I'm thinking about Felix with his contemporaries. He's a significant step down from Verlander and Halladay. How's he compare to guys like Lester or Hamels? Do they make it? I'm still thinking the perfect game will put him over the hump.

If Eli Manning and Philip Rivers retire the same year the discourse on both of them on this subject is going to be insufferable.

Philip Rivers should be excluded for being a psycho catholic with nine kids.

Hernandez is frustrating for me because he sure feels like a Hall of Famer for me, but the numbers suggest he's borderline at best. What differentiates him from guys like Lester and Hamels is that they have both have relatively long, consistently good careers. Hernandez had a six-year stretch where you could argue he was the best pitcher in baseball, but he was also basically useless by the time he turned 30.

The ceiling was crazy high for Hernandez, and he's probably easily in if he could have strung together a bunch of seasons as a mid-rotation starter in his 30s, but instead he just turned awful right away.

Isn't he mormon?

You're thinking of Bryce Harper maybe?

I guess I shamefully assumed because of 9 kids. Sorry, Mr. Rivers and the Mormon faith.

Right. I think these later years hurt him a lot, but it's a question of how much vs like, the perfect game. Clearly the hall voters reward consistency/longevity (Mussina, for example). Hernandez's situation will broach the case of someone like Lincecum--arguably the best pitcher by A WIDE margin for 2-3 years but just cratered after that.

Nope, Mickey is right, he's one of them Quiverfull Catholics. And one of his first acts of the use of his fame was to fight against premarital sex, so he became very easy to hate quickly.

At the far end of the spectrum Mormons and hardcore Catholics are pretty similar.

Now this thread is getting somewhere

Without scrutinizing Felix's numbers yet, this seems to be the general consensus. He was an Ace, perhaps Thee Ace in MLB, for several years but doesn't have the longevity and really, really fell off the past several seasons. It hurts him that he didn't rack up W's on a really shitty Mariners team that gave him pathetic run support - which is unfortunate. Wins is a wack stat.

I agree that wins are a shit way to evaluate a pitcher's effectiveness, especially on a team as bad as the Mariners have been. But I think Hernandez's career has been misrepresented in both directions by virtue of being on shitty teams--there's the narrative that he's not as dominant as Verlander because he never made the playoffs (not his fault), but there's also the narrative that he's a sort of singular gem on a team of bottom-feeders that maybe over-inflates how good he was. It gives him a bit of a cult status. His best five-year stretch is probably 2010-2014, where he had a 2.78 ERA and a 1.09 WHIP--definitely All-Star numbers, solidly better than guys like Hamels and Lester, better than Sabathia and Cliff Lee during that same period. But roughly overlapping that is Clayton Kershaw's 2011-2015: 2.11 ERA, 0.93 WHIP, and over 100 more strikeouts. I still think he's a HOF guy, but I don't think he's a lock the way Kershaw, Scherzer, and Verlander will be the guys of the past decade.

Assuming your numbers are correct, thank you for stepping away from your studies and doing the research.

Have at it yourself if you like. It was interesting, I had kind of forgotten just how dominant Kershaw was. And there were other guys who came to mind from that era who weren't as good as I remembered--Matt Cain, for example.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/play ... fe02.shtml

Frank Gore?

He's about to become 3rd on the list of top all time rushing yards. He'll pass Sanders this year with 200 yards and change.

Gotta put Gore in.

For a sport where the average career is only a few years, guy is a beast.

The football hall tends to reward that sort of longevity and those career numbers. Of the top 12 all-time rushers, 2 are active and the other 10 are in the HOF. In the top 20, 2 are active, and of the remaining 18, 14 are in (shout outs to OJ at #21). QBs don't get rewarded the same way with passing yards, but I have no doubt Gore will get in.

Yeah it feels weird to put Gore in because he was never really a star the way like, Marshawn Lynch was. He just managed not to get hurt basically. But he'll certainly be in there.

unbelievable that whitaker got snubbed (again). meanwhile, harold baines has a plaque in coooperstown.