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Andy Pettitte was an October warrior, the proud owner of 256 career wins and an invaluable cornerstone of baseball’s only true dynasty of the last quarter-century. (Memo to the Dodgers : You’re not there yet!) Would the 1996-2000 Yankees have won four World Series if Pettitte had never worn those pinstripes (not to mention a fifth trophy in 2009)? I don’t think they would. So this winter, I did something I’d never done before.
Advertisement I voted for him for the Baseball Hall of Fame. So when my friend and The Athletic colleague Ken Rosenthal wrote this week about why he didn’t vote for Pettitte , I hung on every word. And when he mused, at the end of that column, “ I’m not sure I was right,” I couldn’t help but think: I’m not so sure he was right, either.
Not that Ken asked me to write this column, telling him why I don’t think he was right. But I wrote it anyway. And Ken, since I like you, I’ll waive my usual fee.
FYI, I’ll reveal the rest of my Hall ballot in a column next week. But I’m writing this because I wound up spending more hours on the fascinating case of Andy Pettitte than I did on anyone else on the ballot. So what better excuse to help Ken with his future Pettitte deliberations than to do this piece explaining my own deliberations.
Why did I vote for this man for the first time? Here’s why. Why’d it take me seven years? Hall of Fame voting may seem so easy — to people who never have to hold a ballot in their hands. But it’s hard to cast these votes.
And it’s especially hard to draw that line between Hall of Famers and Not Quite Hall of Famers. So every year, I hear from hundreds of readers who think differently about this stuff than I do. Thanks for the input! But remember this: There’s no right ballot and no wrong ballot.
There’s only my ballot. And I promise I spend more time thinking about this than you could ever imagine. I pride myself on being consistent.
The first question I ask about every candidate is: Was this guy a Hall of Famer or not? And if I decide he was, I aspire to vote for him every year. I would never say: Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Ichiro goes in alone, so I’m not going to vote for those six guys I voted for last year. That’s not how I go about this.
But I’m also always open to changing my mind. That’s what reasonable humans do, right? And this year, when CC Sabathia arrived on the ballot, he led me down a trail back to Andy Pettitte. Here’s why.
(Source: Baseball Reference) How could I look at the stat lines of those two starting pitchers and not wonder if I’d missed something when I opted not to check the box next to Pettitte’s name on his first six years on the ballot? So I took another look. And many, many hours later, I decided I’d gotten it wrong the first six times. Let me lay out how I came to that conclusion.
Was Pettitte as great as Sabathia? Those numbers above could make you think that Sabathia and Pettitte had essentially the same career. Here’s my take on that: No! Sabathia, at his best, had a bigger peak, a bigger presence in the game, as a Cy Young Award winner with five top-five Cy finishes in a row. Pettitte, meanwhile, was never the best pitcher on his team, let alone his sport.
Advertisement So why didn’t I vote for him in his first six spins around this ballot? That last sentence essentially sums it up. But the more I looked at this, the more I drifted away from focusing on what Pettitte wasn’t and convinced myself I’d underestimated the career he did have. Namely .
.. Don’t let the ERA fool you! If you’re looking for reasons not to vote for Pettitte, it’s easy to get stuck on his 3.
85 career ERA. If he ever gets elected, that would be the highest ERA of any left-handed pitcher in the Hall. And I’ll admit it.
That little factoid has been stuck in my brain every year since he arrived on the ballot in 2019. But then along came CC, with a lower ERA but a worse ERA+. And that was an important reminder that not all ERAs are created equal — because not everyone pitches in the same offensive era.
Thanks to ERA+, which adjusts for those offensive environments, we now know that not only did Pettitte have a slightly better earned run average, compared to his era, than Sabathia, but he also had a better ERA+ than Steve Carlton (115 ERA+), whose four Cy Youngs are the most of any left-handed starter in history. We should never forget that Pettitte spent most of his career pitching in the ferocious AL East, or that he spent a huge chunk of it pitching in the performance-enhancing drugs era. So of course his ERA was higher than Steve Carlton’s! In 2000, the average pitcher had an ERA of almost 5.
00 (4.76). When Carlton broke into the majors, in 1965, the average ERA was 3.
50. So this just in: Perspective is always good. But even more importantly .
.. Pettitte was a winner Speaking of perspective, it’s important to mention this: Hall of Fame voting, for me, is a never-ending quest to put everything about a player’s life and times in the most meaningful perspective.
So here’s what stood out to me about Pettitte’s life and times: If you wanted to win, you wanted this man on your team. Advertisement He may not have been your classic dominator, but you know what Pettitte clearly was? A winner. I can document that in many ways, but how about this: He never had a losing season! He pitched 18 seasons in the big leagues.
You know how many times, in any of those 18 seasons, Pettitte finished with a losing record? How ’bout none! I could find only two pitchers in the modern era (1900-present) who had 18 seasons or more with at least 10 games started and a sub-.500 record in none of them. One was a Hall of Fame legend, Grover Cleveland Alexander.
The other? Andy Pettitte. But wait. Alexander then came back for one final season in 1930 — and went 0-3, with a 9.
90 ERA. It was only in nine appearances, three of them starts. So it didn’t officially bump him off this list.
But if you apply that asterisk, it leaves just one name: Pettitte. He was better than your average Yankee OK, I know what you’re thinking: Of course this guy had a bunch of winning seasons, because he spent most of them pitching for the greatest Yankees teams since The Glory Days. Yes, there’s some truth in that.
But a funny thing happened when I broke that down further. Pettitte’s personal win percentage — .626 (256-153) His teams’ win percentage in his starts — .
608 (316-204) His teams’ win pct. when anyone else started — .577 (1433-1052) So .
.. if we just go by Pettitte’s personal wins and losses, his own winning percentage was nearly 50 points better than his team’s.
And if we go by his team’s record in games he started, he still outwon the pitchers around him by more than 30 points. Get the picture? For nearly two decades, his teams had a significantly better shot of winning when Pettitte took the ball than they did when any other starter on the roster took the ball. And that mattered more than ever to his teams because .
.. Andy Pettitte was Mr.
October Hall of Fame careers don’t just stretch from April to September. What happens in October matters. And October was a time when Pettitte showed us exactly what he was over nearly two decades in the big leagues: A consistently reliable big-moment starter — and a man whose teams always looked forward to pointing him toward the mound in the most important games of their seasons.
Advertisement At first, in those six years I wasn’t voting for him, his 3.81 postseason ERA felt a little too ordinary to me. But this time around, the more I dug into his October record, the better it looked.
Did you know that ...
• No pitcher in history started more potential series-clinching games than Pettitte. He started 12 of them. He was starting and winning those games at age 24.
He was starting and winning those games at age 37. That’s telling us something meaningful. • Also: No pitcher in history won more postseason clinchers than Pettitte.
He went 6-2 in those 12 starts. No one else has won more than four series clinchers. • And his teams won eight postseason clinchers that he started.
That’s also the most in history. The next most, among all the great October pitchers who ever lived, is five, by Roger Clemens, Dave Stewart, Max Scherzer and Charlie Morton . • And just so you know, Pettitte was fantastic in those games.
His ERA in those eight clinchers was 2.66. That’ll work! But beyond that, he was also the perfect Game 2 starter.
He was never The Ace. But he was good enough and dependable enough that he started Game 2 for the Yankees in 15 series. Why wouldn’t there be a place in Cooperstown for a pitcher like that? And it felt like he was That Guy for his entire career.
When I used the term “consistently reliable” to describe him, here’s the tidbit that drove that message home for me: You know which starter has thrown the most “quality starts” in postseason history — a stat that tells us how often a starting pitcher gave his team a real chance to win? Andy Pettitte would be an excellent guess. He threw 28 of them — four more than the runner-up, Tom Glavine. And remember, this was happening at a time when offenses were putting up their craziest numbers since the 1930s.
Yes, those 28 quality starts came in 44 total postseason starts — also the most in history. But that still works out to 63.6 percent of all his starts.
And while that’s not John Smoltz territory (81.5 percent), it compares favorably to many other world-famous starters. (Source: Baseball Reference) So is that a body of work worthy of a slew of extra-credit October bonus points? I think it was.
But there was one more reason I voted for Pettitte ...
We may never see another starting pitcher like him I don’t know what a Hall of Fame starting pitcher is going to look like in 20 years ...
or 50 years ...
or 100 years. But I know this: He isn’t going to look like Andy Pettitte. Once Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw retire, it could be years — even decades — before we elect another Hall of Fame starter on the writers’ ballot.
Heck, we’re barely electing any now. Advertisement This will be the 26 th Hall of Fame election since 2000. You know how many starters the writers have elected in the first 25? Only eight: Bert Blyleven, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez , Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay.
There were eight elected in the 1990s alone. And given how starting pitching is trending, would it shock you if we don’t even elect eight in the next century? So as I said at the beginning of this column, I think we’ve massively undervalued the career of Andy Pettitte — the 256 games he won, the 316 games his teams won when he started and particularly the 26 postseason starts his teams won. (Pettitte received 13.
5 percent of the vote last year and has never topped 17 percent, so he’s far from the 75 percent threshold needed for election.) We’ve forgotten to properly factor in the value of having starters like this man on your roster — not just for one year, but for nearly two decades. And he did all this pitching for teams that were always trying to win, and often did.
The most overlooked ability in baseball is dependability. And very few starters were more dependable, in their time, than Pettitte. Yes, his name showed up in the Mitchell Report in 2007, and he admitted to using human growth hormone.
I know that will stop some voters from ever checking his name. But that was in the era before MLB ’s current system of testing and discipline, an era when we know hundreds of players were using all sorts of magic pills, powders and creams. So I’ve chosen to vote for the best players of that era because who knows how many players we’ve already elected from that time weren’t “clean.
” And that means I’m not dinging Andy Pettitte for this “crime.” Maybe I’m wrong, but I have a strong hunch that multiple Hall of Famers have done stuff far more egregious. Advertisement As Hall of Fame voters, we have a difficult job.
Just figure out who deserves a plaque that will hang in a room full of legends. That’s all. For six Hall of Fame voting cycles, I couldn’t make that case for Andy Pettitte.
But here in year seven, I examined the same career through a different prism — and it led me to cast a vote I didn’t expect to cast. I don’t change my mind on these things very often. But I’m allowed to.
And ohbytheway, so is my friend Ken Rosenthal. More Baseball Hall of Fame coverage GO DEEPER Five things to watch on the 2025 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot GO DEEPER Dick Allen and Dave Parker, Hall of Famers at long last: What we learned from their election GO DEEPER Baseball Hall of Fame tiers: Which active players are on course for Cooperstown? (Top photo of Andy Pettitte in 2012: Rob Carr / Getty Images).
