The hidden-in-plain-sight Hall of Fame case for Andy Pettitte

Through three years on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot, Andy Pettitte’s candidacy has developed next to no momentum.

The lefty debuted on the ballot in 2019 with 9.9% of the vote, climbed just slightly to 11.3% last year, and has picked up only a few votes during the current cycle, according to public ballot-tracking. Pettitte doesn’t fare particularly well with old-school voters, who are likely underwhelmed by his three All-Star appearances and lack of a Cy Young award. And he doesn’t fare particularly well with new-school voters, who see him as more closely comparable to Mark Buehrle and Tim Hudson than to Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine.

But as I see it, the voters have gotten this wrong. In fact, they seem to be committing a fallacy common in Baseball Hall of Fame voting, one that fans of other sports must find entirely strange: They are pretending the playoffs don’t count.

I want to present an alternate view. A statistical case that while Pettitte falls narrowly on the wrong side of the Hall borderline based on his regular season numbers, his full resume clearly warrants induction. A case that uses advanced stats to illustrate what some of those same advanced stats often miss. It’s a case on behalf of Pettitte but also others (Orel Herhiser comes to mind) whose postseason performance belongs at the center of any enlightened Hall of Fame conversation.

Now, invoking playoff stats in Hall of Fame talk always draws some eye-rolls, and I promise I’ve heard the counter-arguments. The fact Pettitte pitched in October every year and, say, Buehrle did not has little to do with those two players and much to do with their respective teams. Pettitte is the all-time leader in postseason wins and fourth in postseason strikeouts for three main reasons:

1. He debuted right as the playoffs expanded, lowering the barrier for entry and supplying another round for him to compete in.
2. He played with Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera and other stars on a big-budget team that reached October every season.
3. He was, himself, an excellent pitcher.

The first two reasons, of course, are more about circumstance than skill. And so the argument goes that the lone difference between Pettitte and Buehrle was being in the right place at the right time.

Logical as that argument may be, the popular response strikes me as unreasonable and even bizarre. In Hall of Fame conversations, voters regularly dismiss Pettitte’s postseason work altogether, either waving away 276 2/3 innings, 183 strikeouts and a 3.81 ERA or weighing that performance as a sort of vague, intangible factor, secondary to whatever Pettitte did or didn’t do from April through September.

In other words, they treat playoff innings as less important than regular-season innings, no matter that they come at the most important time of the year.

Baseball-Reference founder Sean Forman, to single out one high-profile voter whose opinion I respect, implied recently that he didn’t consider postseason performance at all in Pettitte’s case, because doing so would be “a team argument.”

And yet Pettitte threw those 276 2/3 innings — more than a full season’s worth — and he threw them well. He benefited from circumstance, yes, but circumstance affects playing time in all sorts of ways. Some players get called up at younger-than-usual ages. Some are blocked at their natural positions. Some get used more often on short rest. Some are permitted to pitch deeper into games. Some suffer fluke injuries. Some are allowed to hang around and compile stats longer after their primes. All those factors may allow one player to accrue more playing time than another. Ultimately, though, a player’s legacy depends on how he performs in the chances he gets.

Jay Jaffe, the premier Hall of Fame writer around, recently described Pettitte as a “rather weak choice for the Hall of Fame,” “based upon both traditional and advanced metrics.” Using regular season numbers alone, this may be true. Pettitte had a higher career ERA than all but one Hall of Fame pitcher (Jack Morris), he didn’t reach 300 wins or 3,000 strikeouts, his WAR places him right on the Hall borderline and his JAWS score leaves him below most Hall of Fame pitchers and a considerable number of non-Hall of Famers.

But Jaffe, who created JAWS, fails to seriously grapple with his metric’s biggest limitation: It does not account whatsoever for playoff performance. Because once one accounts for what Pettitte did in October… well, Jaffe’s statement is no longer true.

(Before we go further: This no shade to Jay, who is great. I, like everyone on the baseball internet, would be far less informed about the Hall of Fame if not for him.)

The core of this argument will use advanced stats, but I want to quickly touch on baseball-card numbers:

• If we count playoff stats, Pettitte’s win total jumps from 256 to 275. Among post-1900 pitchers, only Roger Clemens, Jim Kaat and Tommy John have more wins and no Hall of Fame plaque.
• Adding in playoff strikeouts, Pettitte jumps from 45th all-time into the top 30.
• Pettitte’s career ERA doesn’t change when considering postseason output. But it’s worth mentioning that he had a slightly better ERA in the playoffs (3.81) than in the regular season (3.85), an impressive feat given the increased level of competition.

These new numbers help Pettitte’s cause. But it’s the advanced stats that make the most persuasive case.

According to Baseball-Reference, Pettitte’s regular-season career was worth 60.2 wins above replacement, 62nd among pitchers and right on the Hall of Fame borderline. He stands considerably lower by JAWS, which accounts for the strength of a player’s peak performance. Hence, the general lack of enthusiasm for his Hall case.

But to fully weigh Pettitte’s contributions, we must consider what he did in October. After all, those were real innings he really pitched.

There is no obvious way to account for playoff performance in a conversation based on WAR and JAWS, which do not have postseason components. But one easy option is to use Win Probability Added, which counts the relative change in a team’s win expectancy that a given player accounts for. The all-time leaders in playoff WPA are Mariano Rivera, Curt Schilling and John Smoltz. You know, playoff heroes.

Pettitte ranks fourth all-time with 3.5 playoff WPA, just behind that trio, suggesting that he was worth, in a crude sense, three or four wins to his teams in the playoffs. This figure survives a logic check: Pettitte pitched about as well in the playoffs as he did in the regular season, when he averaged 3.4 WAR per season. It figures that another season’s worth of similar performance would add another few wins.

If we add 3.5 wins to Pettitte’s career WAR to get a new total of 63.7, he gains some separation from the Hall border and from pitchers like Buehrle and Hudson. Stop there, and he’s a credible Hall candidate.

But given the relative importance of the postseason, we might take things a step further. In the pursuit of a World Series title, the playoffs have, of course, higher stakes than the regular season. Every strikeout or home run in October has a greater effect on a team’s chance of winning a championship than one in May. Therefore, it may seem fair that value produced in the playoffs should get extra credit in an assessment of career stats.

There is no science behind how large of a bonus to award, but Dan Szymborski of FanGraphs has said he counts playoff value with three times the weight of regular season value, and that seems reasonable enough to me. Using that formula, Mariano Rivera jumps from a decent Hall of Fame candidate by WAR to the legend we know him as. David Ortiz jumps from an iffy candidate to a strong one. Sounds right so far.

Meanwhile Pettitte, with 70.7 newly adjusted WAR, jumps from the realm of Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, Chuck Finley and Bret Saberhagen to that of Roy Halladay, Don Sutton and Carl Hubbell. He begins to look Cooperstown-worthy.

To say exactly how much this postseason bonus would help Pettitte in JAWS would require more math than I’m ready to attempt. But at bare minimum, 10 WAR is worth five points of JAWS, which would lift the lefty to the status of respectable — if not elite — Hall of Famer.

Sam Miller, until recently of ESPN, has also argued for Pettitte to reach the Hall, using an entirely different line of reasoning than mine. He notes that pitchers born in the 1970s are terribly underrepresented in the Hall, likely due to structural disadvantages out of their control, and suggests Pettitte should be inducted to fill a conspicuous gap. It’s a provocative and compelling argument that further reinforces Pettitte’s case.

(Note: I have thus far avoided talk of performance enhancing drugs. As you probably know, having made it so far in this article, Pettitte has admitted to using human growth hormone on two occasions in 2002. If that is disqualifying for you, so be it. I’m not going to rehash the same tired PED/Hall of Fame arguments, so I’ll just say Pettitte’s infraction is not disqualifying for me.)

To conclude, I want to return to this idea, expressed by Sean Forman and others, that the playoffs either shouldn’t count in Hall of Fame talk or should count only a little. It strikes me that such logic rarely shows up in other sports. I won’t spend much time comparing MLB with the NBA, because we know one great basketball player has a broader impact on winning than one great baseball player. But can you imagine arguing for Tim Duncan or Magic Johnson’s greatness, let alone Michael Jordan’s, without invoking the playoffs? When Manu Ginobili is eligible for the Hall of Fame, will it not matter than he scored 3,000 points in the playoffs and won four rings?

By that same token, Orel Herhisher was worth 56 WAR in the regular season and 2.8 WPA in the postseason, including a legendary playoff performance for the World Series champion Dodgers in 1988. Did he truly bring less value to his team than someone with 62 WAR but no postseason record?

The great Joe Posnanski, another vital voice on the subject of the Baseball Hall of Fame, wrote recently of Pettitte and Buehrle that he “can’t see how one would get more votes than the other.”

But with respect to Joe, it’s easy, maybe even obvious, to make a case for Pettitte over Buehrle and various other close-but-not-quite pitchers. All it takes is to recognize that playoff pitching counts. And that it’s pretty important.