Dugout Central: Taylor: Best Red Sox Pitcher Ever Too Close to Call

Contacted at his memorabilia shop in the Ben Gurion Airport...Gene Conley seemed pleased.

It seems that most teams, like the Mets with Tom Seaver, have one standout pitcher that is head and shoulders above the rest. So I went out to trusty Baseball-Reference to try and find another team that has had two equally great pitchers. It was easy enough to find teams that could be debatable, like the Braves with Spahn and Maddux, but another reason the Appier/Saberhagen debate is such a good one is that their stats are so comparable. Spahn had twice as many innings with the Braves and 150 more wins, while Maddux’s ERA+ was 25% better. Both were unbelievable pitchers, but their values were in different stats.

This brought me to an unlikely team: the Boston Red Sox with Cy Young and Roger Clemens. Normally any time you bring Cy Young into an argument it’s an uphill battle because the game was so different back then, with pitchers racking up more innings and more wins. However, when you narrow their careers down to just their Red Sox days, you’ll see Young had 192 wins and 2,728.3 innings while Clemens had 192 wins and 2,776 innings.

Obviously they played in very different eras, and Young was able to amass these stats in just eight years while it took Clemens 13, so I’ll be looking primarily at rate stats like WHIP and stats that take league difficulty into account like ERA+. Even then though, it’s amazing how well they stack up against each other.