Joe Posnanski

The always interesting Joe Posnanski has a post up looking at Hall of Fame pitchers through the prism of which year they were born. It is a great read but I do have one nit to pick with the article.

He started off by talking about the round numbers that normally denote a Hall of Famer. For pitchers he notes 300 wins and 3,000 strikeouts. He then says the following:

And the players coming with 300 wins or 3,000 Ks will all sail into the Hall of Fame with the possible exceptions of Clemens (and any other pitcher deemed to be PED stained) and Schilling (who has 3,000 Ks but only 216 wins which makes him borderline).

Emphasis added because I thought only people like Joe Morgan not people like Joe Posnanski thought that wins and losses were the measuring stick for a pitcher's greatness.

The seeming hypocrisy regarding Curt Schilling pops up later in Posnanski's post in the advocacy of Billy Pierce:

He [Billy Pierce] only won 211 games in his career, and his 3.27 ERA, while good on its own, doesn’t really do him justice (his 119 ERA+ is better than Steve Carlton or Nolan Ryan).

Wait - Schilling has that supposedly magic number of 3,116 strikeouts but is borderline because he has just 216 wins. That's 5 more wins than Billy Pierce in a similar number of innings pitched (3,261 for Schilling vs 3,306 for Pierce). And if you want to talk about ERA+ then Schilling's 128 is better than Pierce, Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan along with Jim Palmer, John Smoltz, Juan Marichal, Bob Feller and Don Drysdale among others.

EDIT: Per Joe - he is on record as supporting Curt Schilling when he comes up for election. I was probably just reading too much into things (as usual)