The forgotten Cubs starting pitcher who should be in the Hall of Fame

When Chicago Cubs fans get bent out of shape about a player from yesteryear being spurned by Cooperstown, they're more often than not talking about Sammy Sosa or maybe Mark Grace. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a former Cub more deserving of Cooperstown than burly right-hander Rick Reuschel.

Reuschel, now 75, spent a dozen seasons with Chicago, five in San Francisco and also had brief stints with both the Yankees and Pirates. All-in, he put together a lengthy 19-year career, pitching over 3,500 innings and winning over 200 games.

When he got a crack at Cooperstown, the voters more or less spit in his face. He received just two votes and that was that. But in December, the Quincy, IL native will get another bite at the apple, when the Hall of Fame’s Classic Baseball Era Committee has a chance to right an egregious wrong.

Rick Reuschel could soon get his long-overdue plaque in Cooperstown

Back in the day, wins and losses meant a lot to voters. Today? Not so much. There's a widespread understanding that there are far better ways to measure success of a pitcher than a win-loss record. Reuschel, after all, was barely a .500 pitcher in his career at 214-191 (.528) - but when you dig deeper into the numbers, you quickly find a very different story.

Over those 19 years in the big leagues, Reuschel racked up 69.5 bWAR. But, because he played on a lot of bad teams, nobody seemed to appreciate his body of work. That 69.5 bWAR ranks 37th all-time among MLB starting pitchers - better than Jim Palmer, Don Drysdale, Whitey Ford and countless other legendary greats.

At his peak, from 1977 to 1980, Reuschel was a force in the Cubs rotation, amassing 26.3 bWAR and working to a 125 ERA+ across nearly 1,000 innings of work. But, thanks to some lackluster Chicago teams at the time, he actually finished with losing records in two of those four seasons.

His undisputed best season came in that '77 campaign when he won 20 games (the Cubs wouldn't have another 20-game winner until Jon Lieber accomplished the feat in 2001. The right-hander was worth a staggering 9.5 bWAR that year, a mark that's been topped by a Cubs pitcher just four times since 1900 (Mordecai Brown, Grover Alexander, Dick Ellsworth and Fergie Jenkins). 

He was so good that year, he was statistically more valuable than guys like Jon Lester, Kerry Wood, Mark Prior or Jake Arrieta - some of the biggest names to toe the slab for the Cubs in recent decades. His 48.3 bWAR in a Cubs uniform? Bested only by Jenkins who, as we all know, went into the Hall of Fame on his third ballot in 1991.

So what's the deal? How can these two pitchers have received such varying levels of support and appreciation since they retired? Their resumes aren't identical - Jenkins' is a step above Reuschel, for sure. But they're not so different that one is a shoo-in for Cooperstown and one gets no consideration at all.

For me, it comes down to a few things: that aforementioned love affair with win-loss record back in the day and the fact that Reuschel struck batters out at a comically low rate (5.1 K/9 in his career).

That amounted to barely 2,000 strikeouts after nearly two decades in the league. It just doesn't carry the same weight as the vaunted 3,000-K threshold. All told, Reuschel has been punished for playing for a ton of crappy teams that dinged his ability to pile up wins and not striking enough guys out.

Hopefully, the Hall gets it right and he gets his place in Cooperstown. 'Big Daddy' took the ball every five days and delivered. The numbers don't lie - and it's time we all acknowledge the truth: Rick Reuschel is a Hall of Famer.