The Hall of Impact

That is what Jon Heyman wants to rename the Baseball Hall of Fame. Literally. In his weekly spot with Mike Francesa, Jon Heyman said that Mike Mussina shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame because Heyman (who gets to ultimately vote on this by the way) said that he votes on "impact" that a player has on baseball. Mike Mussina, doesn't quite rate so high on Heyman's "impact" meter.

Heyman claims "I watched Mike Mussina's career, and to me he's not a Hall of Famer." Far be it from me to criticize a man who actually is in the BBWAA, but I'm going to do it anyway. This is an unfair stupid, narrow-minded way to vote. Why in God's name would you not look at his numbers, process them, and come up with a rational reason for or against? You can't possibly quantify "impact." It is a made-up bullshit word that is wildly subjective. There's not a chance in fuck that Jon Heyman watched every single one of Mike Mussina's starts. No chance he saw how many leads his bullpen may have coughed up for him, or how many times his team's offense went quiet. You can't just determine whether or not someone should go to the HOF based on whether or not they "feel" like a Hall of Famer.

Check this out :
http://www.baseball-reference.com/m/mussimi01.shtml

There's Mike's career numbers provided to you by the BEST statistics website on the internet. Now I despise the Yankees and everything about them, but I would say that the dude deserves to get in. He was steadily awesome for what seems like an eternity. He pitched in the AL East smack dab in the middle of the juicehead era, and consistently put up solid year after solid year. His strikeout totals hover around 200 year in and year out, and his career WHIP (probably the best stat to measure a pitcher's effectiveness) is a shade over 1.1. That is really, really good. Scroll to the bottom of the page to check out the pitchers in history who Mike is most similar to, and you'll see 5 out of the 10 are Hall of Famers, and the other 5 are just nasty as hell.

And by the way, the fact that men actually use that 300-win thing for pitchers as a good indicator of getting into the Hall or not is borderline criminal. So, rather than going by 'imapct" or "feel", I invite Jon Heyman to make a logical, statistical argument against Mike for the Hall of Fame. Maybe he could! I'm not saying Mike should be a lock, but it would sound better to have a professional baseball writer back his words up with evidence rather than hokey, subjective crap.

Oh and Jon, Bert Blyleven deserves to be in too you dickhead.

~Jean Pierre