall of Very Good." And while Schilling has the big-name profile, the bloody sock and the sterling postseason résumé, he comes up short in the most tradition-bound statistical measure with only 216 wins.
Voters will ultimately have to bore in deeper to justify saying "yes." According to Baseball-Reference.com, both Mussina (82.7) and Schilling (80.7) have considerably higher career wins above replacement (WAR) than Smoltz's 66.5. The same selflessness and versatility that Smoltz displayed during his sojourn from the rotation to the bullpen from 2001 to 2004 actually put a crimp in his career WAR.
Schilling can point to his 4.38 career strikeout-to-walk ratio, the best since 1900, while Mussina's durability and reliability were evidenced by 11 career 200-inning seasons and a 3.58 strikeout-to-walk ratio compiled during 18 seasons in the always-daunting American League East. But those distinctions have yet to resonate (in a major way) with voters. Although Mussina improved from 20.3 percent to 24.6 percent in his second year on the ballot and Schilling made a more noticeable improvement -- from 29.2 to 39.2 percent -- they're still a long way from paydirt.
Martinez's public comments on Clemens reflect some of the internal conflicts that Hall of Fame players share with beleaguered baseball writers, who are often pilloried for their choices. Upon his induction into the Red Sox Hall of Fame last summer, Martinez gave his blessing to both Clemens and Bonds for Cooperstown.
"With all due respect to everybody that votes, I'll have to say Roger and Barry Bonds are two guys that I think had enough numbers before anything [about their supposed PED use] came out to actually earn a spot in the Hall of Fame," Martinez said. "I'm not quite sure 100 percent how close they will be before all the things came out. But in my heart, if you asked me before any of that, I would've said, 'Yes, 100 percent, without looking back.'"
Nevertheless, Martinez has been an outspoken critic of PED use in baseball, and there's a distinct implication in the air each time he reflects upon his own career with pride over his insistence on playing "clean." Many voters probably will choose to interpret Martinez's comments in a way that jibes with their own agendas.
Ultimately, the starting pitchers who make their mark through time tend to stick together. While Martinez isn't lobbying for any specific candidates, he put in a general plug for his pitching brethren who spent the 1990's and the early 2000's competing against bulked-up sluggers, in small parks with meager foul territory, while throwing baseballs that jumped off the bat.
"As pitchers, we know what we go through," Martinez said. "It's not easy what we do. I hope those [other] guys make it, because they battled their way through it. For the guys coming after us, [I ask the voters to] please consider them."
In the end, the voters will have to determine whether the 2014 and 2015 Hall classes are part of a Cooperstown pitching renaissance or the start of another extended fallow period. It's going to be a long time before Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw appear on a ballot.