Ramping up Some Righteous Recognition for Rick Reuschel

My Illinois-based friend Dex is highly discerning. His opinions about history, religion, culture, sports and politics are invariably well-considered and can be relied upon. In the penultimate category, he is baseball first, hockey second, football third and hoops a distant fourth. (Dex claims not to have seen an NBA game since Michael Jordan took palming the ball and traveling to the next level.) A one-time scout for the Milwaukee Brewers, he is a true student of the game. Sometimes I ask what he thinks of a player, and sometimes he just offers his view—free of charge. Taking a hypothetical example, if he characterizes Joe Schlabotnik of the St. Louis Browns as having a good stick but that he was weak with the leather and rather fond of booze, I pretty much assume it’s true.

Less than a week ago, we were e-mailing (Dex and I have never met) back and forth when he threw out a blanket statement: “For my money, Rick Reuschel is the most underrated pitcher in post-World War II history.”

Of course, I was aware of Big Daddy, who stood 6′ 3″ and weighed 230-plus pounds. He pitched for 19 major league seasons (1972 to 1991, missing 1982 due to a rotator-cuff injury) with the Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants. He was a three-time All-Star, was a two-time Gold Glove winner, finished third in Cy Young voting twice, and had a 214-191 record with a 3.37 ERA and 2,015 strikeouts. He threw 102 complete games, 26 of which were shutouts (one shared with his older brother, Paul).

But let’s return to Dex for a minute. He was a second-semester freshman at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1969. “When I got back to campus from Easter break, our baseball team was facing Western Illinois University, and some big red-faced pitcher was completely shutting us down,” he recalled. “We had three guys who would eventually be drafted by MLB, so we were not pushovers. He didn’t seem to be throwing smoke, but our guys were continually off-balance and totally baffled. It was Reuschel. The next day, I asked our coach who the pitcher was. He knew nothing about him and incorrectly pronounced his surname. It’s ‘RUSH-oll.’”

Tell me more, I said. He complied: “First of all, Bill James [baseball writer, historian and statistician] has quantified many things I’d long believed. RR pitched for teams that were largely bad, he pitched in Wrigley Field and gave up relatively few homers, his strikeout/walk ratio was 2:1, he claimed to have six different speeds on his fastball, he had exceptional range, he ran the bases well and was used often as a pinch-runner, he was not an automatic out at the plate [it is indicative that Reuschel had 46 career walks as a batter], he could bunt with the best of them, he was never heard bitching/moaning, and he never preened. He pitched into his 40s! He was a laconic farm boy from west central Illinois who was never a media darling. He simply wasn’t flashy enough, black enough or glib enough to be ‘cool.’”

It’s too late in the game for me to try mastering baseball sabermetrics, but I read that Reuschel posted 68 wins above replacement (WAR), which is better than 60 percent of the pitchers in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he won 20 games just once (in 1977), it’s important to consider that in his career, he had 158 “quality starts” that turned out to be losses or no-decisions. Surrounded by better defenders and hitters, his numbers would be much better. I admit that Reuschel might have a different legacy if he had excelled in the post-season; in Divisional Championship Series, League Championship Series and the World Series with the Yankees in 1981 and the Giants in 1989, he sputtered to a 1-4 record and a 5.85 ERA; he walked nearly as many batters as he struck out. Furthermore, he never threw a no-hitter.

Reuschel evidently did not impress Hall of Fame voters the one year he was eligible—1997, when he garnered two votes. But those who look closely at baseball think he is worthy. Various metrics put him ahead of such HOF pitchers as Jim Bunning, Jim Palmer, Whitey Ford, Don Sutton, John Smoltz, Carl Hubbell, Juan Marichal, Dennis Eckersley and Tom Seaver. Reuschel had a higher winning percentage than Nolan Ryan (.528 vs. .526), and he added value to the four franchises for which he played.

Neither Dex nor I is arguing that Rick Reuschel was the second coming of Satchel Paige or Sandy Koufax. Remember, his original statement was fairly modest—that Reuschel was the most underrated pitcher since World War II. He had valid reasons for making such a claim. As for Reuschel (who now lives on a farm an hour from Pittsburgh) getting into the Hall of Fame, I will just say that voters have treated him poorly and he deserves further consideration.