Potential Hall of Fame pitchers overshadowed by game's offensive emphasis: numbers put up by hurlers such as Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux get tossed aside for home run hitters

Baseball Digest, Oct, 2004 by Kevin Baxter

METS PITCHER TOM GLAVINE once made a commercial in the which the punch line was "chicks dig the longball."

Turns out, they aren't the only ones.

The home run was getting unprecedented attention from the nationally televised Home Run Derby, which kicked off All-Star festivities for the gathering of the 14 living members of baseball's 500-homer club--three of whom were selected to the National League's starting lineup for the first time in 75 All-Star Games.

Overlooked in all that, however, was the fact four pitchers voted to play in last July's mid-summer classic--Roger Clemens, Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson of the National League and Curt Schilling of the American League--are potential Hall of Famers. And their achievements might be greater than those of the hitters.

One of them, Clemens, had 322 wins, while Chicago's Greg Maddux, who didn't even make the All-Star team, had 299 through games of August 1. That's a total reached in baseball's modern era just 14 times--or six times fewer than a batter has hit 500 homers.

Clemens and Johnson both have more than 4,000 strikeouts--something only two other pitchers can claim--while they have combined to win 11 Cy Young Awards.

Yet, no one has proposed staging a Strikeout Derby just yet.

"I'm not surprised," said Glavine, who has 258 victories through August 1, 2004. "It's kind of the era or the generation of offense and everything being about offense. So much in the game now has been centered around offense and guys hitting home runs and that seems to get all the attention, so pitchers are kind of taking a back seat to all of that."

It hasn't always been that way, of course.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, pitching dominated, yet that was the era that saw Ernie Banks, Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Harmon Killebrew and Frank Robinson hit their 500th homers.

Mays hit his 600th in 1969, and Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record with No. 715 in April 1974.

"There's a lot that's changed, and you have to make the adjustments to go along with it," said Clemens. "The strike zones always have changed and altered. The newer ballparks are conducive for hitting, and everybody works out year-round."

Johnson, who pitched a perfect game for the Arizona Diamondbacks earlier this season, agrees with Clemens and says most of baseball's recent rule changes have been designed to favor hitters.

"It's made baseball a lot more interesting for the fans. But it's made it a lot more difficult for a pitcher to be successful in today's game," he said. "The strike zone's a little bit different than what it was, say, six or seven years ago. The biggest thing that most pitchers in today's game have to do is execute your pitches and hit your spots."

But while the infatuation with home runs has helped spur what commissioner Bud Selig continuously calls "baseball's renaissance," Glavine isn't sure it's a good thing.

"Right now, it's a home run and a run-scoring culture in baseball," he said. "And I don't know that it's necessarily a great thing for the game. It seems to be what people are enjoying right now.

"If the cycle swings back the other way, it's going to be awfully tough to do it in some of these new ballparks," Glavine said.

Despite that, the pendulum might be starting to swing back.

"There's a better group of young pitchers in the game now than there has been in a long time," said Schilling.

Clemens agreed.

"The guys that are good, like Oakland's Mark Mulder, really know how to pitch," Clemens said. "If they take care of themselves, they can pitch for a long time."

Mulder had more wins by age 25 than either Schilling or Johnson, so there's hope.

But will women dig the three-hit shutout as much as the longball?

"They don't seem to, no," Glavine said. "There doesn't seem to be as much talk about a three-hit shutout."