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Mike Mussina’s retirement has started the Hall-of-Fame talk. I linked to King Kaufman’s take basically pro-Moose take the other day, but Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus makes the case much more forcefully, and conclusively, far as I’m concerned.

“Comparing Mussina to a pitcher who is not in the Hall of Fame may not seem like a worthwhile exercise, but when you consider the reputations of the pitchers involved, the reason for choosing the two becomes clear. Mussina, with his lack of 20-win seasons, without a championship team to his name, and pitching with two of the five greatest pitchers ever in his peer group, is perceived as less than he actually was. Morris, who was the second- or third-best pitcher of his comparatively weaker era, is considered the best of his time, has an outsized reputation as a winner which had more to do with run support than any objective reality, and one of the greatest moments in baseball history.”

Dead-on. But that highlighted sentence had a coupla buddies and I scratching our heads. Who does Sheehan have in mind when he says “two of the five greatest pitchers ever [are] in his peer group”?

One friend rightly argued that the two pitchers in Moose’s class that rank among the best of all time had to come from this short list: Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and Greg Maddux.

He said he’d fill out his top-5 of all time from among the following Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Tom Seaver, and Steve Carlton.

A second friend argued Lefty Grove should be on the list as well. All fair enough.

But it got me thinking, as amateurish statheads are wont to do, about how you measure a pitcher’s greatness.

It always strikes me as harder to come up with a determinate metric for career pitching greatness. I’m pretty satisfied with Adjusted OPS+ for hitters. It has its minor flaws, but it basically tells you how much better a given hitter was than his peers, adjusted for park effects and era.

With pitchers, Adjusted ERA+ seems pretty good, but I’m not sure it captures everything.

Here’s what you get (cribbed from baseball-reference.com):

Not exactly pure canon, but not utterly ridiculous either. ERA+ looks like its capturing greatness and making us rethink some conventional wisdom. As a Yankees fan, I’m pretty excited to see Mariano Rivera on the top of the list.

But suppose you don’t buy ERA+ as the definitive measure of greatness. The best alternative is probably career WHIP. But since its not era-adjusted it tilts toward the first deadball era:

Still pretty good at picking out the canonical greats, but also includes a curveball or two.

Martinez and Rivera are back in the top 5 again. Needless to say, it’s quite remarkable that Mo and Pedro, pitching during their peaks in the juiced ball AL East, can insinuate themselves into a list that is almost 100% deadball hall of famers.

A third metric that probably tells you something, since by conventional wisdom the best pitchers of all time are supposed to be those rare Power AND Control guys: K/BB ratio

With a shoutout to Moose for sneaking in at 13, it’s pretty clear that Pedro and Mariano are top-5 all time, maybe even 1 and 2.