Baseball Hall of Fame: Does Trevor Hoffman belong?

One of the more difficult questions when it comes to the Baseball Hall of Fame is the bar for entry for closers.

When it comes to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the most difficult position for me to judge is the closer. Actually, closer isn’t even a position; it’s just the name for the pitcher who pitches the late innings and picks up the save. It’s not a position; it’s a role. This role, the way we know it today, didn’t even exist in baseball until more than a century after the first professional game was played.

For most of the history of baseball, starting pitchers were expected to not only start the game but to finish the game as well. If the starter got knocked out, a lesser pitcher would come in to finish it off. There were a few exceptions along the way. One example is Firpo Marberry, who led the league in saves six times from 1924 to 1932, but no one knew it at the time because the save was not yet a statistic.

There were other pitchers who became known for pitching predominantly in relief since the days of Marberry, but they were a rarity. Jim Konstanty was the NL MVP as a relief pitcher in 1950. He was 16-7 and pitched 152 innings in 74 games that year. Roy Face famously went 18-1 for the Pirates in 1959. He pitched 93.3 innings in 57 appearances. These guys may have been the key men in the bullpen, but they weren’t used like current closers, so it’s hard to consider them comparables.

It wasn’t until 1969 that the save became an official MLB statistic, and it was another two decades before closers started to be used the way they’re used today. With the newness of the role and the changing way in which closers have been used over the years, it’s become very difficult to determine which closers deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. This can be seen by a taking a closer look at the current six relievers in the Hall of Fame.