Milt Pappas and Bad (and Good) Timing
Would you rather be Gimpy or Buehrle?
1974 Topps Milt Pappas (#640) - Card of the Day
Mark Buehrle is on the Hall of Fame ballot for the fifth time in 2025, which is an accomplishment in itself. With 75% of the vote required for enshrinement and 5% required just to stay on the ballot, Buehrle has yet to top 11%.
In 2022, his second year on the ballot, he barely lived to see another day/vote, garnering just 5.8% support. Last year, he was at 8.3%
Those results sort of reflect Buehrle’s in-between status as a candidate. He wasn’t a power pitcher, he didn’t win 300 (or even 250) games, his ERA was (a lot) closer to 4.00 than to 3.00, and his 33 complete games and ten shutouts barely raise a blip on the all-time charts.
When compared to the Hall of Fame starters of the past, those numbers come up short.
And when you look at the aces of today, they come up short, too, but in a much different way. But they also come up long.
Buehrle’s 5.1 strikeouts per nine innings and 1.281 WHIP might get him laughed out of the arbitration room, for example. But he has eight more CGs than any active pitcher, and, among hurlers who began their careers after Buehrle’s last campaign in 2015, only Sandy Alcantara has even a third as many.
Similarly, Buehrle tossed more innings and picked up more shutouts than all but one active pitcher, and all of the leaders are old, old guys (by baseball standards).
The game has changed in a lot of ways, and Buehrle sort of got caught straddling two eras.
But if you look at the list of the most comparable pitchers to Buehrle, according to Baseball Reference’s Similarity Scores, you get a picture of a pitcher who belongs firmly to an earlier time. To wit, his five top comps are Milt Pappas, Jesse Haines, David Wells, Orel Hershiser, and Bob Welch.
The top name on that list, Pappas, certainly does look a lot like Buehrle when you compare their mainstream stats:
Pappas: 209-164, 3.40 ERA, 3186 IP, 1728 K, 858 BB, 1.225 WHIP
Buehrle: 214-160, 3.81 ERA, 3283.1 IP, 1870 K, 734 BB, 1.281 WHIP
Pappas had a big edge in ERA and keeping runners off the bases, while Buehrle generally had better counting stats. If you want to rattle your SABR a bit, Buehrle easily tops Pappas in WAR, 60.0 to 46.2 (BB Ref version).
Pappas was a bit of a hard-luck case in at least one respect, missing out on some prime Orioles years by a whisker. By the end of 1965, he had already pitched in the majors parts of nine seasons for Baltimore, though he was still just 26 years old. That winter, the O’s traded him, Jack Baldschun, and Dick Simpson to the Reds in exchange for Frank Robinson.
So, not only did Pappas lose out on the Cy Young factory in Baltimore, not to mention six division titles, four pennants, and two World Series rings, he also gets to be remembered forever as the short end of a historically bad trade.
That’s not completely fair, of course, since Pappas posted double-digit wins six times in his final eight seasons. But the Reds ended up trading him to the Braves midway through the 1968 season, which meant he was on hand when Atlanta won the first-ever National League West crown but missed out on the birth of the Big Red Machine.
By the time Cincy won their first title (since 1940, at least) in 1975, Pappas was two years out of baseball. He spent his last three-plus summers with the Cubs, pitching a no-hitter in 1972 and winning 17 games in both ‘71 and ‘72. He slipped to 7-12 with a 4.28 ERA in 1973, and the Cubs released him the next spring.
That was fortuitous timing for collectors, at least, as Topps had already slated Pappas in their 1974 set. That horizontal card showing the righty in mid-delivery is also a career-capper, showing his entire statistical accomplishments on the back:
Five years later, Pappas appeared on his only Hall of Fame ballot, picking up a mere five votes as Willie Mays romped to an easy (though not unanimous!) election.
On that same ballot, by the way, Bill Mazeroski landed just 8.3% of the vote but eventually made the cut via the Veterans’ Committee.
Will Buehrle follow Pappas into Hall obscurity, or will he eventually find a way into Cooperstown like Maz before him? The stats and voting trends say he’ll stay on the outside, but it’s tough to tell for sure, especially for a guy caught in the middle. And one who carries the mystique of having tossed a perfect game (in 2007).
The good news for collectors is that we can just sit back and soak in all the cardboard memories that Buehrle and his ballot-mates stir up (or stirrup)…like a 50-year-old gem that drops us into the action on a sunny afternoon at Wrigley Field.