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Originally Posted by Luis_Rivera
Cy Young/MVP/Gold Glove awards are all a very poor way of judging a players' HoF worthiness since a lot of the time those awards don't go to the proper guy because the BBWAA is, quite frankly, full of idiots.
Moose should have won the award in 1992, as he was the best pitcher in the AL that year. Unfortunately, voters couldn't see past Eckersley's 51 saves even though he only gave the A's less than half the value Moose gave the O's.
There's a million examples of things like that throughout baseball history.
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But the thing is, you can't discount stuff like that because in the end the BBWAA, not the stathead community, is going to decide who gets in the Hall and who stays out. At this point, my take on Mussina is that he's a very good pitcher who played at a very unfortunate time. It's not his fault he's been in the shadows of Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson all his career. Had he came up in the late 1970s, he'd probably go in on the first ballot. As it stands... can I put him in ahead of Bert Blyleven? Jack Morris? Tommy John? Jim Kaat? His rate stats are better than (some of) those folks, but there is something to be said about longevity.
For me, a guy with just 413 GS through last year needs to be at the Sandy Koufax level for me to really seriously consider him for the Hall. A full season puts his GS about equal with Whitey Ford, who did get in on the basis of his dominance over a relatively short career (on his 3rd attempt, mind you), so it is pretty close. Of course, Ford had the highest winning percentage of any 20th century pitcher; that and the pinstripes he wore (which, of course, contributed to the first bit) are why he's in there.
Mussina looked very average last year and while he's shown some signs of bouncing back, I think he needs a couple more of those Mussina-esque years to get in.