Circle me, Cooperstown: Blyleven is finally in

Bert Blyleven in the 1987 World Series. His postseason
record—5-1, 2.47 — came in three seasons, well spaced:
1970, 1979 and 1987.

The news this afternoon that Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar were elected to the Hall of Fame by the baseball writers is no real surprise; they each fell just a handful of votes shy last winter, and their ascension into baseball immortality this time around was expected.

Blyleven's case is particularly noteworthy because when he first hit the ballot 14 years ago, there appeared to be no way that the writers were ever going to elect him -- no matter the win totals, no matter the strikeout totals, no matter the postseason record, no matter the legendary curveball.

And now Blyleven's in. He's in because of the sabermetric crowd. He's in because the more people like Bill James and Rich Lederer and Rob Neyer (and others) dug into the numbers, the more they put Blyleven's career into context, the more he stood out. These nonvoters' research informed such writers as Joe Posnanski, Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark, who took up the cause as well.

Lederer in particular beat the Blyleven drum, with no fewer than 29 entries in his "Bert Blyleven series" at the Baseball Analysts web site. Some tout Blyleven's qualifications; others tear down the arguments of those who vote against him.

There's some irony here, since Blyleven himself last season used some of the same arguments used against him by the Flat Earth Society portion of the electorate to argue against giving the Cy Young award to Felix Hernandez.

Blyleven belongs. The only problem with his selection is that it took 14 years.

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I assume that now the Twins will retire Blyleven's No. 28 (with Jesse Crain's departure, the number is vacant). I doubt, however, that they'll blow a hole in the wall of Target Field to get a Gate 28 in his honor.

Luis Tiant, Graig Nettles and Bert Blyleven

Chris Jaffe -- yeah, you've seen his name here a few times lately -- posted an item Tuesday about a big trade the Twins made 15,000 days earlier.

The Twins got Luis Tiant and Stan Williams; in return, they shipped off to Cleveland Bob Miller, Ted Uhlaender, Dean Chance and a young guy they couldn't fit into their lineup named Graig Nettles.

Graig Nettles hit 390 homers
in 22 major league seasons.
Twelve of those homers
came for the Twins.

These were name players. Chance had won a Cy Young; Tiant was one season removed from a 1.60 ERA and 22 wins. Williams and Miller were veteran swingmen; Uhlaender had been the Twins regular center fielder.

In retrospect, we Twins fans would probably like to have Nettles back. But the trade made sense at the time, and in the short term, it wasn't a disaster.Chance, Uhlaender and Miller didn't do much when they left the Twins. Nettles had a stellar career. As for Tiant and Williams ...

I had a post back in September about the 1970 Twins staff. Williams had a big year in relief -- 10-1 with 15 saves and a 1.99 ERA in 113-plus innings. He and Ron Perranoski (7-8, 34 saves, 2.43 ERA 111 innings) were a devastating right-left bullpen combo. They were also 33 and 34 years old respectively, and both men's performance fell off the cliff in 1971.

Jaffe dismisses Tiant's contribution to the 1970 Twins, but he was doing what the Twins were looking for -- 6-0, 3.12 -- before suffering an arm injury in late May that derailed his career for a few years.

People are all agog about the current Phillies rotation, but consider the Twins rotation entering 1970:

• Jim Perry (age 34) had won 20 games in 1969 with a 2.82 ERA.
• Dave Boswell (age 24) was also coming off a 20-win season and had four straight double-digit win years on his resume.
• Jim Kaat (age 31) was one of the better lefties in the league.
• Tiant (29) had had a poor 1969 season, but had been marvelous in 1968 and was clearly a talented pitcher.

Perry won 24 games and the Cy Young in 1970, and Kaat was his usual effective self (14-10, 3.56). But Boswell's career cratered and never recovered, and, as noted already, Tiant got hurt.

Tiant's injury (and Boswell's ineffectiveness) opened holes in the Twins rotation. One of those holes was plugged by a 19-year-old named Bert Blyleven.

Tiant and Kaat both have Hall of Fame cases. Today should be the day Blyleven's case is finally accepted.

Today is Blyleven Day (or it should be)

Today the BBWAA announces who got elected to the Hall of Fame, and unless everybody's crystal ball is getting static, Bert Blyleven will be in.

Fox Sports North plans live coverage from Blyleven's Fort Myers. Fla., home. The announcement is expected at 1 p.m.

Anticipating the Hall of Fame announcement

The results of the BBWAA voting on this year's Hall of Fame candidates are to be announced Wednesday.

Chris Jaffe — the guy who wrote the book on managers that was the basis of my Monday post — has his prediction of how the vote will go here.

This is a bit like reading a public opinion poll after the voting is over but before the vote is counted; we want to know the winner, but patience will bring the numbers that matter.

But Jaffe's put enough work into understanding how this particular electorate works that one of his points — that Jack Morris either goes in this year (unlikely) or in 2011 or not at all through the writers' vote — strikes me as particularly intriguing.

Morris is an exceptionally marginal candidate. There are worse pitchers in the Hall of Fame, and a number of superior pitchers who have been left out. I see no reason to put Morris in when Jim Kaat and Tommy John are out.

I've made this observation before, but I expect this to be my last chance to do so with these four names: Only four of the eligible pitchers in the modern era (since the formation of the American League in 1901) with at least 250 wins are not enshrined in Cooperstown: Bert Blyleven, Kaat, John and Morris.

Morris is really the odd duck in that group — he's at 254 lifetime wins. Blyleven, Kaat and John are all in the 280s. Morris barely makes that 250-win cutoff;  the other three are comfortably above it.

One other thing those four have in common: They've all been broadcasters for the Twins. It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

Ron Gardenhire's bullpen magic

A bit more than a year ago, a writer for The Hardball Times website, Chris Jaffe, was promoting to bloggers his then-upcoming book on the history of baseball managers. I milked this excerpt for one post in November, then put the book on my Christmas wish list and sat back, figuring that I'd write more about it when I actually had the book.

Effective bullpen use has been a key to Ron Gardenhire's
managerial success with the Twins.

But the publication date got pushed back -- first to January, then, as I recall, to spring, and it faded from my priority list until fall, when I ran across a favorable mention of it by Bill James. Back on the Christmas wish list it went, and into my hands it came.

I've been slogging though "Evaluating Baseball's Managers: A history and analysis of performance in the major leagues, 1876-2008"  in bits and pieces. Jaffe has concocted a series of evaluative stats that I don't necessarily understand, but I can avoid the math and get the kernel of what he's talking about.

And the section on Ron Gardenhire is illuminating -- especially in the context of this offseason, when the Twins are reshaping their relief corps with a bunch of question marks.

Jaffe wraps up almost two pages of detail of Gardy's history of relief pitchers, two pages in which he examines everybody from LaTroy Hawkins and Eddie Guardado to Willie Eyre and Joe Roa to Joe Nathan and Matt Guerrier:

Folks, Ron Gardenhire has not been simply good at handling a bullpen. In all the decades since the bullpen has been an established part of the major league roster, no manager has ever had a seven-year stretch like this is getting the best production from his relievers.

That seven-year stretch is 2002-08; I think it's safe to say that Gardenhire didn't hurt his status at all in 2009-10.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results, of course. But the fact that the established arms have left the Twins middle relief corps does not mean the bullpen will be ineffective. Gardy built a 'pen essentially from scratch in 2002 -- he moved Guardado to closer and found roles in which Hawkins, J.C. Romero, Mike Jackson and Tony Fiore could be effective. A few years later, with all those guys gone, he rebuilt the pen again, this time with Nathan, Juan Rincon, Jesse Crain,  Dennys Reyes and Guerrier.

It's merely time for his third generation.

Jeff Bagwell, PEDs and the Hall of Fame

Back in my youth, when I was trying to decide what role in newspapers I wanted to play, one of the attractions of aiming at becoming a baseball writer was the idea of being one of the Hall of Fame electorate.

Jeff Bagwell actually stepped back
before his swing, not forward.

I went in another direction, for reasons we need not bother with here, and I don't have a Hall of Fame vote.

And when I consider the current controversy over the candidacy of Jeff Bagwell, I'm content not to have a vote.

Bagwell was a great hitter, especially when considering the context of the Astrodome, his home park for the better part of his career. He also had a short career for such a productive bat; he had 14 good seasons, then had a major shoulder problem and was gone. So his career totals -- 2,314 hits, 449 homers -- aren't driving the writers to his cause. His selling point is peak value, and as Tony Oliva can attest, the BBWAA electorate is (for position players) more attuned to career totals.

And it certainly doesn't help his Hall of fame case that his best season, his MVP season, was 1994, the strike year. As it is, his compilation numbers that year -- 39 homers, 116 RBIs, 104 runs -- are better than the stats for some other sluggers who won MVPs. They just happened to come in a season shortened by about a third.

 But the real reason Jeff Bagwell won't be elected when the results of the balloting are announced Wednesday is steroids.

Bagwell  never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs (not that they did much testing during his time, and not that the results are publicly revealed). He wasn't named in the Mitchell Report or fingered by Jose Canseco. He has always denied PED use.

But ... he played in the era of cheaters; he developed massive forearms; he was an unabashed admirer of Ken Caminiti, who was the third baseman whose presence forced Bagwell to play first base and who was, by his own admission, a heavy steroid user.

Circumstantial evidence at best. Guilt by association at worst.

Bagwell represents the worst aspect of the current consensus against electing steroid users. In his case, unlike those of Rafael Palmeiro or Mark McGwire, it's merely suspicion.

That consensus will eventually crumble. It's one thing to keep McGwire and Palmeiro and Bagwell out; it will be another altogether to keep out Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who clearly had HOF credentials long before any credible narrative of their careers can connect them to the chemical enhancers. Once that wall cracks, others will follow.

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Poll results: The 48 voters make the Twins the favorite to win the AL Central: 28 (58 percent) pick the Twins, 14 (29 percent) pick the White Sox and six (12 percent) the Tigers.

New poll up.

Carl Pavano, it's 2011. Do you know where your contract is?

The waiting is the hardest part.

This wasn't the way Carl Pavano's contract talks were supposed to go.

After his high-quality 2010 season -- 17-11, 3.75 -- he figured to cash on his pair of one-year, make-good deals. He'd gone two seasons without injury, two seasons of 200-plus innings. He was arguably the second-best starter on the free agent market.

The expectations were for a three-year deal totalling $30 million.

Hasn't happened. Doesn't appear to be happening. Might not ever have been a possibility.

Ted Lilly got such a deal, but Lilly is (a) left-handed, (b) two years younger and (c) has a less extensive injury history.

Jon Garland, who has been far more durable than Pavano and is five years younger, got a mere one-year, $5 million deal ($2 million less than Pavano got last season).

Pavano and his agent appear to have figured that if they waited out the Cliff Lee sweepstakes, the teams that were after Lee and missed would go after him. And they probably figured that the Yankees would sign Lee. But that didn't happen. Pavano's history with the Yankees made them an impossible destination (probably for either side), and Texas is apparently uninterested in Pavano.

The Brewers are said to have made a pitch to Pavano, then turned their attention to getting Zach Greinke. They're out.

It appears that the Pavano market is down to the Twins and the Washington Nationals. There's no competitive reason for a 35-year-old to sign with the Nats; if he does go there, it will be for the money. That he hasn't signed yet makes me wonder if either has offered even a two-year deal, much less three.

So he waits for the Twins to bid against themselves. And I don't think that's likely.