I thought about this. Like Bonds, Roger was great well before the steroid era became a thing. I mean, was he on them then? Nobody knows. But he was a great, great pitcher, and worthy of being in any top 5. I have no idea when he was taken, but I have to think it was the top half of the category.
Paige, Seaver, and Mathewson were the hardest guys to rank for me. Already talked about Paige. Seaver to me gets bumped down a bit because I simply feel other guys in his era (Carlton and Ryan) were better. Mathewson... I see he's pretty high on a lot of all time lists, but so are other two dead-ballers. Young has the wins and the award named after him. Johnson has better stats, and also considerably bridged eras, giving him a decent sized edge in my mind.
This was hard but fun. Needed a little baseball in my brain. Now onto football (few days for those).
This is not even worth serious consideration but I find the early HoF voting interesting. Presumably a lot of the voters had a clearer picture of where they ranked relative to their peers or predecessors.
1936 Class - Mathewson (90.71%) and Johnson (83.63%) rank 4th & 5th in the inaugural class. Cobb, Ruth, Wagner (in that order) receive over 95%.
1937 - Young, denied the first time around, squeaks (76.12%); no idea but my guess is most of the sportswriters had never seen him pitch as his career ended in 1911 and his dominant period was 30+ years prior.
1938 - Grover “Pete” Alexander (80.92%) was the 9th player voted in and the 4th pitcher - they were all eligible back in ‘36. He wasn’t in the SP category, I’ll have to place him in Category 2.
Anyway, nothing to prove here, just thought it interesting to look at the Prewar perspective. I don’t know if we can conclude anything - maybe Mathewson benefited from recency bias. Just food for thought.
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With respect to Seaver, Ryan and Carlton - I would have placed ranked Seaver over Carlton. Most would I believe. No offense to my friend jwb, but I don’t think I am alone in having Ryan third amongst that cohort group and by a considerable distance. Seaver had the highest HoF % for 24 years before being surpassed 3 times in the last 5 votes (Griffey, Jr, Jeter, Rivera.) Again, it’s a stupid stat to cite, it has no correlation to in field performance.
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Judging is painfully difficult and I think
@jwb is exactly the same as myself and many/most who are taking on writing up & giving subjective opinions. We take it seriously, we want to be fair, and we want to have well reasoned, articulate defenses of our thought process. It’s easy to be a critic but it’s nearly impossible if you’re a fellow judge then you know how hard it is.
Anyway, I have no dog in the fight & jwb you’ve looked at the numbers a lot more than I have. Just sharing my perspective and what the consensus was back when they each retired. Maybe that perception has changed over the years, I’m not much of an MLB fan anymore.
No offense intended jwb. None at all.
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