Hentgen's Value Primarily Sentimental
Pat Hentgen is a veteran pitcher with a wealth of experience the Toronto Blue Jays' young pitchers can tap into. But at 35 years old, does the one-time Cy Young winner really have anything left?
11/18/03
Neate Sager

Should Toronto Blue Jays fans party like it’s 1996 since former Cy Young recipient Pat Hentgen has returned to the club?

As a stopgap measure, Hentgen (7-8, 4.09 ERA in 160.2 innings for Baltimore in ’03) may work out splendidly. Presumably, this is GM J.P. Ricciardi’sintention for signing the 35-year-old righty to a reported one-year, $2.2-million contact.

Hentgen, one of only four pitchers to win 100 games for the Jays, pitched decently during his salary drive this summer. From early August on, he lowered his ERA from 4.68 to 4.09 even as Baltimore won just 3 of his last 10 starts.

But how much does Hentgen ­ a stellar addition to the list of Cy Young Winners You Couldn’t Pick Out of a Police Lineup, right beside Steve Bedrosian, John Denny, and Mike McCormick have left in the tank?

According to the tables posted at Baseball-Reference.com, the most similar pitcher to Hentgen at age 34 is none other than his former teammate Todd Stottlemyre.

After his “age 34” season (1999), the pitcher whom infamously asked the mayor of Philadelphia to kiss his tuccus had only 115.2 innings left in his right arm.

So I ran some numbers ­ can you tell I really need a girlfriend? ­ on the other pitchers who are “most similar by age” to Hentgen. They are Jaime Navarro (age 29), Storm Davis (30), fellow Cy Young recipient Jack McDowell (31), and Charles Nagy (ages 32 and 33).

None of the first three hurled even one pitch in the Majors after their 34th birthdays.

As for Nagy, since his 17-win year of 1999, he has posted ERAs of 8.21, 6.40, 8.88 and 4.38 ­ the last in 5 relief appearances with the pitching-starved Padres this season. He turns 37 before next opening day, so you wonder if he has anything left.

Another pitcher with parallels to Hentgen is the greatest hurler in Jays history, Dave Stieb. Both were members of the ’92 World Series-winning Blue Jays, when Hentgen was a rookie and Stieb was a fading star.

In their prime, both were pitchers who “took the ball” no matter what ­ a warrior mentality, in the parlance of TV cheerleaders. Both Hentgen and Stieb are/were the type of power pitcher who would give the batter something to hit, leaving them with a strikeout-to-walk ratio of less than 2-to-1.

Guess what? Stieb’s career, though we didn’t know it at the time, essentially ended on Sept. 2, 1990, the day he threw the only no-hitter in team history.

At age 32 that summer, Stieb won a club-record 18 games that season. However, he failed to win some crucial starts down the stretch as the Jays lost the AL East flag by 2 games to the much less talented Red Sox.

Plagued by back problems ­ something Hentgen has also had ­ Stieb never pitched 100 innings in a season after 1990.

This is not to say a pitcher of Hentgen’s vintage can’t enjoy a renaissance ­ witness 36-year-old John Burkett putting up the NL’s third-best adjusted ERA+ with the 2001 Braves.

The X factor there was Burkett toiled under the critical eye of Leo Mazzone, and I don’t know if Jays pitching coach Gil Patterson has any of the Mazzone touch. Patterson knows from comebacks ­ he had eight arm operations in his playing career ­ but he has only been a major-league pitching coach since June 5, 2002.

With their sketchy bullpen, the Jays need starters who can soak up a lot of innings, and at this point in his career, I don’t know if Pat Hentgen fits those specifications. He may buy time for the kids down in Syracuse to develop, but anyone who thinks he can come close to pitching like he did in 1996 probably also believes the Macarena is a hip new dance craze.