New York Nine

Well everyone's favorite loud-mouth and blogger extraordinaire has decided to hang up the cleats one last time, and already writers are already buzzing about him, is he a hall of famer? One look at his career line and its easy to dismiss him 216 wins, 3.46 ERA and so on and so forth but in truth it doesn't really tell the whole story. I feel like I'm going the way of some old baseball writers who rely on their subjective experience and intangibles like "grit" and "clutchness" instead of statistics, but those simple stats don't really tell the whole story.


To get Curt's impact you have to look at those numbers but also the context he got them, with his biggest seasons all in seasons where he was the backbone for a championship team, with four world series trips and three rings to show for it. Now you can say hey well he happened to pitch well in those spots but he didn't do it over a long peroid of sustained excellence. This is true he had his ups and downs, but its hard to argue that well into his late 30s Schilling was one of the most dominating pitchers in the game when it mattered the most especially in the postseason with his 10-2 record and 2.23 ERA. But its more than that, as even the stat-minded Rob Neyer remarks

"It's not his 216 career wins. It's not his .597 career winning percentage. It's not his 11-2 record in postseason games, or his 2.23 ERA. It's not even the bloody sock.

It's all of those things."

I feel like I'm not really explaining his candidacy very well here, but as a Yankee fan it seems like a no brainer to me. From his time with the Diamondbacks in 2001 in the World Series and 2004 in the ALCS and the goddamn bloody sock I've learned all too well to respect and appreciate the man's talents. He's on the very short list of pitchers I just do not want to see on the mound when the game matters and he always delivered. Maybe for some that isn't enough sustained excellence but nearly a decade of frustrating the hell out of me and my team is more than enough for me to see this guy is a hall of famer. I hate the guy he's an annoying fat bastard who loves to hear himself talk, but the guy can fucking hurl it with the best of them. Perhaps he isnt the best hall of fame candidate, but you sure as hell could do a lot worse.