By Bill
Everybody knows by now that Andy Pettitte -- you remember, the guy that used PEDs just like everybody else but it's totally OK because he seems like a nice guy? -- announced yesterday that he would retire rather than returning to the Yankees for 2011. The question that immediately comes up, then, is: is Andy Pettitte a Hall of Famer?
Aaaand...that's not what this post is about, not really. My answer, based on his career (regular-season) numbers and accomplishments as they stand, is no, and not particularly close. If you ignore the wins (as all reasonable people do), there's nothing about his record that really looks anything at all like a Hall of Famer. He had one great year (1997), a couple other really good ones, and about twelve more in which, by and large, he was just a touch above average. His career bWAR is 50.2, better than a handful of weaker HOF starting pitchers but less good than Kevin Appier, Brett Saberhagen, Chuck Finley, Dave Stieb, David Cone and Jerry Koosman. By ERA+, Pettitte's 116 is pretty nice, but just 31st among non-Hall of Famers with between 2500 and 3500 innings pitched (Pettitte threw 3055), and doesn't compare very well at all to no-chance guys like Billy Pierce, Stieb, Carl Mays, or Kevin Brown, among others. I don't think there's any reasonable argument, not based on the absurd fiction of pitcher "wins," that puts Pettitte all that close to the Hall of Fame based on the stats you'll find at Baseball-Reference or FanGraphs.
But the question, I guess, is: is Pettitte somehow better than his raw numbers? There are two arguments I've heard hinted at today that kind of suggest that he was, and I'll deal with them separately here:
