The perpetually underrated Jerry Koosman

In talking to a fellow Mets fan about my article from last week (Can the Mets Win 100 Games Next Year?) we kept coming back to circle around and talk about Jerry Koosman.  It was probably blasphemous that I would compare the 2015 rotation and saying that they could be better than Koosman/Tom Seaver. I know many Mets fans know just how good Koosman is, but I’m willing to bet most non-Mets fans have no idea that he is the 3^rd best pitcher in Mets history (1^st being Seaver, of course and 2^nd being Dwight Gooden).

Koosman would end up finishing with a career fWAR of 65.8, accumulating 43.5 of that fWAR during his 12 years with the Mets. Since 1945, Koosman ranks 27^th among all pitchers in fWAR, yet he never won a Cy Young and only received Cy Young votes in 2 seasons. In 1976 he finished 2^nd, losing to Padres pitcher Randy Jones. Koosman was in the MVP race more often than he was in the Cy Young race. He only made 2 All-Star teams, right at the beginning of his career. He appeared 1 Hall of Fame ballot before falling off, garnering just 0.9% of the votes cast in 1991. He got fewer votes than Sparky Lyle or Larry Bowa, who had significantly less fWAR in their careers. Even Koosman’s contemporaries didn’t understand his value.

How does a player with 222 wins, 73^rd all-time, make it on just 1 Hall of Fame ballot? Of all the players above him in career wins that aren’t in the Hall of Fame that played post 1915, Koosman has the lowest voting percentage received. Now, I’m not saying that Koosman absolutely belongs in the Hall, but he at least deserved more than a passing through of the whole voting process. His 222-209 record certainly isn’t helping his cause, but in this day and age we all know that a pitcher can only win a game if the team scores runs for him. Koosman finished 28^th all-time in strikeouts, partially due to the extremely long career he had. Of the players ahead of him who are Hall eligible, only Mickey Lolich isn’t in the Hall. The strikeouts are particularly impressive, considering this was still an era where strikeouts were thought to be extremely bad.

Would Koosman playing just one more season have helped his Hall chances? Seaver entered the ballot the next year, garnering the highest percentage ever. Could have he had ridden to a higher percentage thanks to voters remembering how good the two of them were together while pitching on the Mets? It’s possible. It’s also almost possible that Koosman never even pitches a single game for the Mets, as the book “The New York Mets Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic” notes. In 1966 the Mets almost cut him from their farm system, but assistant farm director Joe McDonald was able to talk them into keeping Koosman until he got his first paycheck because he owed the team money! The Mets had wired him money to help fix his car as it broke down en route to Spring Training. Can you imagine? It’s not as if he was even that bad in 1965, his first minor league season for the Mets. He went 5-13 with a 3.75 ERA, but the levels he was playing in didn’t even keep track of strikeouts. He proceeded to tear up the New York-Penn league in 1966, going 12-7 with just a 1.38 ERA and a 0.894 WHIP, but no word on how many strikeouts because again, they didn’t keep track! The Mets almost gave up on Koosman after just one minor league season. Koosman was almost as looked over by the Mets as he has been after all these years. He deserves more than that.