Not to pile on the Committees, but

daltex

I took a moment to look at the BBWAA HoF ballot for this year for the first time. As it happens, there were five starting pitchers who fell off the ballot this year (with a total of three votes). In no particular order, they were Weaver, Dickey, Cain, Arroyo, and Lackey. For fun, I compared them to the most recent starting pitcher elected by the Committees, Kaat.

https://stathead.com/tiny/vacQt

So, first, are these guys clearly better than Kaat? I would say that Dickey and Arroyo clearly weren't. Cain maybe. And Lackey and Weaver no doubt about it. Looking at this group, no one would pick Kaat as a clearly superior pitcher, and would think that if you did a "he's in the group", you'd be fairly generous to him.

Again, I'm by no means suggesting that even Weaver should be in the Hall, just again pointing out that the BBWAA does a pretty good job choosing players and the Committees continue to select players far worse than those rejected by the BBWAA, and really always have.

craig44

Kaat was a really bad choice in my opinion.

dallasactuary

I see Kaat being clearly better than Lackey. Kaat had Lackey's career through 1972 and then pitched, better than average, for another decade. I think the gap from Kaat down to Lackey is enormous. We can certainly debate how much value to place on length of career vs. peak vs. averages, but I think to get Lackey on top of Kaat you literally have to assign negative value to Kaat's last decade. (Ditto for Weaver, but Kaat had Weaver's career by 1969).

Looked at another way, if you took Kaat's best seasons until they reached the length of Lackey's or Weaver's careers, you'd have a MUCH better pitcher than Lackey or Weaver. The negative values assigned to the remainders of Kaat's career at that point would have to be huge.