This is part four in a hall of fame diary series that examines the hall-worthiness of some of the candidates for 2007.  You can follow these links to get to the other diaries:
Bert Blyleven
Jack Morris
Andre Dawson, Dave Parker and Jim Rice.

For reference, entire ballot can be seen here.  Voting for the regular ballot will be announced on Tuesday, January 9th.  The Veteran's Committee ballot will be announced February 27th.  Over the next month I'll post diaries on the nominees that have a St Louis connection: Ken Boyer, August Busch Jr, Curt Flood, Whitey Herzog, Jim Kaat, Marty Marion, and Joe Torre.

Today I'd like to open up discussion on the two relievers on this year's ballot likely to get any kind of support for the hall of fame: Rich "Goose" Gossage and  Lee Smith.  But before we get to them, I thought we could start things off with Quiz.  Below is a chart showing the stats of two relievers from the same era (their careers overlap by ten seasons); one of them is in the hall of fame, the other received almost no support and was off the ballot after his first year of eligibility.  Before scrolling down, try to figure out who they are.

I imagine most will know who the guy on the right is, but here is a hint about the guy on the left...  The capital Q in "Quiz" is not a typo.

The answers are Dan Quisenberry (left) and Bruce Sutter (right).  The similarities of these two aren't entirely superficial.  Both were relatively marginal prospects until they learned a new pitching technique: with Sutter, of course, it was the split fingered fastball and with Quisenberry it was the submarine delivery and a sinking fastball.  And both subsequently went on to short, but dominating careers as closers.

There are of course some big differences between the two.  Sutter had a good nine years as an effective closer while Quisenberry only had about seven years.  But during those seven years, Quisenberry was routinely logging about 130 innings as a reliever, compared to Sutter's 80 to 100 innings.  For reference on how many innings 130 is for a pitcher, Pedro Martinez and A.J. Burnett had about that many in 23 and 21 starts, respectively, last year.  Pouring over these stats gave me new respect for Quiz!  However, the difference most relevant to today's discussion is, despite similar careers Quisenberry and Sutter received vastly different support for the HoF.  Quisenberry got only 4% in his only year on the ballot.  Sutter got 24% in his first year and went up somewhat steadily from there to his induction last year.

Of course neither is on the ballot next year, but the point of this that I don't think it is a valid argument to say that if Sutter is in the hall, Goose Gossage and Lee Smith should be there too.  Let's face it, a big part of why Bruce Sutter was elected is because he is to the splitter what Candy Cummings is to the curve.

Enough about that!  Today's discussion is about two relief aces: Rich "Goose" Gossage and Lee Smith.

Gossage's line is:
124-107, 1002 Games, 310 Saves, 1809 IP, 1502 SO, 3.21 ERA, 126 ERA+, 1.23 WHIP
Cy Young finishes: 3,5,5,5,6
MVP finishes: 3,9,13,13,17
9 All-stars
2006 HoF vote: 65%

Smith's line is:
71-92, 1022 Games, 478 Saves 1289 IP, 1251 SO, 3.03 ERA, 1.32 ERA+, 1.27 WHIP
Cy young finishes: 2,4,5,9
MVP finishes: 8,14,18,21
7 All-stars
2006 HoF vote: 45%

There are only three HoFers worth comparing to these two.  Their lines are below:

Rollie Fingers, inducted in 1992:
114-118, 944 games, 341 saves, 1701 IP, 1299 SO, 2.90 ERA, 119 ERA+, 1.19 WHIP  
Cy young finishes: 1,3,8,8
MVP finishes: 1,4,14,14,16,16,19
7 All-Stars

Dennis Eckersley, inducted in 2004:
197-171, 1071 Games, 390 Saves, 3286 IP, 2401 SO, 3.50 ERA, 116 ERA+, 1.16 WHIP
Cy young finishes: 1,2,4,5,6
MVP finishes: 1,5,5,6,31
7 All-stars

Bruce Sutter, inducted in 2006
68-71, 661 games, 300 saves, 1042 IP, 861 SO, 2.83 ERA, 136 ERA+, 1.14 WHIP
Cy young finishes: 1,3,3,5,6
MVP finishes: 5,6,7,7,8
6 All-stars

A few things stand out to me.  Obviously Smith has far fewer innings per game than anybody else, though if one looks strictly at Eckersley's last 695 games, he only pitched 790 innings or about 1.14 innings per game which is less than less than Smith's average of 1.26.  Surprisingly (to me at least) is that Smith struck out far more batter's per inning than any of these guys.  In fact Lee Smith is #11 on the all-time list of strikeouts per 9-innings pitched at 8.7.  Gossage is at #40 with 7.5; Sutter is #45 with 7.4; Fingers is #85 with 6.9.  The other thing that stands out is that the three HoFers all have won a Cy Young and two of them won an MVP.  All of them were widely considered dominant at their peak: Eckersley from 1987-1992, Sutter from 1976-1979, and Fingers more broadly from 1973-1978 and 1981-1982.  Smith, at least, doesn't have that kind of peak.  

MVP and Cy Young vote smack of subjectivity, so I decided to do a bit more inventive analysis.  I wanted to see how many runs these pitchers saved when compared to a league average pitcher, so I simply took the difference between each pitcher's ERA and the LgERA and multiplied it by innings pitched for each season.  I summed the results to get a career number for each pitcher.  This didn't completely make sense to me, since it seems reasonable that a "run saved" in relief is generally more valuable than one saved in the beginning of a game; so I weighted relief runs saved by 1.6.  (I believe 2.0 is commonly used for this kind of analysis, but my SWAG resulted in a smaller ratio, 1.67.)  I added in Bert Blyleven, Jack Morris and John Smoltz for reference.  Here are the results:

Pitcher, Runs saved, Weighted Runs Saved
Gossage, 155, 270
Quisenberry, 148, 247
Smith, 138, 229
Eckersley, 204, 201
Sutter, 118, 197
Fingers, 107, 177
Blyleven, 397, 400
Smoltz, 300, 332
Morris, 78, 76

A few things become clear, over the course of a career Gossage was clearly the best at preventing runs from scoring by this analysis.  Quisenberry was better than I even expected and considering his brief career and relative dominance, he really should have gotten some support for the hall.  Smith comes out better than I'd expect and perhaps Eckersley, Sutter and Fingers weren't quite as good as their reputation.  Finally, it is a bit of a digression, but Morris doesn't look very great by this analysis; even if the years he posted an ERA below the league are removed, his totals would be about 155.

Clearly over the course of their careers, Gossage and even Smith were as good as the relievers already in Cooperstown.  However, Fingers, Eckersley and Sutter are enshrined largely on the strength of well-remembered, though brief, dominance.  Gossage might be remembered similarly, but Smith certainly isn't.  Given voting history I doubt either one has a serious chance at getting in, but do you think they should be in the hall?