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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Countup with Keith Olbermann ~ win #28…win #29…win #30.
It remains, in short, the most amazing season a pitcher has put together since at least Sandy Koufax, and very probably since long before him. And now, Steve Carlton’s 1972 campaign, when he won 27 of his rotten team’s 59 games, dates to 40 years ago.
So much has been written about Lefty’s work that it is amazing to consider that an extraordinarily relevant detail is usually omitted from the recounting – one that makes winning 46 percent of one team’s entire supply of victories all the more remarkable.
Steve Carlton did it in a strike-shortened season.
The first sport-wide in-season strike in American history would in later contexts seem so brief as to be almost quaint. But when Opening Day was pushed back by a week forty years ago, and each team lost between six and nine games, it was traumatic – and it contributed to the distinct possibility that Carlton missed an opportunity to win 30 games.
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1. TomH Posted: February 08, 2012 at 08:29 AM (#4056179)um #2. Carlton pitched on opening day, and then won a game on the 2nd-to-last game of the year. The Phils missed 10 games total for the strike. Exactlyhwo was Lefty supposed to win 4 more games????
That being said, it was a great, great year.
Really? I guess this is based more on his 346 innings pitched than anything else.
It was a terrific year, no doubt. But let's not forget that his rotten team scored 3.83 runs per game for him (NL average 3.91), and 3.00 for everyone else. The 1972 Phillies scored 8 or more runs 8 times, 7 of those for Carlton.
How much of this was due strictly to Carlton and how much was due to the improved performance of the rest of the team is hard to say for sure, but unless you want to throw out human psychology, it's not hard to imagine that the rest of his team approached Carlton's games in a far superior mental state than they did when Ken Reynolds, Bill Champion [sic] or Woodie Fryman took the hill.
This seems like an odd choice of phrase since Koufax had only been retired for 7 years in 1972.
If this were 1984 or earlier.
I think the innings and the 182 ERA+ are equally amazing. Well, maybe not, 182 ERA+ by itself is not uncommon, every year some 40 IP relievers will do that. But the combination of the two is amazing. Comparable to Koufax's final season (323 IP, 190 ERA+).
Carlton is 8th in ERA+ among pitchers with 300+ innings in the liveball era (1920 on). He has more innings pitched than all of those ahead of him.
Carlton was a good hitting pitcher so he makes his run support better than his teammates. But not enough to explain the gap in 1972, and besides, that was not one of his better hitting seasons (.197, 1 HR).
>300 IP, ERA+ >180 has only been done 8 times since 1920. And 2 of them were in the AL in 1971.
In my first post I was going to say until Gooden in '85 , who had far better rate stats, but Carlton did pitch 70 more innings.
The '72 Phillies finished 59-97. I count that as only 6 games short of a full season, and Carlton needed three wins to get to 30. Wasn't going to happen with only two more starts available.
Still, when he was good he was damned good. 30 complete games? No wonder he was lousy the next season.
This is perhaps more unfair to Steve Carlton than any other Hall-of-Fame pitcher. He probably had about as bad an end to his career as anybody. His final three seasons, 15-29, 338 IP at a 5.72 ERA, 75 ERA+. Ouch. Oh, and he worked his way through 5 teams in those 3 years doing that.
This seems like an odd choice of phrase since Koufax had only been retired for 7 years in 1972.
And yet those 7 years contained a pitcher's year that was better than any year from Koufax and better than Carlton's 1972. I'm speaking, of course, of someone who was Carlton's teammate in 1968.
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