Phil Niekro: 1939-2020

 

A collage of my Phil Niekro baseball cards. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

My signed photo of Joe and Phil Niekro-I bought it on eBay, I never met either Niekro brother. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Phil Niekro in 1987, just before the last start of his major league career. He still looks like he means business, even at age 48.

2020 has taken yet another baseball Hall of Famer from us, as Phil Niekro passed away on December 26^th at the age of 81. Phil Niekro was one of my favorite players, thanks in part to the 1988 book The Niekro Files, which is comprised of the letters that Phil and Joe Niekro sent to each other during the 1987 baseball season. I read The Niekro Files sometime during my childhood, and since then the Niekros have been on my list of favorite players. I never met either Phil or Joe Niekro in person, unfortunately.

Both Phil and Joe had 20+ year careers in the major leagues: Joe with 22, Phil with 24. Counting the minor leagues, Phil Niekro had a 28-year professional career in baseball. That’s simply amazing. Together, Phil and Joe won 539 major league games, a record for two brothers, with Phil accounting for 318 wins, and Joe adding 221 of his own. In 1987, the Niekros broke the record of Gaylord and Jim Perry, who won 529 games.

Phil Niekro didn’t achieve the same level of fame as some of the other pitchers of his generation. Niekro never played in a World Series, never won a Cy Young Award, and won 20 games in a season “only” 3 times. (Joe Niekro finally appeared in a World Series with the Minnesota Twins in 1987. He threw 2 scoreless innings.) Phil had the misfortune of pitching for the Atlanta Braves when they were mostly a second division team, and he ended up losing a lot of games: 274, to be exact, 5^th on the all-time list. Niekro had the ignominious distinction of leading the league in losses 4 years in a row, from 1977-1980. Ouch.

However, with advance statistics and sabermetrics, it’s clear to see how great Phil Niekro was. Niekro accumulated 95.9 WAR, which is 35^th all-time, and 97 pitching WAR, good for 11^th all-time. Niekro’s 97 pitching WAR puts him just below Christy Mathewson, and just ahead of some of the other great pitchers of Niekro’s generation, like Bert Blyleven, Gaylord Perry, Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, and Ferguson Jenkins.

Because he spent five years in the minor leagues before making his big-league debut, Niekro only had 31 wins by the time he turned 30 on April 1, 1969. In contrast, Tom Seaver had won 146 games by his 30^th birthday, and Steve Carlton had won 133. But Niekro quickly made up for lost time, as he set a career high by winning 23 games in 1969, as the Braves won the NL West. However, in the very first NLCS, they were swept by Seaver’s Miracle Mets.

Niekro remained the workhouse of the Braves’ rotation throughout the 1970’s. Because Niekro’s main pitch was the knuckleball, which puts very little strain on the arm, he was able to average 288 innings during the decade of the 1970’s. By the end of the decade, the Braves were far from contention, and in 1979 Niekro had a truly odd season, as he led the NL in both wins and losses, in addition to also leading the league in games started, complete games, innings, hits, home runs, walks, hit by pitch, and batters faced! Phil tied his brother Joe for the league lead in wins in 1979, which is pretty cool.

After the 1983 season, Phil Niekro was released by the team that had originally signed him 25 years before. The Yankees signed Niekro as a free agent, and he quickly rebounded, going 16-8 with a 3.09 ERA in 1984. Niekro was now 16 wins away from 300. In 1985, Niekro won his 15^th game on September 8^th, leaving him just one win away from 300. But the next 4 starts he remained winless. According to my 1986 The Complete Handbook of Baseball, Niekro “destroyed phone booth after one of his unsuccessful attempts at No. 300.” It’s hard for me to imagine Phil Niekro destroying a phone booth, but hey, winning 300 games is a big deal. It all came down to Niekro’s final start of the season, against the playoff-bound Toronto Blue Jays. Niekro came roaring back, firing an 8-0 shutout, winning game number 300, and becoming the oldest pitcher to ever hurl a shutout. Niekro didn’t even throw a knuckleball until the very last batter he faced.

Niekro pitched well past his 48^th birthday, an amazing feat in baseball. In fact, Niekro won 121 games after his 40^th birthday. In 1987, pitching for the Cleveland Indians, Niekro and Steve Carlton were teammates, and they became the first 300-game winners to appear in the same game, pitching for the same team. At the end of 1987, Niekro even got to go home again, as he returned to the Atlanta Braves for the final game of his big-league career. Niekro pitched 3 innings and gave up 5 runs and didn’t factor in the decision.

Phil Niekro had a great career in the major leagues, and from every story I’ve heard he seemed to be a really nice guy. RIP to one of baseball’s greats.

Derek Jeter and Keith Olbermann

Derek Jeter, wearing a Derek Jeter patch, 2014.

Two days ago Keith Olbermann went on a rant on his TV show about how Derek Jeter is overrated, and that he’s sick of all the hype surrounding Jeter’s impending retirement. While I agree with Olbermann that Jeter is overrated, the rant that he went on was annoying and over the top. Olbermann didn’t give Jeter any credit for being a great player, which annoyed me. He called Jeter “excellent,” but that’s it. I think it’s completely logical to think these two things:

1. Derek Jeter is a great baseball player

2. Derek Jeter is also overrated

I should say that I’m not a Yankees fan. I’m a Twins fan, and I hate how the Yankees have crushed us in the playoffs in 2003, 2004, 2009, and 2010. That being said, I admire and respect Derek Jeter. He plays the game hard, all the time. He’s the kind of player you’d love to have on your team, and the kind of player you hate playing against. 

So what does Olbermann have against Jeter? Well, first Olbermann criticizes Jorge Posada for saying that Jeter is the greatest Yankee of all time. Come on, what do you think Posada is going to say? Jorge Posada played with Derek Jeter for 17 years. Jorge Posada did not play with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, or Mickey Mantle. Jorge Posada is not a baseball historian. He’s not going to say, “Well, actually, if you look at OPS+ and WAR, no one has ever come close to surpassing Babe Ruth as the greatest Yankee of all time.” His purpose, at that press conference, is to say something nice about Derek Jeter. Of course people who really know the history of the game know that Derek Jeter isn’t the greatest Yankee ever. 

Yes, Derek Jeter is overrated as a player. Yes, the year-long celebration of him and how wonderful he is has become a little grating. But what Olbermann didn’t say is that there are reasons why Derek Jeter is overrated:

1. Jeter has played his entire career for the New York Yankees, which means that he plays for the most famous baseball team in the world. Just because of that fact, he’s going to get more media attention than, say, Paul Konerko, who has played almost his whole career for the White Sox, and who is also retiring at the end of this season.

      2. Jeter has played almost an entire season’s worth of post-season games. 158, to be exact. Even if you’re a casual baseball fan who only plays attention in October, Derek Jeter is someone you are very familiar with. Jeter also comes through during the playoffs. His regular season slash line is .309/.377/.439. His postseason slash line is .308/.374/.465. Derek Jeter consistently comes up big when the game is on the line, as he showed tonight when he got the game-winning hit in his final home game at Yankee Stadium.

      

      3. Derek Jeter is very media friendly. He’s movie-star handsome. He has a knack for always saying the right thing. He comes off as a smart, well-spoken guy. He’s always been a class act. And he just seems like a really nice guy. (In contrast to A-Rod, who always says the wrong thing at the wrong time and comes off as a jerk.)

For those reasons, it’s inevitable that Derek Jeter is going to get a lot of media attention and press coverage and be much more famous than other baseball players. It isn’t so much that Derek Jeter is overrated; it’s that he’s overexposed. 

To further criticize Jeter, Olbermann picks the stat, “Best WAR per season as a Yankee,” which is slightly misleading, since Jeter played more seasons for the Yankees than anyone else on the list. Jeter has played for 20 seasons, but since Olbermann is only counting full seasons, we’ll disregard the 1995 and 2013 seasons for Jeter, putting him at 18 full seasons, and an average of 3.8 WAR per season. I’m not sure where Olbermann is getting his numbers from. I’ve used baseball-reference.com for my WAR stats. According to baseball-reference, Jeter has 71.7 WAR for his career. If we take away 1995 and 2013, his partial seasons, he has 72.7 WAR, which would be an average of 4.04 WAR per season, which is higher than the 3.8 figure Olbermann has. So how does Jeter compare to those other Yankees that Olbermann mentions?

Graig Nettles averaged 4.0 WAR a year as a Yankee, but he also played for the Yankees for just 11 seasons, rather than Jeter’s 18. Nettles also played for the Yankees during the peak of his career, which helps his WAR as a Yankee. If you look at Nettles’ whole career,  he had 68 WAR over 22 years, which averages out to 3.09 WAR per year, quite a bit lower than Jeter’s 3.8. 

Red Ruffing pitched for the Yankees for 15 years, so the 7 years he played for the Red Sox at the beginning of his career, when he was a crappy pitcher with an ERA+ of 92, don’t count. It’s also silly to compare pitching WAR to hitting WAR anyway.

Willie Randolph’s name is spelled wrong in the graphic on Olbermann’s show. He played 13 years for the Yankees, so we’re not counting the last 4 years of his career. When you average out Randolph’s WAR for his entire career, it’s 3.64 per season, which is lower than Jeter’s 3.8.

Mike Mussina played for the Yankees for 8 years. He has more WAR than Jeter, but he’s also a pitcher so the comparison is silly anyway.

Thurman Munson played for 11 years. He died in a plane crash at the age of 32, so we don’t know what kind of numbers he would have put up in the decline phase of his career. He’s not a great comparison to Jeter.

A-Rod has been a Yankee for 10 years. Yes, he has more WAR than Jeter. He’s also a steroid user.

Joe DiMaggio only played for 13 years, because he missed 3 full seasons due to World War II. Babe Ruth played 15 years for the Yankees. Lou Gehrig played for 17 years, although 3 of those are partial seasons, putting him at 14 full seasons. Mickey Mantle played 18 years, the same number as Jeter when we take away his partial seasons. Mantle is the only player on the list who has played as many seasons with the Yankees as Jeter. These comparisons are inexact, and invariably unfair to Jeter, because you’re comparing his entire career to people who played many fewer seasons for the Yankees. Baseball-reference ranks Jeter 5^th in WAR for the Yankees, behind Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, and DiMaggio, and I think that’s a better display of where Jeter ranks among the all-time Yankees.

I do agree with Olbermann that Jeter has stunk this year. His stats show that he really did make the right decision to retire. And he probably should have said, “Move me down in the batting order.” However, Joe Girardi probably didn’t want to be in the middle of the inevitable media firestorm that would have occurred had Jeter been moved down in the batting order. 

Yes, the modern merchandising of baseball has made Jeter’s final season a crass marketing juggernaut. But because we knew early in the season that 2014 would be Derek Jeter’s last year, fans got a chance to show their appreciation for him, knowing it would be the final time he played in their city. Sports fans don’t often have a chance to say goodbye so publicly to athletes. Most of them just fade away. Many great players and Hall of Famers did not get the season-long sendoff that Jeter did. To give just a few examples, Jim Palmer was released by the Orioles in May, 1984. Steve Carlton was released by the Twins in April, 1988. Mike Schmidt abruptly retired in May, 1989. Ken Griffey abruptly retired in June, 2010. Pete Rose just stopped putting himself in the lineup after August 17, 1986. Fans didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to these great players. So it’s pretty cool that Derek Jeter got to have a final lap. I’ll admit, when the All-Star Game came to Target Field this year, I was proud to stand up and cheer for Jeter as he exited the game. I was applauding Jeter for his whole career, and the excellence he’s embodied throughout 20 years in the majors. I was applauding his ability to rack up more than 3,400 hits, good for 6^th on the all-time list. I was applauding his uncanny ability to make the big play when it needed to be made. I’m glad I got a chance to say goodbye to a truly great player.