I vote Sutter!

I have been disappointed by the Hall of Fame selections recently. I am not going to be the person who has to explain to our children why Ozzie Smith and Ryne Sandberg belong in the same echelon as Jeter and A-Rod- particularly when guys like Alomar and Bagwell don’t. I honestly believe Smith is in there because he did back-flips- because he sure as heck did not hit much (an amazing career .262 with 28 HRs). Sandberg is in there- despite offensively not being better than, oh, say "the Sarge".

But I am chastised today- as I would have voted only for Bruce Sutter on this year’s ballot- fully admitting he is a more intriguing argument than usual.

Normally I am a committed member of the show me “either 3000 hits, 500 homeruns or 300 wins” club. Got one of those three credentials?- and you need to argue with me why you don’t belong. Miss those numbers- and you need to explain to me why you belong in.

Those three standards illustrate a fact about pro-baseball: we haven’t really figured out closers yet numbers wise. We know good ones when we see them. But the baseball establishment- writers and sabermatricians and such- have yet to break closers down into disgest-able buckets. And as such, it is hard to separate the immortals from the great.

But Sutter deserves to go. First, two key qualifying attributes, outside raw numbers, are:

- did the player affect the game?
- did he dominate a multi-year era?

Sutter arguably did both. Relief pitching is arguably broken down pre-Sutter and post-Sutter. Sutter was the first popular stopper, the pitcher featuring the one-unhittable pitch, who struck out a batter an inning for eight years. The firemen, the sort of man for whom the “Rolaids' Relief Award” was created. While he was not a closer per se- he did more to bridge the gap from your best relief pitcher being a guy who brought value pitching multiple innings competently to a guy who dropped the hammer getting the last few outs. He also had a run 1976-1984 about as good as a pitcher can have: a Cy Young award, votes in five other years, bunches of saves when “getting saves” was not the end all- be all of bullpen work, post-season championship & success (one win and two saves in the 1982 World Series).