Quote:
Originally Posted by Wallymo
Kevin Appier is criminally underrated.
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I'm not an "Appier should be in the HoF" guy or anything, but he was a metric **** ton better than Jack !@#$ing Morris...
Where I think Appier gets shafted is that he doesn't get discussed with guys like Oswalt. Or even contemporaries of his like Orel Hershiser. And I think that's fairly where he should be considered historically. A guy who was very good through a short peak and then pitched admirably for a long while after that.
I think it's because he just didn't hold his apex for very long and that apex wasn't exemplary (just very very very good). Then again, I'm hard pressed to find anyone in modern baseball history that got ****ed as badly in a CY race as he did that year he was amazing. And if you're not going to give it to the most deserving player (Appier) then maybe give it to the guy who had a better ERA than the winner and struck out
300 !@#$ing guys - Randy Johnson.
Jack McDowell is one of the least deserving CY winners I can think of. And if the voters get that right that year, maybe Appier is viewed differently by history.
But I think that since the Royals decline really coincided with Ape's, his time in KC is seen through a pretty jaundiced lens by his hometown fans. If he has the exact same career in the 80s for KC instead of the 90s, he's a franchise legend.
But late-state Appier (97ish) was a warhorse. Never really did recapture that dynamite stuff he had in his early/mid 20s but he'd battle tooth and nail out there.