Basically, Pettitte has been 17 percent better than the average pitcher. He has 240 wins, with 18 more games in the postseason.
When you scroll down to his Hall of Fame statistics, Pettitte falls short in black ink (times leading the league in an important stat), gray ink (top 10 in important stats), Hall of Fame Monitor (a point-system for worthiness) and Hall of Fame Standards (where you rank relative to other Hall of Famers — basically average or below average).
To summarize, Pettitte falls short in every Hall of Fame metric.
Salfino does a nice job breaking down Pettitte’s Hall of Fame candidacy. I assume Pettitte gets in because of the rings and the Yankees and everything else, though it’s unclear he deserves the merit. He’s certainly better than Jack Morris, but just being better than some guy who’s in the Hall of Fame should not make you a Hall of Famer.
But Salfino neglects to examine what I think is the most interesting thing about Pettitte’s candidacy: He admitted HGH use.
Media and fans seem to buy Pettitte’s claim that he was just using HGH to recover from surgery in 2002 and never again after that. And hey, I have no reason to doubt Pettitte either.
But if we’re going to take his excuse on faith and look past Pettitte’s indiscretion, why not do the same with A-Rod? Is “recovering from surgery” more palatable than “young and stupid”?
Every home run A-Rod hits, people throw around terms like “tainted” and “disgraceful” and everything else. Many seem to insist A-Rod doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame because he cheated, and yet no one even mentions it when discussing Pettitte’s candidacy.
Just sayin’s all.
UPDATE: Tom Boorstein points out that Jack Morris is not actually in the Hall of Fame, which is good because he doesn’t really deserve to be.
Tedquarters 
True that. But I ignore steroids for everything. Better bats. Better balls. Better gloves. Better bodies. What’s the dif?
And I don’t disagree, I’m just saying no one ever brings up PEDs when discussing Pettitte and everyone does when discussing A-Rod.
You are correct. There’s some tangible difference between Pettitte and A-Rod that may influence this cognitive dissonance. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it is…. Thinking….. Oh, right. Got it. BTW, I came up with that whole topic just as a pretext to link cool Marc Bolan clips.
Pettite’s got one thing going for him – ridiculous postseason stats. Its really his only way into the HOF.
Andy petite’s postseason stats really aren’t all that ridiculous if you really look at them. He’s always noted for the amount of postseason wins he has, but that too is really just a byproduct of playing in alot of postseasons often on great teams.
Along with his 18 post season wins. He has 9 losses, and his numbers aren’t anything great. His postseason numbers as a whole if you look at them really aren’t much different that his regular season numbers, which are very good but not great or HOF worthy IMO.