Curt Schilling

Curt Schilling has made his retirement official. The question now is whether Curt will be elected to the Hall of Fame. I won't deal with that question just yet but I did want to make the following comparison.

Player A - Season 1 - 22-9 / 2.40 ERA / 156 ERA+ / 158 SO
Player B - Season 1 - 22-6 / 2.98 ERA / 157 ERA+ / 293 SO

Player A - Season 2 - 23-11 / 2.09 ERA / 169 ERA+ / 193 SO
Player B - Season 2 - 23-7 / 3.23 ERA / 142 ERA + / 316 SO

Player A - Season 3 - 22-13 / 2.51 ERA / 130 ERA+ / 159 SO
Player B - Season 3 - 21-6 / 3.26 ERA / 150 ERA+ / 203 SO

Player A is Jim Palmer and the seasons are the three seasons he won the AL Cy Young Award in a four year stretch. Player B is Curt Schilling and the seasons are the years he came in second in Cy Young voting three years out of four from 2001 to 2004. It can be argued that Schilling's seasons were every bit as impressive as the seasons in which Palmer won his Cy Young Awards. It was Schilling's bad luck to have to compete with first Randy Johnson and then Johan Santana. Just one Cy Young from one of those years probably would have cinched the vote for Schilling for the Hall of Fame.