No-Brainer

Upon Curt Schilling's announcement of his retirement a few weeks ago, the first question everyone in the sports media began asking---well, maybe the second question, after "will he finally fucking shut up now?"---was whether Schilling will end up in the Hall of Fame. Apart from the basic absurdity of reading baseball writers, the very people who will decide the issue five years hence, openly speculate about this, it is absurd that there should be any question in the first place. If Curt Schilling---loudmouth, narcissist, bad teammate, political neanderthal, all-around asshole---isn't a Hall of Famer, then there's no point in having a Hall of Fame.

To wit: Let's start with the obvious: Schilling is the most dominant and successful postseason pitcher of the last 20 years. He was a number 1 or 2 starter on three World Series winners; it might easily have been four, if his complete-game shutout in game 5 of the '93 series hadn't been made irrelevant by Mitch Williams's loserdom and Jim Fregosi's idiocy in games 4 and 6 (distributively, not merely respectively).

Moving on to regular-season criteria: Schilling has the best career strikeout-to-walk ratio of any pitcher since 1900, at 4.38. He was an innings-eater who reached 300 strikeouts three times ('97, '98, '02) and threw 7 or more complete games seven times in his career (83 in all). These are lightweight numbers compared with, say, the 1970s, when pitchers routinely threw 25 or 30 complete games a season, but they're incredibly strong for the pitch-count era: a pitcher has thrown as many as 10 complete games exactly once this decade (C.C. Sabathia, 2008).

Haters will counter that Schilling never won a Cy Young, and that his career won-lost record (216-146) is at best borderline for the Hall. The Cy Young argument is flimsy: Schilling's best individual seasons happened to coincide with absolutely insane ones from Pedro Martinez (NL, '97), Randy Johnson (NL, '01, '02), and Johan Santana (AL, '04). Wins and losses, ever a shitty and misleadingly defined category for starting pitchers, are skewed in large part because Schilling played half of his career for the 1990s Phillies, who were unrelentingly bad every year except one. Excluding the World Series team of 1993, the Phillies' best record while Schilling was a starter came in 1999, when they went 77-85. To get an idea of the general awfulness and lack of run support that contributed to Schilling's underwhelming '90s W-L, consider 1998, the year in which Schilling had 15 wins *and 15 complete games* (and 300 strikeouts, while the team went 75-87; this was also the year, let's recall, that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were assaulting National League pitchers with their ambiguously gay synthetic forearms). To be sure, pitchers have had seasons in which they were able to rise above the muck around them---Steve Carlton went 27-10 (with 30 CG) for the 1972 Phillies, who won just 59 games---but wins and losses usually obscure as much as they illuminate a pitcher's actual performance.

Schilling will always be remembered for the bloody sock game, and rightly so, but I fear that in early 2014 we'll be hearing a lot about how it was that game, "that courageous performance," that secured his place in the Hall of Fame. Horseshit. Schilling should be in on the strength of his regular-season record, not to mention his pre-2004 postseasons. Any baseball writer who thinks that Schilling's enshrinement is historically contingent on Dave Roberts stealing second base should be thrown out of the guild. And then they could join Schilling in the Asshole Hall of Fame.