Billy Wagner deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, and here's why

Billy Wagner won’t be picking up the phone when the baseball Hall of Fame announcement comes Tuesday.

In fact, the former Mets closer told a few news outlets that he doesn't even plan to have his cellphone near him that evening, because he can’t stand to be disappointed a ninth time.

Oh, the bittersweet irony: The fireman who made a career out of being the last man standing — the wiry 5-10 lefty from Middle of Nowhere, Virginia, who stared down some of the most fearsome hitters to ever grace the game — is nervous as he enters the final innings of his candidacy.

The ballots  already are in, and according to Ryan Thibodaux’s tracker, with about 47% of the voting revealed,  Wagner had garnered just under 80% of the vote from eligible members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America by Friday afternoon.

That’s a strong number, but far from a guarantee: Wagner will need to be on more than 70% of the remaining ballots to reach the 75% threshold for induction, and percentages always go down when unrevealed ballots are thrown into the mix.

If he doesn’t make it this time, he’ll have one year left — one more year of not waiting by the phone, one more year to somehow remind people he was one of the best to ever do it, and one more year for the eligible voters of the BBWAA to understand that the criteria that have kept Wagner out of the Hall thus far are skewed.

Because let’s face it — if more than 75% of voters valued relief pitchers correctly, Wagner, a seven-time All-Star, would have been in years ago.

Of the 270 players in Cooperstown, 89 are pitchers, and only seven were career relievers (nine if you count Dennis Eckersley and John Smoltz, who also started). Taking Mariano Rivera out of the equation — because no one was Rivera — Wagner has a better ERA than any of the remaining six at 2.31. His FIP, or fielding independent pitching, was 2.73 — again, better than any Hall of Fame reliever other than Rivera.

His ERA-   — essentially ERA adjusted for the hitting era a player pitched in — was second only to Rivera among relievers; it's an important distinction, given that he pitched during the heyday of the steroid era.

His ERA+ is 187, meaning he was 87% better than the average pitcher. He struck out more than  33% of the batters he faced — the highest percentage of any pitcher who has thrown more than 900 innings — and was the prototype for the flamethrowing closer of the late '90s and early 2000s. His 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings is the best of any pitcher ever,  Rivera included. He has 422 saves, sixth in MLB history, and 1,196 strikeouts.

I know what the detractors are going to say: He generally pitched only the ninth, meaning he finished his 16-year career with only 903 innings. He never won a Cy Young Award. He never led the league in saves. He never won a World Series and often didn't pitch well in limited postseason appearances.

But if you're going to enshrine the top 1% of players, you should be willing to enshrine the top 1% of relievers, and Wagner certainly is that. That becomes doubly true when you consider how much the sport itself has increasingly relied on its bullpen arms.

Starters are pitching fewer innings, and we’ve routinely seen strong bullpens carry teams in the postseason — all of which means the days of the 300-win pitcher might be behind us, and the 3,000-strikeout benchmark could be a far reach, too. We’re also seeing a greater shift toward the “closer by committee” approach, meaning that exclusive ninth-inning guys such as Edwin Diaz and Emmanuel Clase are becoming a little rarer. There even might be a day down the line when the save stat holds far less importance.

Excluding relievers under the guise that they don't pitch enough is reductional thinking. Saying they're not that important is flat-out wrong.

So how do we evaluate them? Well, the same way we appraised Wagner here: Compare him to the other relievers in the Hall, evaluate his stats — main and peripheral — and weigh cumulative criteria such as innings pitched or WAR with an eye toward context.

If you do that, Wagner is an easy pick for the Hall of Fame. And if he doesn't get the call Tuesday, you can bet I'll be using my first vote next year to check the box near his name. I hope other members of the BBWAA do the same.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.