The last four posts have been about sports, as this one will be as well. Actually, this is a specific post about baseball's pitchers. Actually, this discussion is ripped straight from Bill James' ideas about what makes the best pitcher ever.
This is inspired my my dad's comment to the last post about the best pitchers ever, and he named some of the greats. In truth, he named the six I'm going to go over in a bit of detail.
A few preliminaries on Bill James and his methods. He's developed a system that gives shares of a teams wins to players depending on how they performed during the season. The way it works: each win is worth 3 Win Shares, and after the season they can be dispersed. One beautiful thing is that it doesn't tell us all sorts of new things. According to the system Babe Ruth is still the best right fielder, Willie Mays get's the nod over Cobb, and Williams gets the slight nod over Stan the Man. It mostly conforms to our already mostly agreed upon beliefs about players.
It can, though, give some insight to certain things. Through the studies that James' has conducted, and the tweaks that take into account league averages, park effects, and eras in which folks played, what you get is a more objective view of a player's worth to their team in the context of the league.
How else can Honus Wagner's league-leading 109 RBI from 1908 seem more amazing than Juan Gonzales' league leading 157 RBI from 1998? In 1908 runs per game were almost half of what they were ninety years later, and equivalently Juan Gonzales would have needed almost 200 RBI to have had an equal impact on the game he played.
In any case, Win Shares nearly match the number of Wins for pitchers, which is what you want with this kind of system, and the best pitchers according to the Abstract are determined from a three-pronged approach:
Walter Johnson vs Lefty Grove; Walter Johnson vs Cy Young; and Walter Johnson vs Pete Alexander and everybody else.
Lefty Grove had the highest Win Shares per inning rate for all non-relief pitchers (modern relief pitchers have the highest impact on a the won'loss record, which can inflate their overall value)(tell that to a team that blows 20 saves a year (the difference between 77-85 and going home early and 97-65 and the playoffs)). Lefty pitched phenomenally well in a big hitting era and in a hitter's park, and besides Pedro Martinez in mid-career, he outshines everybody. The next closest pitcher is Walter, who is closer to the next ten guys than he is to Lefty. The difference is about 8%, which Bill James deems significant enough to rate Grove ahead, if another factor is ignored. That other factor?
Innings. Walter had over 5900 to Lefty's over 3900. Walter had 50% more innings in his career than Grove, and that's just too much to ignore. Walter pitched more effectively for longer than most everybody else. Edge: Walter Johnson.
That same argument, but in reverse, goes for Johnson and Cy Young. Young pitched more innings, but Johnson had a higher per-inning rate. When Cy Young started pitching, he stood fifty feet away and started more than fifty games a season. You almost have to devalue his stats a little. Even so, the differences aren't as stark as they were with Johnson and Grove.
And so the list gets built like this:
1) Walter Johnson; 1907-1927;
2) Lefty Grove; 1925-1941;
3) Pete Alexander; 1912-1930;
4) Cy Young; 1890-1911;
5) Warren Spahn; 1942-1965;
6) Tom Seaver; 1967-1986...
Of the the five guys in front of Tom Seaver, we have four guys who pitched before WWII, and three of them had their best years before WWI, and one guy who pitched during and directly after WWII. Also, five of Seaver's contemporaries (Carlton, Sutton, Ryan, Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry) had more wins than he did, but none with a winning percentage close to Seaver's.
Two other contemporaries (Jim Palmer and Juan Marichal) had better winning percentages, but had less wins and played for far better teams than Tom Seaver played on.
So...
These kinds of discussions are one of the fun bonuses of baseball and stats. Right?
Yes, absolutely.
ReplyDeleteSo, is that 1-through-6 list an all-time ranking? If so, I have no trouble concurring with it.
While we're at it, I keep seeing Pedro Martinez's name coming up in these discussions. I have a hard time ranking him anywhere in the top dozen of all time, probably not in the top two dozen. But: I will grant that he had an all-time great changeup, that he was able to pair with a well-above-average fastball, and his success clearly highlights the key aspect to timing in hitting a professionally-pitched ball. BTW, he had a precursor in Mario Soto, a grand master of the straight change, who ultimately lacked Martinez's durability.