Should Mike Mussina’s number have been retired?

[Mondo Trasho]

I'm neutral on it. Mostly because I'm neutral on retiring numbers in general. 

[Snutchy]

Hot take:

I’d rather see them retire Markakis’ number instead. 

[drdelaware]

Settling this right now.

Cuellar. W 143 L 88. ERA 3.18. Cy Young.  3 WS 

Mussina W 147 L 81 ERA 3.53

No freaking way 35 should be retired for Mussina.  
 

Another pitcher wore the number and did it just as good and probably better.

Game, set, match.

Edited May 25, 2022 by drdelaware

[Frobby]

2 hours ago, Snutchy said:

Hot take:

I’d rather see them retire Markakis’ number instead. 

Hays has it now.  Nick was my favorite player then, Hays is my favorite now.  So I’m happy to keep it in circulation.  

[Frobby]

15 minutes ago, drdelaware said:

Settling this right now.

Cuellar. W 143 L 88. ERA 3.18. Cy Young.  3 WS 

Mussina W 147 L 81 ERA 3.53

No freaking way 35 should be retired for Mussina.  
 

Another pitcher wore the number and did it just as good and probably better.

Game, set, match.

How ridiculous is this argument?   Mussina had a better W-L record while playing on worse teams.  He played in a much more offense-friendly era than Cuellar.  Mussina’s 130 ERA+ as an Oriole dwarfs Cuellar’s 109.   I loved Cuellar but Mussina was by far the better pitcher.   The fact that Cuellar played on three WS teams is irrelevant, it just reflects that Cuellar had a much better team around him than Mussina did.  

[Jammer7]

I voted No because I think retiring numbers is way overdone. Mike Mussina was a fantastic Orioles pitcher. My favorite Orioles pitcher since Palmer retired. I even played basketball against him in HS. And I will never forgive him for going on to become a Yankee. Leave, fine. But never, ever, put on those pinstripes. And then, he did not go in as an Oriole. Pass.

[OriolesMagic83]

2 hours ago, drdelaware said:

Settling this right now.

Cuellar. W 143 L 88. ERA 3.18. Cy Young.  3 WS 

Mussina W 147 L 81 ERA 3.53

No freaking way 35 should be retired for Mussina.  
 

Another pitcher wore the number and did it just as good and probably better.

Game, set, match.

Cuellar was on a better team in a better pitcher's park in a better pitching environment.  Nothing against Cueller, but I think when you compare the eras and the teams, Mussina was better. 

[Gofannon]

9 hours ago, Frobby said:

How ridiculous is this argument?   Mussina had a better W-L record while playing on worse teams.  He played in a much more offense-friendly era than Cuellar.  Mussina’s 130 ERA+ as an Oriole dwarfs Cuellar’s 109.   I loved Cuellar but Mussina was by far the better pitcher.   The fact that Cuellar played on three WS teams is irrelevant, it just reflects that Cuellar had a much better team around him than Mussina did.  

It's too bad they retired Cal's number without thinking of Andy Etchebarren.  He played on three WS teams as well.  Are we up to that point yet?

Let's stop the Mike Cuellar talk.  I think many of the people who are bringing him up weren't even alive when he pitched.  He was a good pitcher.  Mussina was our best pitcher since Palmer.  Number retirement aside, they are in different categories.

[Frobby]

1 minute ago, Gofannon said:

It's too bad they retired Cal's number without thinking of Andy Etchebarren.  He played on three WS teams as well.  Are we up to that point yet?

Let's stop the Mike Cuellar talk.  I think many of the people who are bringing him up weren't even alive when he pitched.  He was a good pitcher.  Mussina was our best pitcher since Palmer.  Number retirement aside, they are in different categories.

I laughed out loud at your first sentence.  Hilarious analogy!  I will say this for Cuellar he was a very good pitcher and a workhorse.   I agree he’s not in Mussina’s category, but he’s also not in Etchebarren’s.  And I liked Etchebarren.  He actually played on four WS teams, not three.   

[Sports Guy]

9 hours ago, Frobby said:

How ridiculous is this argument?   Mussina had a better W-L record while playing on worse teams.  He played in a much more offense-friendly era than Cuellar.  Mussina’s 130 ERA+ as an Oriole dwarfs Cuellar’s 109.   I loved Cuellar but Mussina was by far the better pitcher.   The fact that Cuellar played on three WS teams is irrelevant, it just reflects that Cuellar had a much better team around him than Mussina did.  

Yea that’s a horrible comparison. That’s an old guy going with “his guy” and being upset a player left to go to the Yankees.  

[nevadaO]

https://twitter.com/jonbecker_/status/1529198877110321152/photo/1

 

[Frobby]

1 hour ago, Sports Guy said:

Yea that’s a horrible comparison. That’s an old guy going with “his guy” and being upset a player left to go to the Yankees.  

I’m not exactly young, you know.  I’ll be eligible for Medicare in three weeks.

My favorite pitcher on those great ‘69-71 teams was McNally.   I can’t really say why, but it’s probably because he also was great in ‘68 while Palmer was hurt and before Cuellar arrived.   So, I glommed on to him first and stuck with it.   But when I look at those teams in hindsight, all three pitchers really benefitted from having an amazing defense behind them.   Brooks, Belanger and Blair are all among the very top defenders ever to play their positions.  To have all three at the same time was incredible.   

[Moose Milligan]

9 hours ago, Jammer7 said:

I voted No because I think retiring numbers is way overdone. Mike Mussina was a fantastic Orioles pitcher. My favorite Orioles pitcher since Palmer retired. I even played basketball against him in HS. And I will never forgive him for going on to become a Yankee. Leave, fine. But never, ever, put on those pinstripes. And then, he did not go in as an Oriole. Pass.

I'll also add here that the days of players hating the opponents like fans do is long gone.  Long, long gone.  Sure, there might be some rivalries in the game where teams don't necessarily like each other (White Sox and Yankees certainly heated up over the weekend.  Giants/Dodgers, Card/Cubs, Sox/Yanks) but the rivalries are mostly for the fans.  I think the players get into it too, but only to a certain extent.

That certain extent ends when you realize that these guys are all millionaires and play for the money, full stop.  I'm sure they all want to win, but they want to have their cake and eat it too, which is fine.  I don't begrudge a player for making more somewhere else.  The days of a player sticking with a team for his entire career are long gone.  Sure, you have a guy like Trout, but let's not forget that the Angels gave him a massive deal before he could ever hit free agency.  

That certain extent also ends when you realize that these guys all work out together in the offseason at various places like Driveline, etc.  We've got a thread going about Manny Machado, IIRC he was working out with guys on other teams in Miami in the offseasons when he was here.  

It's just not the 50s and 60s anymore where players played for one team for the bulk of their careers and real rivalries existed.  

Rivalries are for the fans.  I don't believe they're for the players anymore.  Maybe a little, but it's certainly not the way it used to be.

[Just Regular]

20 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Matt Kilroy

I knew about his 19th Century 500K+ season, but not until today had I appreciated it was his Age-20 rookie season.   B-Ref has him a 5-9, 175 LHP.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/kilroma01.shtml

513 SO in 2469 BF is K% rate of 21%, about what Jordan Lyles has today.

Nolan Ryan's 383 in 1355 was just a hair over 28%, which still would be pretty good these days.

Zach Wheeler led MLB last year with 849 Batters Faced.

[DrungoHazewood]

41 minutes ago, Just Regular said:

I knew about his 19th Century 500K+ season, but not until today had I appreciated it was his Age-20 rookie season.   B-Ref has him a 5-9, 175 LHP.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/kilroma01.shtml

513 SO in 2469 BF is K% rate of 21%, about what Jordan Lyles has today.

Nolan Ryan's 383 in 1355 was just a hair over 28%, which still would be pretty good these days.

Zach Wheeler led MLB last year with 849 Batters Faced.

Forgive me if you know some of this already, but the evolution of pitching from the 1860s through the 1890s was massive and dizzyingly fast.  In 1865 pitching really was more like pitching a horseshoe than what we think of as pitching today.  The rules changed almost annually, but you might see a pitcher limited to having both feet on the ground during his delivery, the hand couldn't even come up to waist level, he couldn't snap his wrist, and the batter could call for a high or low pitch.  Called strikes and balls started to be written into the rules by sometime in the 1860s, but umps were usually very reluctant to call them. So you would sometimes have individual at bats that lasted 10 or 15 minutes with pitchers refusing to throw hittable pitches, and batters refusing to swing at balls 3' off the plate.

This threatened to ruin the game as a spectator sport, so over the next 20-odd years they tinkered with the rules in ways that would make today's "stop messing with baseball" folks contemplate jumping off a bridge.  From 1865 to 1888 they went from underhanded tosses and 70-pitch at bats to fully overhand pitching much like today.  After 1893 the pitching rules were basically in modern form. 

Kilroy was 18 before overhand pitching was legalized. When pitchers tossed the ball underhand and probably rarely threw a pitch 60 mph nobody even contemplated things like rotations and relievers and the like. You could throw all day. As the rules changed it took a while for use patterns to catch up.  The early days of overhand pitching as hard as you want saw pitchers start 2/3rds or more of their team's games.  Old Hoss was the most famous, but Kilroy threw 583 innings at 20 and 589 at 21.  Nobody had done this before, so nobody really knew what the limitations of human psychology are.  Most of these 1880s pitchers who threw these superhuman innings totals fell off very quickly.  Kilroy was done as an effective pitcher by 24. Radbourne didn't pitch in the majors until 26, pitched until 36 but was a .500 pitcher after his 60-win season, and was dead at 42.

By the 1890s teams were using at least primitive rotations to spread the workload.   The Champion 1894 Orioles used nine different starters in a 129-game schedule, including five with at least 15 starts. Wasn't quite a modern rotation, but it was a far cry from one guy completing 85% of his teams starts as would have been common about a decade before.

Anyway, Kilroy was throwing from flat ground in a box whose front edge was 50' from the plate.  He had to start striding 4-5 feet behind that so he wouldn't step over the line.  But in any case, he was pitching from maybe 55' in today's terms, overhand, to 5'8", 150 lb batters many of whom had been recently playing sandlot and semi-pro ball.  And he averaged 7.9 K/9 as a rookie, falling to 3.3 the next year (which happened to be the four-strike year).