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Hall of Merit — A Look at Baseball's All-Time Best Thursday, January 10, 2013David Wells and Kenny RogersWells was eligible in 2013. Rogers is eligible in 2014. |
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1. Ray (CTL)Quoting now from Baseball Prospectus's annual:
Before age 35:
Before age 36:
Before age 37:
Before age 38:
A fun career, and a very good one. Not a Hall of Famer.
1. The Yankees signed him in 1996 off of a career year, and then when he repeated his career averages instead of his career year, he became the poster boy for not being able to handle "the pressure of New York."
2. Game 3 of the 2006 ALDS. Yankees fans and media types were sure that Rogers would crack under the pressure of facing The Yankees in a 1-1 swing game in Detroit. Rogers put an end to that in what was one of my favorite baseball moments ever. From wikipedia:
A very good pitcher, one who seemed to get more than was expected out of a mediocre K rate, including pitching until age 43, but not a Hall of Famer.
Not being a Mets fan, the image is not seared into my memory :-)
Actual record: 239-157
RA+ equivalent record: 207-175
Rogers:
Actual record: 219-156
RA+ equivalent record: 194-173
Rogers has a very large discrepancy between his actual record and his equivalent record. It's as large as the discrepancy for Jack Morris. Wells has an even larger such discrepancy, the second largest in my entire table (after Christy Mathewson).
I would rank Wells as the better candidate of the two. I have him approximately level with Morris, and also similar to Vida Blue, Mickey Lolich, Milt Pappas, Larry Jackson, and Mel Harder. Rogers would fall below all of those.
Both Rogers and Wells had very late peaks and were successful pitchers into their 40's. The 1930's saw some successful older pitchers, but it was a different model. The archetype then (and there were others somewhat like him) was Ted Lyons. Lyons was known as the Sunday pitcher. The schedules then featured frequent off-days during the week and frequent weekend - especially Sunday - doubleheaders. It would have been hard to manage a strict 5-man (or 4-man) rotation through such a schedule, and having a starting pitcher who pitched one a week, during the doubleheaders, stabilized the staff. Lyons and the others that I'm talking about had had parts of their careers in which they'd been full-time starters. As older pitchers, they were no longer physically capable of sustaining that effort over the season. They needed more rest. But given that rest, on the once-a-week schedule, they were quite effective.
It's simply not possible to do that under modern schedules and with modern rosters. There are no scheduled doubleheaders any more. A once-a-week pitcher would destabilize a rotation rather than stabilize it. Paying a the salary of a star (or former star) pitcher for 120 or so innings of work is no great bargain. But there's no doubt in my mind that if it were possible it would work, and would possibly work even better than it did in the 30's. There are many career-twilight pitchers who would have been quite effective in that role. Wells and Rogers, for sure. El Duque would be another. Chris Carpenter, maybe. And so on.
Rogers was very athletic and supposedly a very good fielder for a pitcher. I assume those things helped out. It's funny that he's paired with Wells here. They're sort of a study in contrasts, except you get the feeling the heavier Wells was, the better he became.
That was the game with speculation of pine tar use by Rogers. I guess that was the 'good cheating' then?
I thought that was Game 2 of the WS.
I'm not a Morris fan, but my take is the converse, Morris was a slightly better version of Wells, mostly due to better in season durability, Morris was in the top 5 in IP 6 or 7 times, Wells twice.
Neither pitcher has an edge on peak, maybe Wells has a slight one, maybe
Wells 108, Morris 105- Wells had a betetr career ERA+ because Morris had more bad years,
Morris (ERA+) 70 in 153 IP, 79 in 170 IP, 83 in 141 IP, 89 in 249 IP, 89 in 106 IP, 97 in 235 ip
99 in 250 IP
Wells, 76 i 157 IP, 76 in 120 IP, 85 in 64ip, 97 in 224 ip
anyway can't really see a vote for one and not the other, Hall of Good/ Hall of Very Good, neither is close to HOM
FWIW Wells' BBREF comp list is mostly guys who were better than him, which is odd considering that Wells had such a high ERA (historically speaking for a guy with his W-L/ERA)
I think you're forgetting that Wells wasn't a full-time starter until age 30. That was the first time he got 30 starts - and he still got 2 relief appearances that year. And immediately after he was handed a full-time starting job, the strike came in 1994, limiting him to just 16 and 29 starts, respectively. He doesn't _really_ get a full opportunity to start until 1996, when he was 33. He then averaged 223 innings for his next five years, leading the league once.
So maybe that in itself means the comparison doesn't work well, but Wells has a comparable ERA+ (slightly higher) and comparable IP when adjusted for era. Though Wells did get the chance to do the easier job of relief for a while, which boosted his ERA+.
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