Dave Stieb didn’t expect to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame, but the former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher does take issue with the fact that he only appeared on one ballot.
“I said right off the bat, ‘I don’t belong in the Hall of Fame, I did not win enough games and so forth,’” Stieb told Graham Womack of The Sporting News. “I surely did not deserve to be just wiped off the map after the first-year ballot. It’s like, please, amuse me and string me out for two, three years.”
Stieb played for the Blue Jays for all but one of his 16 major league seasons. He stepped away from the game following the 1993 season and returned for a stint with Toronto as a 40-year-old in 1998. He appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2004 and received just seven votes (1.4 per cent).
“It’s like an insult,” Stieb said. “What it told me was in (the writers’) minds, I didn’t even do anything worth recognizing.”
[relatedlinks]
The right-hander will be eligible this fall as a veterans candidate on the Modern Baseball Committee ballot, getting a second chance at Hall of Fame induction. He’ll join other players who didn’t make it in on writers’ ballots, including contemporaries Jack Morris, Dale Murphy, Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell.
Stieb became the Blue Jays’ ace in the 1980s and stills hold several of the franchise’s all-time pitching records, including wins (175), games started (408), strikeouts (1,658) and innings pitched (2,873.0). He was also one of baseball’s most dominant starters in the 80’s, with his wins above replacement of 48.6 leading all pitchers in the decade.
The stat — used to summarize a player’s total contributions to a team — was not around during Stieb’s playing days, but he’s well aware of it now.
“Pat Hentgen told me years ago, he goes, ‘Man, you know how they’re using that WAR a lot, that stat?’ I go, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘They use that like crazy now to gauge how good someone really is.’ He goes, ‘If they looked at that when you were playing, you would have won four Cy Young Awards in a row.’”
Injuries caught up to Stieb in the 1990s and caused a sharp downturn in his career.
“The Hall of Fame is more indicative of somebody having consistency throughout their whole career and dominating numbers throughout their whole career,” he said.
