Viva El Birdos: Jack Morris and (Matt Morris and Matt Morris)

I’m reminded of Wayne Morris playing Wayne Morris in Screen Snapshots: Hollywood Plays Golf.

But baseball news is baseball news, at this point, right? And discussion is discussion. So in the grand tradition of blogging, I’d like to show you this weird thing I found: Jack Morris, apparently inevitable Hall of Fame mistake, vs. two Matt Morrises stacked on top of each other.

...Matty-Matty-Mo becomes Jack Morris’s most similar player by a significant margin, somewhere in the 920s. The only real differences between these guys is Our Morris’s substantial control advantage and Other Morris’s famous complete games. I liked Matt Morris a lot, and there are scenarios in which he could have been a Hall of Fame-caliber pitcher; he came up young and was immediately excellent, and if he doesn’t lose two years in the late-90s and his fastball sometime in the middle of 2003 he might be the poor man’s Mike Mussina.

But the version of Matt Morris we got is not very suitable for Hall of Fame cloning. He’s got three all-star-type seasons, one of which might have won the Cy Young in a weaker year, some solid fragmented seasons, and four years of bulk pitching. It’s a few years of the Matt Morris we’ll all remember appended hastily to the career of Kyle Lohse. These are not pieces you can make into a Hall of Fame pitcher, but they’re exactly what Jack Morris has, along with a reputation for tenacity, a habit of completing games, and two heroic World Series performances out of three.