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Article on Moose's Hall of Fameness and other stuf
Topic Started: Aug 27 2008, 06:56 AM (57 Views)
HomieYank
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Everyone from stat-literate writers like Rob Neyer to members of the blogosphere to the mainstream media agrees: If Mike Mussina wins four more games this season, he's punched his ticket to the Hall of Fame.

This unanimous sentiment comes with Mussina sitting on 16 wins. If Moose can get to 20 wins in a season for the first time in his career, the thought goes, it will legitimize all of his other accomplishments and make up for all the near-misses that, for some, have defined his career. Unfortunately for Mussina, he drew a no-decision against the Orioles on Friday night. That leaves him with just seven more starts this season, many of those coming against tough opponents. There's a very real chance that Mussina will get to 18 or 19 wins this season, only to fall short of the magic number 20 yet again.
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Mussina, 39, is tied for second in the AL in wins (16) and ranks 12th in ERA (3.45). He has issued only 21 walks in 27 starts.
All of which raises one question: Why should we care?
Mussina deserves to be a Hall of Famer, even if he never wins 20 games in a season, or 300 in his career for that matter.
If you insist on using wins as a barometer, you could argue that only six pitchers in major league history have as many wins as Mussina, with a higher winning percentage: Hall of Famers Lefty Grove, Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander and Jim Palmer, and Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson, two of the 10 best pitchers of all time. If you're into fancier analysis, you could point to the Gray Ink, Hall of Fame Standards and Hall of Fame Monitor tests, all of which show Mussina with more than enough credentials to surpass the average player already enshrined in Cooperstown.

But the argument over Mussina's candidacy based on his (in)ability to win 20 games in a season raises a bigger issue: Baseball's media and fans (mostly the media) butcher the numbers in their attempts to evaluate a player's accomplishments, or his overall worth.
You can break down the most common misuses of numbers into five kinds of problems:
A lot more good stuff in there too, including some of the stuff I've been saying about players like Dunn.
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