A year ago, Wade Miley went to camp with the Brewers as a 31-year-old minor-league free agent. He was coming off a disastrous season that saw him finish with a 128 ERA- with the Orioles. In truth, Miley wasn’t quite that bad — he also finished with an xFIP- of 106. But even 106 is unspectacular, and going into the season, expectations were modest. It wasn’t even guaranteed Miley would ever find a spot.

He wound up making 16 starts in a Brewers uniform, plus four more (technically) in the playoffs. In one sense, the Brewers got what they might’ve expected. Once again, Miley finished with an xFIP- of 106. But then, his ERA- settled at a ridiculous 63. In other words, while his xFIP- stayed exactly the same, he cut his ERA- in half. Miley finished with a better park-adjusted ERA than Corey Kluber. He finished with a better park-adjusted ERA than Gerrit Cole. He finished with a better park-adjusted ERA than Clayton Kershaw. The best and worst thing about baseball is that it doesn’t always have to make sense. Through one lens, Miley pitched as the ace of his team.

And now he’s going to take his pitching to Houston. Miley has signed with the Astros for a year and $4.5 million, with another $0.5 million in incentives. The Astros are likely to lose Dallas Keuchel. In Miley, they’re hoping to find an approximation.

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On Sunday, the Mets continued an active weekend of trades designed to add bench-quality pieces to their big league roster, sending several low-level minor leaguers to Houston for power-hitting corner bat J.D. Davis. Here’s the whole deal:

The Mets get:

J.D. Davis, 3B/1B/OF
Cody Bohanek, INF

The Astros get:

Luis Santana, 2B
Ross Adolph, CF
Scott Manea, C

Davis is talented — he has plus-plus raw power, a plus-plus arm, and can play several positions, though none especially well — but it’s hard to see how he fits in New York without taking playing time from players who have greater long-term potential and might also be just as good as Davis is right now. He doesn’t complement Todd Frazier or Peter Alonso — the two players projected to start for the Mets at Davis’ primary positions — in any way. Like Frazier and Alonso, Davis hits right-handed and isn’t a good infield defender.

He does have experience in the outfield corners, an area where the Mets need warm bodies, so perhaps we’ll see Davis used as a platoon or situational corner outfielder as a means of getting him at-bats against left-handed pitching. Davis hit .348/.419/.583 against southpaws last year and .344/.401/.800 in 2017, with most of that production coming at Triple-A Fresno. He could get some starts against lefties in situations where the Mets can hide him on defense. They could mix him with Juan Lagares or Keon Broxton depending on if the game state dictates a need for offense or defense, which might move Michael Conforto or Brandon Nimmo to center field once in a while.

This assumes Davis, who turns 26 in April, can hit big league pitching, something he hasn’t done in a fairly limited sample; he owns a .194/.260/.321 line in 181 career big league plate appearances. Houston, an organization at the forefront at understanding how to implement swing changes, doesn’t seem to have been able to alter Davis’ batted ball profile in a way that would enable him to start showing his raw power in games. A power-hitting platoon outcome seems reasonable to hope for, though Davis’ true talent level is probably closer to a defensively-limited bench bat, one that’s easier to roster in the American League and isn’t a great fit on this Mets roster as it’s currently composed.

Cody Bohanek, also acquired by the Mets, is an interesting, late-blooming athletic flier who is probably just an org guy. He played safety and corner at Marist High School in Chicago and had college football aspirations until the University of Illinois-Chicago gave him the opportunity to play baseball. Two-sport, cold weather prospects are apt to improve later than their warm weather peers who play more baseball, and that’s what happened with Bohanek, who had a statistical breakout as a senior and impressed scouts at NCAA Regionals. He was a 30th round senior sign in 2017.

Bohanek split 2018 between Low and Hi-A. He walked a lot and has a proficient, versatile infield glove. He may be a bench infielder at peak and the two-sport, small school, cold weather pedigree makes him slightly mysterious and interesting.

I like Houston’s end of this deal. Tyler White, who lifts the ball consistently and has a track record of hitting for power against big league pitching, made Davis offensively redundant in Houston, as the team didn’t seem interested in exploring a two-way role for Davis, who closed in college. They add three up-the-middle defenders who have performed statistically. The best of them is 19-year-old Dominican second baseman Luis Santana, who is coming off a domestic debut at advanced rookie-level Kingsport where he hit .348/.446/.471 with more walks than strikeouts.

A stocky, curvaceous 5-foot-8, Santana crowds the plate so much that he’s practically straddling it, and his idiosyncratic, low-ball swing enables him to impact pitches that cross the plate beneath his chest as he leans over it. It’s weird, but it works, and Santana looks like he’s going to be a plus hitter who also has a discerning eye for the strike zone, and whose plate crowding gets him hit by pitches so often that it actually matters. Santana has been hit in 4% of his 611 career plate appearances, which is nearly twice the career rate of active big league HBP leader Shin-Soo Choo (132 HBP, 1.9%) who became the active leader when Chase Utley (204 HBP, 2.5%) retired.

Athletically, Santana fits at second and third base. His body is pretty maxed out and he’s not likely to grow into sizable raw power, but he runs well, has infield-worthy hands and an average arm. The combination of his defensive profile and promising feel to hit make him a very intriguing prospect. He was slated to be the 10th ranked Mets prospect on our upcoming list as a 40+ FV player, and I think he’s the best individual talent involved in this deal.

The Astros also received Scott Manea and Ross Adolph. Adolph,22, is an interesting small-school sleeper who hit .322/.445/.654 as a junior at Toledo, then signed for $125,000 as a 2018 12th rounder. He continued to rake at short-season Brooklyn after signing, hitting .276/.348/.509 and swiping 14 bases (on 17 attempts) in 60 games.

He’s an above-average runner with good instincts in center field, and there’s a chance he can stay there. He could be a 50 bat with gap power who is playable in center, which would make him at least a viable big league fourth outfielder. He was going to be a prominent part of the Mets prospect lists’ honorable mention section. We whiffed on him pre-draft, but our sources who saw him in pro ball raved and I’m very interested to see how he hits in full-season ball next year because I think the industry’s error bars on small school bats are pretty large due to the quality of pitching they face.

Manea, 23, was drafted by Seattle out of high school but didn’t sign. He transferred to St. Petersburg College in Florida after his freshman year at NC State, but wasn’t drafted after his sophomore year despite being eligible. He had a good summer for the Wachusett Dirt Dawgs of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League and was eligible to sign as an undrafted free agent, which he did with the Mets in late July of 2016.

He’s a heavy-bodied catcher with power who hit .261/.368/.432 at Low-A Columbia last year. Manea’s a below-average receiver who lets his target sag as his pitcher starts to deliver the ball home, which means he has to come back to that spot with his glove, creating a lot of unnecessary movement that isn’t great for stealing strikes. He’s also a well-below average athlete and thrower, so he probably can’t catch.

The Astros have, in several instances, traded players on the periphery of their big league roster (Teoscar Hernandez, David Paulino, Ramon Laureano, etc.) for prospects, and this is another example. I understand the Mets desire to add high-probability contributors to their big league roster, even if they’re low-impact players, but moving a prospect like Santana for the kind of role player readily available on the open market feels short-sighted.

Like most teams that win the World Series, the 2018 Astros did not complete the two-peat, winning 103 games during the regular season but falling to the Red Sox in five, thus keeping the 2000 Yankees as the most recent team to win more than one World Series in a row. Russia may be the stumbling block for empire-builders, but despite arguably having a better team than in 2017, the Astros’ failed to repeat due to the implacable foe of World Series champions: a ten-team playoff in a sport in which teams are relatively close together in quality.

The Setup

Well, the 2017 Astros won the World Series. Which, if you didn’t already know that for some odd reason, you should probably at least have noticed unless you have a strange habit of not reading the opening paragraph to articles.

In my not-so-humbly-expressed opinion, borne from decades as a baseball fan and a couple more as a curiously paid observer, the greatest danger facing any championship team is inaction. When everything has gone right and a team has won baseball’s top honor, there’s a real tendency for that team to decide that each and every player on that championship roster helped lead the franchise to the fated promised land, like some sort of strange, baseball-specific Calvinism. Teams like the 2002 Angels, the 2005 White Sox, and the 2015 Royals all had disappointing follow-ups to their trophy runs and faded out of contention quickly.

While 2017’s follow-up wasn’t the most action-packed one for the Astros, as the team didn’t have many glaring weaknesses, they did still find it in themselves to pull of one off the offseason’s biggest trades, picking up Gerrit Cole from the Pittsburgh Pirates and making a deep rotation even deeper. The trade was a bit of a dice roll; Cole had never really fulfilled his early promise in Pittsburgh except for one shining season. But Houston thought the short-term upside in Cole was greater than the long-term value in the pitchers they gave up to acquire him, and showed they weren’t afraid to continue to tinker with the rotation, even leaving Collin McHugh in the bullpen.

With a deep rotation made deeper by the addition of Cole, and the quartet of Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, and George Springer all still in their twenties for a few more years, Houston, like the other large-market teams, largely avoided dipping their toes into a weak free agent market.

The Projection

Houston didn’t have as obvious a cakewalk as the Cleveland Indians coming into the 2018 season, but very few saw a lot of real resistance for them in the AL West. Of the 40 FanGraphs writers and contributors who made 2018 staff predictions entering the season, 38 chose the Astros to win the West. In ESPN’s panel, 29-of-29 picked Houston.

And the ZiPS SuperComputer© didn’t beg to differ. While the computer thought the Angels had at least some path to a division title if certain not-too-crazy things went right for them, with a 95-67 projected record for Houston, ZiPS projected the Astros to have the second-easiest divisional crown, with 83.9% odds of winning, just behind the Indians at 84.4%.

The reasons for the optimism were, in foresight and hindsight, quite obvious. The Astros were overflowing with awesome, deep talent and had the resources to trade for in-season help if UCL tears somehow proved to be contagious. The team’s weak spot in 2017, designated hitter, looked to be an improved if not a league-beating spot, with the retirement of Carlos Beltran. And in any case, there wasn’t a lot of help available in free agency at that spot.

The Results

Somewhat boringly, a lot of things went right for the Astros; 103-win teams tend to have more than their fair share of breaks go their way, simply because lucky 100-win teams are more likely than unlucky 106-win ones.

That’s not to say everything fell on the sunny side for Houston. Some wounds were self-inflicted. The team made the controversial decision to acquire then-suspended reliever Roberto Osuna at the end of July, a move that read to many as unforced error, given the nature of Osuna’s suspension and the availability of other relievers on the market.

Others were just the way the game goes. Josh Reddick didn’t repeat the best season of his career and Yuli Gurriel’s power dropped off (not surprising for a 34-year-old). Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve both missed time due to injury, the former more seriously with a larger dropoff in play.

But as in the 143 episodes or so of The Simpsons in which Homer gets fired from the power plant before the first commercial break, things mostly worked out. The offensive losses hurt, but the team’s choices in role players arrested some of the loss, with Max Stassi, Tony Kemp, and Tyler White all making very real contributions to the team’s win total. The offense dropped from first in the AL in runs scored to fifth, but this was mirrored by an improvement from fifth to first in the team’s ERA.

Justin Verlander’s 2018 post-trade mojo continued to prove strong, and Gerrit Cole finally had became as unhittable as furious Pirates fans spent years hoping he’d be, seeing an almost 50% bump in his strikeout rate from 2017 after mostly giving up on his sinker, which batters had slugged nearly .500 against that year.

All told, Houston’s rotation collected 22.5 WAR in 2018, a franchise best. Not even the mid-1980s Astros, with Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott’s changeup and the weird world in which Jim Deshaies was a strikeout machine, were able to match that.

Probably the weirdest 2018 phenomenon for Houston was that despite winning games at an impressive clip, they weren’t truly able to pull away from the rest of the division until the last week or so of the season. Pythagorean Magic may sound like a really bad educational video game someone buys for their kids, but it was enough to keep Seattle in the race, to the extent that the Astros actually lost first place for a few days during a twelve-game winning streak.

And after the Mariners returned to earth or their Soundgarden albums or whatever it is Seattle people do in 2018, the Oakland A’s proved nearly as resilient. Despite finishing with 103 wins and never having a losing month in 2018, Houston never established a division lead greater than six games.

What Comes Next?

The big challenge facing the Astros in the present, and over the next few years, will be in dealing with what is a transitional phase in the team’s rotation, one of the big 2018 strengths. Of the five primary starting pitchers for the Astros in 2018, three are already gone: Dallas Keuchel and Charlie Morton to free agency, and Lance McCullers to Tommy John surgery. Verlander, Cole, and McHugh are all free agents after the 2019 season.

Even with an optimistic return from McCullers, that’s an awful lot of quality pitching turnover in a very short period. The team still has an above-average farm system with legitimate rotation candidates, one of whom, Josh James, looks assured of a 2019 spot. But it’s easy to see why when talking with the Miami Marlins about a possible J.T. Realmuto trade, Houston has reportedly been adamant about not giving up Forrest Whitley.

2019 ZiPS Projection – Alex Bregman

I’m going with Bregman here simply because I received a barrage of requests during his breakout 2018 for a ZiPS look into his future. And since I occasionally like to give the people what they want, let’s crank out some Alex Bregman goodness.

Yup, that’s a bonafide star. Enough of one that if Carlos Correa roars back in 2019, the Astros face some very interesting long-term questions. Imagine a world in 2020 in which the Astros are able to make a long-term deal with Bregman but not Correa. Bregman’s defensive numbers at third were hardly amazing, but he did a decent job filling in at short for Correa in 2018. At what point do you start to talk about a Correa trade, especially for a piece that fills up another hole, say in the rotation? It’s not so far-fetched.

In 2018, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, the Manager’s Perspective series, and a smattering of feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

———

“My slider will come out and it will be spinning, spinning, spinning, and then as soon as it catches, it picks up speed and shoots the other way. Whoosh! It’s like when you bowl. You throw the ball, and then as soon as it catches, it shoots with more speed and power. Right? “ — Sergio Romo, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher, January 2018

“One of the biggest lessons we learn is that iron sharpens iron. That is 100% how we try to do things with the Rockies — hiring people that are smarter than we are, and more skilled, and have different skills that can complement, and train people to be better at their jobs than I am at my job. That’s how you advance an organization.” — Jeff Bridich, Colorado Rockies GM, January 2018

“We could split hairs and say, ‘Hey, you’re playing in front of a thousand drunk Australians instead of 40,000 drunk Bostonians, and you’re living with a host family instead of at a five-star hotel.’ But The Show is The Show, and in Australia the ABL is The Show.” — Lars Anderson, baseball nomad, January 2018

“Baseball is heaven. Until our closer blows the game.” — Michael Hill, Miami Marlins president of baseball operations, January 2018 Read the rest of this entry »

J.D. Martinez received a lot of props this year for how he helped his Red Sox teammates approach at bats. A direct correlation between the cerebral slugger’s arrival in Boston and the increased offensive production from the likes of Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts is impossible to prove, but there’s no disputing his influence. Few hitters hone their craft as studiously — and pass on their knowledge as effectively — as does Martinez.

A question about his mindset jump-started a conversation this summer. I asked the outfielder/DH if he processes information in much the same manner on both sides of the ball. In other words, does he approach defense — 83% of his career games have been in the outfield — like he approaches offense.

“That’s kind of a weird question,” opined Martinez. “I think I evaluate them the same, but you’re not going to be as analytical with your defense, because there’s not nearly as much data to help you go about it.”

I countered that a lot of work goes into defense, including how to position opposing hitters against certain pitchers, and in different counts. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance of collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.

Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a pitch learned from teammate (and 2018 ballot-mate) Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 800 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA.

Lacking the longevity of fellow 2016 Hall of Fame ballot newcomer Trevor Hoffman, Wagner never set any saves records or even led his league once, and his innings total is well below those of every enshrined reliever. Hoffman’s status as the former all-time saves leader helped him get elected in 2018, but Wagner, who created similar value in his career, has major hurdles to surmount after receiving a high of 11.1% in three years on the ballot. Nonetheless, his advantages over Hoffman — and virtually every other reliever in history when it comes to rate stats — provide a compelling reason to study his career more closely. Given how far he’s come, who wants to bet against Billy Wags?

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. It is based on earlier work done for SI.com. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Roy Oswalt spent a decade as one of the National League’s top pitchers before injuries took their toll. Though listed as just six feet tall and 180 pounds — size that caused him to be overlooked by scouts during his amateur days — he spent nearly a decade as a staple of the Astros’ rotation and a perennial Cy Young contender. Relying primarily on a mid-90s fastball/curve combination with an almost 20 mph differential, he never took home an award, or won a championship, but he played a key part on five postseason-bound teams in Houston and Philadelphia.

Had Oswalt enjoyed better luck in the health department, his career probably would have been the subject of spirited debate on, say, the 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. Alas, lower back woes caused by a pair of degenerative discs curtailed Oswalt’s major league career. His last effective season was in 2011, his age-33 season, and he threw his last pitch one month past his 36th birthday. His total of 2,245.1 innings is fewer than those of all but one Hall of Fame starter — and no, it’s not Sandy Koufax, it’s Dizzy Dean. While he may not truly be a viable candidate, he’s on a separate tier from the one-and-dones whom I’ll cover in brief later in this series.

Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi on August 29, 1977, Oswalt grew up in nearby Weir, a tiny town with a population of just 550. His father Billy Joe, a logger and rec league softball player, saw his son excel in Little League and eventually petitioned the school board to start up a baseball program at his high school, Weir Attendance Center; Billy Joe volunteered to clear pine trees for a ball field using his own equipment. Looking to get every advantage he could out of his small stature, the younger Oswalt came up with an unorthodox delivery. From a 2006 profile for ESPN Magazine by Buster Olney:

Because he was so slightly built, he had to use everything he had to propel the baseball-arm, legs, soul.

Young Roy had seen enough to know that most pitchers start their delivery with one foot parallel to the rubber. This made no sense to him. He was trying to drive himself toward the batter, like a sprinter breaking out of the blocks. Sprinters, he thought, don’t plant their feet parallel to the starting line; their feet are pointed forward.

So that’s how Oswalt designed his pitching mechanics, with his back foot, his right foot, angled slightly forward. He raises his left foot, pauses slightly, then hurls his body at the batter, more like a javelin-tosser than a sprinter in the end. Nobody else in the majors uses mechanics like these, and no pitching coach would teach them unless he was considering a change of profession. But batters have confessed that Oswalt’s motion can be unnerving, this wiry six footer leaping at them like a mugger.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Roger Clemens has a reasonable claim as the greatest pitcher of all time. Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Grover Cleveland Alexander spent all or most of their careers in the dead-ball era, before the home run was a real threat, and pitched while the color line was still in effect, barring some of the game’s most talented players from participating. Sandy Koufax and Tom Seaver pitched when scoring levels were much lower and pitchers held a greater advantage. Koufax and 2015 inductees Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez didn’t sustain their greatness for nearly as long. Greg Maddux didn’t dominate hitters to nearly the same extent.

Clemens, meanwhile, spent 24 years in the majors and racked up a record seven Cy Young awards, not to mention an MVP award. He won 354 games, led his leagues in the Triple Crown categories (wins, strikeouts and ERA) a total of 16 times, and helped his teams to six pennants and a pair of world championships.

Alas, whatever claim “The Rocket” may have on such an exalted title is clouded by suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs. When those suspicions came to light in the Mitchell Report in 2007, Clemens took the otherwise unprecedented step of challenging the findings during a Congressional hearing, but nearly painted himself into a legal corner; he was subject to a high-profile trial for six counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Congress. After a mistrial in 2011, he was acquitted on all counts the following year. But despite the verdicts, the specter of PEDs won’t leave Clemens’ case anytime soon, even given that in March 2015, he settled the defamation lawsuit filed by former personal trainer Brian McNamee for an unspecified amount.

Amid the ongoing Hall of Fame-related debates over hitters connected to PEDs — most prominently Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa — it’s worth remembering that the chemical arms race involved pitchers as well, leveling the playing field a lot more than some critics of the aforementioned sluggers would admit. The voters certainly haven’t forgotten that when it comes to Clemens, whose share of the vote has approximated that of Bonds. Clemens debuted with 37.6% of the vote in 2013 and only in 2016 began making significant headway, climbing to 45.2% thanks largely to the Hall’s purge of voters more than 10 years removed from covering the game. Like Bonds, he surged above 50% — a historically significant marker towards future election — in 2017, benefiting from voters rethinking their positions in the wake of the election of Bud Selig. The former commissioner’s roles in the late-1980s collusion scandal and in presiding over the proliferation of PEDs within the game dwarf the impact of individual PED users and call into question the so-called “character clause.”

Clemens’ march towards Cooperstown stalled somewhat last year even as he climbed 3.2 percentage points to 57.3%. Whether or not the open letter from Hall of Fame Vice Chairman Joe Morgan pleading to voters not to honor players connected to steroids had an impact, the end result was another year run off the clock. He still has a shot at reaching 75% before his eligibility runs out in 2022, but he needs to regain momentum.

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Last year, in all of baseball, the lowest team strikeout rate was 18.7%, and it belonged to the Indians. This is considering only non-pitchers, so as to put the National League on the same level as the American League. Projections, as you know, are by their very nature conservative. And now the 2019 Astros project for a team strikeout rate of 18.4%.

Last year, in all of baseball, the highest team wRC+ was 118, and it belonged to the Dodgers. The second-highest team wRC+ was 111, and it belonged to three different ballclubs. This is considering only non-pitchers, so as to put the NL on the same level as the AL. Projections, as you know, are by their very nature conservative. And now the 2019 Astros project for a team wRC+ of 115.

This is where the Astros stand after having come to a two-year agreement with free-agent Michael Brantley, worth $32 million. It’s not yet official-official, and I guess there’s some chance it all blows up, but I wouldn’t count on that happening. Brantley is good, and he’ll be the Astros’ newest regular.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

As much as Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte was a pillar of the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty. The tall Texan lefty played such a vital role on 13 pinstriped playoff teams and seven pennant winners — plus another trip to the World Series during his three-year run Houston — that he holds several major postseason records. In fact, no pitcher ever started more potential series clinchers, both in the World Series and the postseason as a whole.

For as important as Pettitte was to the “Core Four” (Williams always gets the short end of the stick on that one) that anchored five championships from 1996 to 2009, he seldom made a case as one of the game’s top pitchers. High win totals driven by excellent offensive support helped him finish in the top five of his leagues’ Cy Young voting four times, but only three times did he place among the top 10 in ERA or WAR, and he never ranked higher than sixth in strikeouts. He made just three All-Star teams.

Indeed, Pettitte was more plow horse than racehorse. A sinker- and cutter-driven groundballer whose pickoff move was legendary, he was a championship-level innings-eater, a grinder (his word) rather than a dominator, a pitcher whose strong work ethic, mental preparation, and focus — visually exemplified by his peering in for the sign from the catcher with eyes barely visible underneath the brim of his cap — compensated for his lack of dazzling stuff. Ten times he made at least 32 starts, a mark that’s tied for seventh in the post-1994 strike era. His total of 10 200-inning seasons is tied for fourth in that same span, and his 12 seasons of qualifying for the ERA title with an ERA+ of 100 or better is tied for second. He had his ups and downs in the postseason, but only once during his 18-year career (2004, when he underwent season-ending elbow surgery) was he unavailable to pitch once his team made the playoffs.

On a ballot with two multi-Cy Young winners (Roger Clemens and Roy Halladay) as well as two other starters (Mike Mussina and Curt Schilling) who were better at preventing runs and racking up strikeouts — and also had plenty of postseason success — Pettitte would appear to be a long shot for Cooperstown. And that’s before factoring in his 2007 inclusion in the Mitchell Report for having used human growth hormone to recover from an elbow injury. Thanks to his championship rings and his high win total, he’ll probably receive enough support to persist on the ballot nonetheless.

About those wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon pitcher win totals, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one needn’t know how many wins Pettitte amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value, those totals have affected the popular perception of his career.

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