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Bob Carroll, whose writing I enjoy very much, commented on this phenomenon in his 1985 article for the National Pastime ("For the Hall of Fame: Twelve Good Men"). "Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds," wrote Carroll, "but it can also make certain ballplayers nigh unto invisible. Indian Bob Johnson never had one of those super seasons that make everyone sit up and whistle. While phenoms came, collected their MVP trophies, and faded, he just kept plodding along hitting .300, with a couple dozen homers and a hundred ribbies year after year...like a guy punching a time clock."
His specific point has merit. Johnson's career numbers, in the context of their time, are probably better than Hack Wilson's, but Wilson had the big year. Carroll, at least, is rational on the subject; some guys get really carried away with it.
Anyway, to state first the argument that this is an injustice...think of the player's career record as if it was a season's record. Suppose that Ken Griffey, Jr., winds up this season with 37 homers, 118 RBI and a .326 average, but Juan Gonzalez posts even better numbers. Some people will argue that Griffey should win the MVP Award because he's a better defensive outfielder, some people will argue that Griffey should win because the Mariners had a better year, somebody might argue that he should win because he's a better baserunner and hit better in the clutch. But would anybody argue that he should be given extra credit because he hit .437 in July? It's obvious, isn't it, that if he has better numbers in July but poorer numbers overall, he must have done worse some other time?
The seasons of a career, we might argue, are like the pieces of a season -- individually interesting, but not fundamentally relevant to value.
Now let's look at it from the other side. You know the old saying about a statistician...if you have one foot in a block of ice and the other in a fire, a statistician will tell you that on average you're comfortable. This problem is like that: It is dangerous to ignore fluctuations in performance, and assume that the aggregate total reflects the impact of the elements.
But in this case it is held against the player if he stays at a comfortable temperature. The players who put one foot in a block of ice and the other in the fire get extra credit for it. Is that fair?
Because pitchers are less consistent than hitters, this is a more common problem in evaluating pitchers than it is in evaluating hitters.
The analogy that seasons are to careers as months are to seasons, it seems to me, has one major flaw, which is that it doesn't account for pennant races. A pennant is a real thing, an object in itself; if you win it, it's forever. If a pitcher goes 7-0 in June and puts his team into first place, that's just June; if he then goes 1-5 in July and the team slips to fourth place, the end result is pretty much the same as if the hot streak had never existed.
This is not true of seasons. If a pitcher goes 24-5 in one year and leads his team to a World Championship, that flag is going to fly forever. If he goes 5-17 the next year, they don't take the flag down.
On the other hand, we cannot assume that the pitcher who has a big year and then a bad year has had a positive impact on his team's chances in the pennant race. Bill Singer went 20-12 with the Dodgers in 1969 and 20-14 with California in 1973, but in between went 10-17 and 6-16. He never played with a championship team. If he had just been a nice, consistent 14-14 every year, his teams would have won at least one pennant and possibly two. The 1969 and 1973 teams were so weak that they weren't going to win no matter what Singer did, but the 1971 Dodgers, for whom he went 10-17 with a 4.17 ERA, missed the National League West championship by one game. There's no question but that a decent year by Singer would have put them over the top. The 1972 team, for whom he went 6-16, missed by a wider margin, but with a staff led by Claude Osteen (20-11) and Don Sutton (19-9), it's a safe statement that they could have won if they had gotten better performance out of the back end of their starting rotation.
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