Major League Baseball

Hall of Fame: Will Mike Mussina Make the Hall?

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 11:17 p.m. ET

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Mike Mussina had a fantastic career during a time in which hitters shone. Was he good enough to get into the Hall of Fame?

The largest factor hurting Mike Mussina’s Hall of Fame chances is the great pitchers that played during the same era as him. He was continually battling against Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, and Pedro Martinez for Cy Young awards. Because he played with three sure-thing Hall of Famers (Clemens would be if not for PED questions), his career doesn’t look nearly as exciting from the outside. He didn’t reach 300 wins, he only got 20 wins once, and he never even won a Cy Young award. Those types of pitchers aren’t usually given high praise.

However, when we dig deeper on Mussina we can find a very compelling argument for him to reach the Hall of Fame. Mussina ranks 19th all-time in strikeouts with 2,813. When we narrow things down to pitchers with at least 3,000 innings pitched in their career, Mussina ranks 8th with a strikeout rate of 19.3%. That corresponds to 10th among the same group of pitchers in K/9 with 7.1. He did benefit from pitching in a time of heightened strikeouts, but residing so high on the list is certainly an argument in the right direction.

His K-BB% is also among the best all-time. The only pitchers that sit above him in the category are Hall of Famers Randy Johnson and John Smoltz and probable Hall of Famers Curt Schilling and Roger Clemens. He excelled at striking batters out while limiting walks like almost nobody else could. If we want to talk WAR, Mussina accumulated 83.0 during his career. That’s more than Hall of Famers from his era, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine. It’s also more than Bob Gibson and nearly as much as Nolan Ryan‘s 83.45. It’s also well above the average pitching Hall of Famer WAR of 70.

Jay Jaffe is well-known for his expertise as a Hall of Fame historian. He invented the JAWS metric to compare possible Hall of Famers to those already in the hall in a WAR-type score. Essentially, the higher the score the better case the player has to be inducted in the Hall. You can read more about the metric itself here. Mussina’s JAWS rating is right at 62.1, which happens to be the exact average value for starting pitchers already in the Hall of Fame. Fellow members on the ballot Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling reside at the same mark. It’s highly indicative that Mike Mussina should be a Hall of Famer.

Mussina’s case is great in the sabermetric community, but does he have enough juice and flash to get enough votes to enter the Hall? This was his 4th year on the ballot and he received 51.8% of vote. It was big jump from 43% in 2016, 24.6% in 2015, and 20.3% in his first year on the ballot. He may not see as large of a jump in the coming year with an impressive group of players being added to the ballot in the coming year. However, he is still on good pace to reach the Hall. It’s not a sure-thing, but he is well on his way to getting enough support to reach just over that 75% plateau.

Mike Mussina may not have had the same impressive career as some of his contemporaries like Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens. That shouldn’t take away from how impressive his entire career was. He has the stats to satisfy both the traditional and sabermetric crowds. He was impressive in the postseason and won a lot of games. He needs to find his way to the Hall of Fame, and it’s looking like he might do exactly that.

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