Saying goodbye to Livan Hernandez, one of the game's last true workhorses

Wednesday was a sad day for fans of everlasting mediocrity, as hurler Livan Hernandez formally announced that he was retiring from active competition. Hernandez is expected to file his retirement papers with the league on Thursday, opting to transition to a coaching role with the Washington Nationals.

This is hardly news, considering Hernandez didn't pitch at all in 2013 and was probably considered by most to be retired already.

It does, however, mean the league no longer has its resident rubber-armed workhorse.

Hernandez was a throwback, one of the last of a dying breed of pitchers able to take the mound and consume innings in bulk without issue. He retires ranking 85th on Major League Baseball's all-time innings pitched leaderboard with 3,189, 43rd in the expansion era and fourth among pitchers who started their career from 1990 onward. 

Mark Buehrle and C.C. Sabathia loom as threats to eventually surpass him in innings pitched, but the 3,000-inning career may soon be a thing of the past. There are no 300-inning machines any longer, and rare is the pitcher who represents a lock for 200 frames, something Hernandez did 10 times (he threw at least 175 innings 14 times and thrice led the league in that regard). 

According to Baseball Propsectus' disabled list logs, Hernandez never even hit the DL, only once opting for offseason surgery for debridement of his right knee.

Since entering the league in 1996 a year after defecting from Cuba, Hernandez has started more games (474) than anyone but Andy Pettite, thrown more complete games (50) than all but three other pitchers, ranks 14th in strikeouts (1,976) and has faced more batters (13,816) than any other hurler. 

At the best of times, he could be very good, like in the 1997 NLCS when he struck out 15 batters in a complete game victory, helping push the Florida Marlins to a World Series berth and an eventual championship.

He also lived by his own rules, pitching exclusively on the outside portion of the plate late in his career and forcing hitters and umpires to adjust. He was who he was, responding to four straight down seasons in 2010 by changing little and posting his best season since 2004. His pitch mix in 2010 was the same as in 2003, and if we had the data it would probably show it was similar in 1998. 

But Hernandez was never particularly great. 

On only four occasions did he pitch a full season with an ERA south of 4.00 and his FIP never dropped below 3.87 over a full campaign. He was worth more than three wins above replacement just three times and made "just" two All-Star appearances. As such, Hernandez has also given up the fourth-most home runs (362) since 1996, issued more walks (1,066) than all but Ryan Dempster and given up more hits (3,525) and earned runs (1,572) than anyone else.

His career ERA of 4.44 is about as average as they come, and his ERA+ landing on 95 at the end of his tenure seems slightly unfair, given how painfully average he usually was. It should have been an even 100. He was worth 32 wins above replacement according to Fangraphs and just 25.2 by Baseball Reference's metric, but more impressively he comes in at -0.2 wins above average for his career, essentially a rounding error away from zero. 

His career record was 178-177, a single game above .500. His average game score was 49, one point below average. His HR/FB rate was average, his fastball mediocre, the batted ball profile he gave up an exact replica of the league-wide rate. His leverage index finished at 1.01, meaning on average, this average pitcher was pitching in exactly league-average situations.

17 injury-free seasons, 3,189 innings, all completely average. When you accumulate a sample this large, it seems that everything eventually regresses to the mean.

Don't mistake this for being dismissive of Hernandez, however.

There's a great deal of value in what he did - Hernandez earned an estimated $53.1 million as a professional baseball player, and nine different franchises sought his services at different points.

A single league-average season is shrug-worthy, but 17 years at that level is incredibly impressive. Sure, his fWAR of 32 seems underwhelming given his tenure, but it still means he added 32 wins to teams over his career, something only 264 other pitchers in history - and only 127 in the expansion era - can boast about.

Until the very end in 2012, he was looked at as a veteran stop-gap, someone capable of taking the hill every fifth day, saving the bullpen and affording younger pitchers more development time. Teams pay a pretty penny for pitchers that can bridge the gap between the present and the future, which is how Ricky Nolasco ends up with a four-year, $49 million contract for a non-playoff team. Hernandez wasn't able to cash in to quite that degree, but it doesn't mean he didn't provide a great deal of value to his nine employers.

He was Scott Feldman in Houston before there was Scott Feldman; he was Mike Pelfrey in Minnesota before there was Mike Pelfrey; he was Jason Hammel in Chicago before there was Jason Hammel.

There's something eminently respectable about someone able to go to work, day after day, doing their job in unspectacular fashion but proving more reliable than any of their peers. Livan Hernandez was that, and now he's not.