How Wagner WHIPped his way to Cooperstown

The lefty reliever from "over the mountain" makes the Hall in his 10th and final chance.

Congratulations to the assembled major league scouts and Division I college recruiters who saw Tazewell High play baseball in the late 80s. You were watching a Hall of Famer, unbeknownst to you.

There weren’t that many of you, of course. Tazewell is off to itself, in southwest Virginia. The school itself is “over a mountain,” as Billy Wagner used to say, from his real home in Tannersville, population 392. Wagner himself was, and is, 5-foot-10. He struck out 116 batters in 46 innings his senior year and didn’t get drafted by the pros, didn’t get a sniff from the collegians. He went to Ferrum College, a Division II school, and as a sophomore he averaged 19.1 strikeouts per nine innings. That would be hard to do against the Elks Club, so Wagner suddenly became a first-round draft choice of the Houston Astros.

On Tuesday, in his 10th final year of the ballot, Wagner finally broke the 75 percent barrier. He made the Hall of Fame, along with first-balloters Ichiro Suzuki and lefty starter C.C. Sabathia. It’s a testament to the awareness of the baseball writers, since Wagner is anything but a self-promoter, and he didn’t have a legion of advocates. He has had a DIY career. “There hasn’t been a soul who taught me how to pitch,” he said. Few souls learned how to hit him.

Wagner walked onto major league mounds to the accompaniment of “Enter Sandman,” by Metallica. That anthem is more associated with Mariano Rivera. The difference between the two is Rivera’s spotless postseason record and Wagner’s October struggles. Otherwise Wagner’s plaque would already be hanging.

Wagner pitched 16 years and had 422 saves. He nailed down 86 percent of his opportunities. He was an All-Star for four different clubs (Houston, Philadelphia, the Mets and Atlanta). He was 38 in what the Braves knew would be his final season, and he saved 37 games, and struck out 104 in 69 innings.

What probably boosted Wagner’s Hall of Fame stock is the popularity of the WHIP statistic, which is Walks and Hits Per Innings Pitched. Baserunners, in other words. It’s a very useful calculation because it deals with real-world events, not cold abstractions or probabilities.

Starting pitchers don’t sweat it when they permit baserunners. They can negotiate their way around them. Sabathia, for instance, has a career WHIP of 1.259, which ranks 359th in baseball history, yet his innings and wins made him a viable candidate. Giving up a run in an early inning usually isn’t fatal.

For closers like Wagner, it’s different. Normally they come in with a 1-run lead. If they walk the leadoff man, clouds gather. Most closers have poor pickoff moves. They are programmed to pitch on red-alert. They also pitch on adrenalin, with a limited number of bullets. Men on base can empty their chamber in a hurry.

Among pitchers with 1,000 or more innings, only Addie Joss, Ed Walsh and Jacob deGrom have a career WHIP of 1.000 or under. Wagner, who pitched 903 innings, has a WHIP of 0.998. Better, in other words, than Rivera’s. With Houston in 1999, he had a WHIP of 0.777. That was the year he turned in 74 ⅔ innings and gave up 35 hits while he struck out 124. Those numbers simply don’t belong on the same line, and Wagner finished fourth in Cy Young voting.

Overall Wagner gave up 601 hits in those 903 innings. That’s a lot of 1-2-3 ninth innings. That shortens games, turns up the urgency for the opposing team to scramble for a lead before Wagner starts warming up, and calms his own team. He struck out 33.2 percent of the batters he faced, and he ended his career with four consecutive Ks. Opposing batters had a batting average of .187.

Wagner was just as direct off the field. He said Houston declined to re-sign him because he was “a little too blunt” about the way things were going, but then he also criticized the focus of his Phillies’ teammates and didn’t like it when he saw certain Mets hiding from reporters when things went bad. “Not everyone is going to like Billy Wagner,” he said, but most teammates did. He drove a big truck and he dressed like a cowboy and he could handle a blown save as long as everyone else could. Although he began to favor the slider in his sunset years, Wagner basically left the game the way he greeted it, frontally and at high velocity.

Besides, no sane bettor would have put a cent on Wagner’s chances to even see a big-league stadium. His parents feuded, and when they split up Wagner was shuttled from relative to relative. He finally began living with his high school coach, and things began coming together. At Ferrum he was just an aimless thrower until Darren Hodges, a pitcher whom the Yankees had drafted, came by to work out. He advised Wagner to slow down his motion, planted some fundamentals, and Wagner was suddenly throwing mid-90s strikes.

As he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he built arm strength by throwing at the outline of a strike zone on the side of a barn. “I didn’t have much to do,” he said. “I’d throw it as far as I could, run and get it, then throw it back as far as I could.”

There’s a resistance to the idea of closers these days. We’re told that “high leverage” situations in the sixth inning can be just as pivotal as the events of the ninth. Few of those analysts have trod to the mound to get Outs 25 through 27, with no bailout. Fewer pitchers relish that stress. Wagner was a setup man for a while and had to admit it made for a better life. “No pressure, just go out there and if you get in any trouble, here comes the closer,” he said. “I never had that feeling before.”

Today Wagner has a ranch near Charlottesville, Va., where he raises alpacas among other things, and his son Will made his MLB debut on August 14 with a 3-hit game for the Blue Jays.

It’ll be quite a Philadelphia weekend in Cooperstown this July. Dick Allen will enter the golden door, thanks to the Veterans Committee. Shortstop Jimmy Rollins now becomes the project for Phillie fanatics. He deserves far more support than the 18 percent he got on this ballot.

And it will also be a landmark weekend thanks to Suzuki, the first Asian player to earn a plaque. He came within one vote of unanimity. Hall of Fame voters can still remain anonymous if they choose, and that one chose to, rather than risking the sticks and stones of the Internet. It’s difficult to understand why anyone would shortchange Ichiro, but, hey, people voted for Jill Stein. There’s no reason you should be shamed in the public square for an eclectic opinion.

When Tony Gwynn’s name came up, a writer was asking his fellows if they would consider leaving him off the ballot. The logic, to stretch that term, was that Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and Sandy Koufax weren’t unanimous, so why should Gwynn be? The truth is that it really doesn’t matter, that Bert Blyleven’s plaque is the same size as Babe Ruth’s. Better to grant the dissenter some peace and quiet, in this case, rather than listen to some foghorned moral argument against voting for Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, who were of course Hall of Fame worthy but again finished up the track.

Anyway, Induction Day will belong to those who passed that bar. Those who arrange the program should make sure Suzuki leads it off and Wagner finishes up, easy as 1-2-3.