2014 Hall of Fame Candidate Mike Mussina 1993 UD Inside the Numbers #463

Tonight in our HoF ballot series we take a look at my favorite borderline candidate.
 

 

1993 UD Inside the Numbers #463 Mike Mussina

There are flaws in his resume, but for me Mike Mussina is a strong Hall of Fame candidate.  Notable career numbers include his 270 wins vs 153 Ls (117 above .500) and 2813 career Ks (19th all time). 

The Vote No on Mussina argument falls into 3 areas 1) No dominant season (no Cy Young Award), 2) His stats are largely Accumulators, 3) No Championships - an omission that is further exacerbated by the fact that he spent 8 seasons with the Yankees who bookended Mussina's tenure w/ World Series Wins on each end. 

However...

-He may have never won a Cy Young Award, but he did lead the league in Pitching WAR in 2001.

-Mussina's Black Ink scores are very soft but his Gray Ink Test is quite strong. While not pointing to a dominant season, this does tell us that Mussina was in the top 10 of pitching categories often.  I think the accumulators argument falls flat largely based off of the gray ink. 

-Finally in 2001 had the "Greatest Closer Ever" not blown a save, Mussina would have a World Series  Ring.

 1993 UD Inside the Numbers Subset - Peter Gammons

1993 UD Inside the Numbers #463 Mike Mussina (b-side)

Inside the Numbers is a 21 card subset in 1993 UD (#450 - #470) with each card featuring a short writeup by HoF baseball journalist Peter Gammons. Clear back in 1993 Gammons referred to Mussina as having Game Seven Make-up. 

The Phillies are represented by Dave Hollins, other players getting the Gammons treatment include Chipper Jones, Jeff Bagwell, Dave Justice, Bernie Williams, and Pudge Rodriguez.

More Moose
2004 Upper Deck USA USA-134 Mike Mussina 

Phungo Verdict: HoF - Full Disclosure, I met Mike Mussina in 2001. An acquaintance of mine is related to Mussina's wife. We didn't talk much but he was a real decent and polite guy. I am glad I met him and I was really happy to find out that he was good guy. So yes this may influence my opinion a bit, but I am happy to say that I think the numbers look HoF worthy on there own.

2014 HoF Candidates
Todd Jones
Mike Piazza (2013 Profile)
Curt Schilling (2013 Profile)
Mike Timlin
Larry Walker (phungo vote = HoF)
 .
2013 HoF Rejects (no longer on ballot)

Jeff Conine

Kenny Lofton

Jose Mesa

Sources & Links
1993 UD Peter Gammons Inside the Number subset
baseball-ref.com
Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards (2006 ed) 

Happy Thanksgiving and Trade Bounty from Play at the Plate

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

One of the things I am thankful for is all the folks I have traded with since going on-line. I try and do a minimum of one trade a month and frankly am amazed by the folks who are doing 3 or 4 trades a week. It takes me a week just to get myself organized enough to thing about a trade.

Brian of Play at the Plate and I were both involved in the same group break held over at Saints of the Cheap Seats. One of the cards that I received was a Carl Yastrzemski Relic that PatP was interested in, I swapped that for a Chase Utley relic and we expanded the trade out. Here are some of the cards that have been added to the Phungo Collection.


2008 UD Sweet Swatch #SS-CU Chase Utley

In additions to the Utley the lot included lots of great Phillies cards.

2002 Donruss Diamond Kings #21 Scott Rolen
2009 Topps Chrome #139 Ryan Howard

I have recently started building player collections. Utley is in my player binder as are some other Phils like Jamie Moyer and Garry Maddox. I am also working on non-Phils collections. These players include Johnny Damon, Bill Lee, and I am thinking about Jeff Conine. Mike Mussina is among this group.

2002 Topps T206 #67 Mike Mussina (Tolstoi Back)

Topps has come out with another T206 series and Cardboard Junkie has a pretty thorough discussion of the back variations from the earlier T206 retro sets. The Tolstoi variation is considered "Uncommon".

I have a pretty varied Want List, and Brian did a great job of scouring it and found all kinds of different goodies - including a Brandon Meriweather Auto!


And this Football Relic:
Is it Brett Favre?!?!?!



2008 Stadium Club Beam Team #BTR-JB John David Booty

No silly - It's John David Booty. I don't think Booty ever took a snap as a Viking and is currently on the Tennessee Titans practice squad.

Once again I would like to thank everyone I have traded with in the past year and look forward to getting more trades out in the future. I don't always give the trade posts as much attention as they deserve, but I dot try and post something on each trade.

I can only hope that everyone is as happy with the cards they receive from Team Phungo as I am on my end.

Thanks Again, Happy Thanksgiving and Go Broncos!

Phungo Cards - Mike Mussina

2009 Phungo #20 Mike Mussina

Today the Hall of Fame committee selected Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice as it's class of 2009. Henderson is an obvious choice and is going in on his first ballot, Rice is not as obvious and gets in on his last ballot. I haven't really looked over Rice's numbers, but from what I have read Rice's qualifications are certainly in the neighborhood. The only non-member that I know enough to construct an argument for would be Bert Blyleven and possibly Ron Santo.

What does this all have to do with today's Phungo Card? Well, if he remains retired, in 2014 Mussina will be on his first Hall of Fame ballot. At that time I am pretty sure that I will advocate his induction into the hall. If you want to see some of my arguments for Mussina's Hall of Fame credentials check out the Phungo post from November in reference to his retirement.

As far as the Phungo Card, I have selected a dark blue for the Yankees border color. Mussina gets a hero number of 20 for his card. I did this to represent his 20 Wins in his final season. His uniform number is 35, I will let you ponder who got that number instead over Mussina. You may also notice in the player postion I have added the designation of ACE. I have annoited certain pitchers as Aces if I think they are the top pitchers on their staff. I am sure this can be debated during Mussina's career in New York. He may not have always been their ace but over the last 5 or 6 years he has certainly been one of their steadier pitchers. This picture was taken on May 3rd of this past year. It was a Saturday day game. Mussina pitched well giving up one run over six innings scattering 7 hits, all singles. Good enough for Career win #254.

I hope that Mussina gets one more victory when they announce the selections for Cooperstown five years from now.

If you want to know more about Phungo Cards, read some background here.

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There was another reason I selected Mussina today, I wanted to recognize the great young ladies over at A Cardboard Problem for getting into the Heavenly 7. They are of Yankee fandom and put out quality work that is both informative and funny - Best of all they drop by here to comment occasionally and are also active participants in Spot the Sig!

Speaking of Spot the Sig! Night Owl Cards got this weeks STS! and broke PTBNL string of four consecutive STS! victories. I will have more on Alex Rios and the autographed card later this week. Tonight, however I am hoping to do some streak busting of my own. If you were with us last night, you now that Team Phungo is in a Phillies drought. We have opened 18 EIGHTEEN!!! consecutive packs and not drawn one Phillies card. Can you believe that??

This is the first pack, 08 UD Masterpieces. I think at least two of our participants picked Masterpieces and I appreciated it. Here goes. RIP!!!

#36 Miguel Cabrera
#8 Jim Palmer...funny doesn't look like Palmer
#60 Whitey Ford and I think I have this card already.
#39 Roy Oswalt

bummer 19 packs and still no Phils.

Sorry Sooz, Sorry Fan of Reds. No Phils in the Masterpieces Pack. Tomorrow or Wednesday I will have a Post on the 05 UD MVP, which was only picked by DayF.

Happy Trails Mike Mussina

This week Mike Mussina formally announced his retirement from Major League Baseball. The fact that Oriole's Card "O" the Day, 30-Year Old Cardboard, Dinged Corners, and Fielder's Choice have all written about his retirement tells us a lot about Mussina's impact.

2004 Upper Deck USA USA-134 Mike Mussina

I have always been a fan of his for several reasons. During the mid 90s he was a key cog in the Orioles staff and since then he has been the steadiest pitcher on the Yankees staff. His 270 wins rank behind only Maddux, Glavine, Clemens, and Randy Johnson among pitchers from his era. He has finished top 10 in his league in wins 9 times, top 10 in ERA 11.

Despite never winning a World Series ring he did pitch fairly well in the post season. He played for nine different playoff teams. One of Curt Schilling's (11-2) two losses is against Mussina. Same for Josh Beckett (7-2 in the playoffs). And Mussina left the critical fifth game of the 2004 ALCS with a lead, in the 7th inning against Pedro Martinez, before Mariano Rivera blew the save.

Beyond the post season he provided plenty of other great moments. I can still remember watching his near perfect game on Sunday Night Baseball in September of 2001. And this year he started and won the last game I will ever see at Yankee Stadium.

Yes he may be Mr Almost. But he was not just pretty good. He was really really good.

I would like to close by mentioning that Mike Mussina is considered by many accounts to be a real decent guy off the field. Each winter he returns to his roots in rural Central Pennsylvania to help out in his community. Sports needs more stories like this and we need to remember and honor those stories.

I would like to also remind everyone that Sunday is Spot The Sig! Night. I expect to post the next Sig around 10:30 tonight. Stop back then and see if you can guess the Auto!

2008 11 02 - Card Show @ Concord Mall, Wilmington DE

To celebrate the Phillies World Series victory I hit the card show at the Concorde Mall outside of Wilmington Delaware last weekend. I perused several dime boxes, here are some of the Highlights.

2008 Topps UH Gold #UH220 Geoff Jenkins #0033/2008
1983 O-Pee-Chee #350 Robin Yount

I picked up bunches of Phillies and some cards of Hall Of Fames like Robin Yount. The Jenkins card was a particular surprise as it was out of the recently released Updates and Highlights.

I also got some some good looking star inserts of players like Vlad, and Griffey.

2000 UD Ultimate Victory #86 Ken Griffey
2002 Topps Gallery Heritage #GH10 Vladimir Guerrero

The Griffey Foil doesn't look good on the scan but is a sharp card. I really like the Gallery Heritage cards and will keep my eyes open for more of these.

I picked up a half dozen cards from last years Wal-Mart Trading Card History. This is a set I keep looking for on ebay and was happy to find a couple at the show. As usual I picked up some Heritage cards of various Stars like Bernie Williams from several different sets Bowman, Topps and UD Vintage.

2007 Topps Wal-Mart #WM6 Greg Maddux
2002 Bowman Heritage #278 Bernie Williams

The best for me was finding thirty 08 Topps inserts in a dime bin including 20+ All-Star Rookie Inserts like the Strawman. I also picked up a couple of Fleer Flair from different years - Always a favorite of mine.

1993 Flee Flair #154 Mike Mussina
2008 Topps All-Star Rookie #AR1 Darryl Strawberry

Obviously I was pleased with all my nickel and dime box finds. Filling out the 08 inserts was pretty awesome. I have also been working on the 1959 Topps base set and was able to find 5 commons pretty cheap.

There were maybe 20 or 25 tables with a wide array of items. The dealers had apparently had a good weekend, business likely bumped by the recent Phillies triumph, and certainly did not complain as much as they do at a typical show.

Damages:

$3 - Nickel Box several Hall of Famers, Oddballs, Sporting News All-Stars, Football, AI
$2 - five 1959 Topps Commons
$5 – 31 Phillies commons, 13 Phils Heritage/Retro , plus 02 Donruss Originals Jimmy Rollins, Geoff Jenkins Topps Gold
$10 – Dime Box 08 Topps Inserts, Walmart 07 TCH, Chrome, Allen Ginter, various Vikings, 2004 Team USA
$5 - Top Loaders

$25 for a fun day at the card show, very worthwhile!