Bert Blyleven

Well here comes my brief annual rant that Bert Blyleven needs to be in the hall of fame. I last wrote about it on 1/3/05 and now that it is time for the announcement it is time for it again.

Bert had a tremendous career and would have easily hit the 300 win plateau if it weren't for him playing on a lot of sub par teams. The doubters like to bring up his only 2 all-star appearances or maybe the fact that he never finished in the top 3 in CY Young voting, but his overall stats prove he should be. What he did do was end up with 3701 K's, 60 shutouts, 287 wins and 254 complete games. In Jayson Stark's new article he says he voted for the 1st time for Bert because of Lee Sinins' new Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia CD-ROM and it informed that Bert gave 344 less runs than his average counter-part. Well in my article back on 1/3/05 I said the same thing, “Bert also had a 344 Runs Saved Above Average (RSAA) which ranked him 17 all time." I am glad that Jayson voted for him, but if this was the reason, then maybe before he votes on players he needs to do more research as this information was easily available to me a year ago.

So Bert Blyleven, good luck tomorrow.