Jack Morris

Jack Morris won more games than any pitcher of the 1980s and pitched as if losing were a personal insult. He threw a wicked split-finger fastball, took the ball every fifth day for 14 years, and saved his fiercest work for October, where he authored one of the greatest games anyone has ever pitched. He won championships with three different teams and bent more than one of them to his will on the mound. The Modern Baseball Era Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 2018, after the writers spent 15 years arguing about him.

The Workhorse From St. Paul

Morris was born on May 16, 1955, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and pitched at Brigham Young University before the Detroit Tigers drafted him in 1976. He reached the majors the next year and settled into the rotation by 1979, and he stayed there, durable and stubborn, for more than a decade. His best pitch was a split-finger fastball that dropped off the table, taught to him by his teammate Milt Wilcox, and he threw it with a scowl that told hitters exactly how the afternoon would go. Across the 1980s he won 162 games, more than any pitcher in baseball, the ace of a good Detroit team for the whole decade.

Champion in Detroit

The peak of the Detroit years came in 1984, when the Tigers started 35-5 and never looked back. Morris set the tone in early April with a no-hitter against the White Sox on national television, the first by a Tiger in 26 years, and he carried the staff through October. He won twice in the World Series against San Diego, complete games in Game 1 and Game 4, and Detroit took the title in five. The Series Most Valuable Player award went to his shortstop Alan Trammell, but the rotation was Morris's, and the championship confirmed what his teammates already knew about him.

The Greatest Game

Morris left Detroit after 1990 and signed with the Minnesota Twins, the team of his hometown, and it set up the night that made him a legend. In Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, he faced the Atlanta Braves and a young John Smoltz in a scoreless duel that would not break, and he refused to leave it. He pitched all 10 innings, shut the Braves out, and when the manager Tom Kelly tried to pull him after nine, Morris looked him in the eye. "I'm not going nowhere," he said. "This is my game." Gene Larkin singled home the winning run in the bottom of the 10th, the Twins won 1-0, and Morris had thrown the finest World Series Game 7 in history.

A Third Ring in Toronto

Still pitching at the top of the game, Morris signed with the Toronto Blue Jays for 1992 and won 21 games, his only 20-win season, then claimed his third championship with his third franchise. He had now won titles in Detroit, Minnesota, and Toronto, three titles in three uniforms, a traveling ace who arrived and won. The competitiveness that made teammates respect him and hitters resent him never dimmed, and he finished his career having pitched 14 straight Opening Days, the durability as much his signature as the split-finger.

Pitching to the Score

Morris built his reputation on an idea he believed about himself, that he pitched to the score, easing off with a lead and bearing down when games were close. His defenders pointed to the 254 wins, the innings, and the October record as proof that the man was better than his earned run average suggested. His critics ran the numbers and found that he pitched about the same in every situation, and that his 3.90 earned run average was the highest of any starter in the Hall of Fame. The debate ran for years because both sides had a point, and it turned his candidacy into the most argued of his generation.

The Long Wait

The argument played out on the ballot. Morris spent the full 15 years before the writers, climbing to 67.7 percent in 2013, close enough to feel the door, before falling short in his final try in 2014. The wins and the big-game aura pulled one way, the high earned run average and the analysts pulled the other, and the writers never quite pushed him over the line. He had to wait for a veterans committee to settle it, and in the meantime the case for him only grew more familiar.

Cooperstown at Last

In December 2017 the Modern Baseball Era Committee elected Morris to the Hall of Fame, and it elected Trammell on the same day, sending the 1984 Detroit battery mate and infielder in together. He went in wearing a Tigers cap, the franchise where he had won his first ring and his no-hitter and most of his 254 victories. The pitcher whose worth had been debated for two decades finally had the answer carved into a plaque, and the night in Minnesota that defined him needed no debate at all.