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So where's the link to the other 38? I see F12 lists for individual years, but not a combined list for 1960-2012.
Does it seem odd to compare a starter's IP to the average innings of all pitchers? Would doing so make it difficult to compare across eras, given the larger bullpen sizes and differing usage patterns now? Does this include everyone - if 30 teams each called up 3 guys in September who threw 1 inning apiece, would those be factored in?
"Odd"?? You're being far too kind
63 - Koufax
64 - Chance, Horlen, Koufax
66 - Koufax, Peters
67 - P Niekro
68 - Gibson, Tiant, McDowell, McNally, McLain, John and Bolin
It was a great season to be sure, but "1.12 ERA" overrates it.
Does this include everyone
Seems to. Teams pitch about 1440 innings a year so if the average is around 65, that's an average of 22+ pitchers per team.
kinda like with lou brock ...
Always with the unsupportable adverbs. Overrated, yes. Wildly overrated? As noted, it is 6th in WAR, and 7th in ERA+.
Why would future events have any effect on current valuations, much less "favor pitchers"?
I have Gibson's 1968 around the 11th-best pitching season since 1960 (measured relative to average, maybe top 10 if you drop to a "replacement level" comparison). I wouldn't have thought you could come up with a system "odd" enough to find 37 better seasons. I do agree with Ray, though; "arguably top 10" is probably lower than most people think when they think "1.12 ERA".
That is very much in dispute. Overrated is not in dispute, but wildly overrated, would be akin to giving Jeter a gold glove type of overratedness. It's not that much overrated.
You are right about the unearned runs, and is another reason that earned runs is a poor measurement of a pitcher(mind you, it's still massively better than either babip or the use of war for pitchers)
Pedro's season is more impressive, and arguably a better season. And as post 5 pointed out, there are some arguably better seasons, but as Bill James points out, if your method produces some massively contrary to what you expect, instead of touting the results, you might want to reexamine the methodology. (and of course they waste all that effort to do the some semi in depth math, and then ####### stupidly use k/9 and bb/9..... please for the love of all that is holy, get rid of those stats. Yes I know that for the most part it doesn't make a difference, but it's just lazy to use k/9 instead of something that accounts for the actual number of batters faced like strikeout percentage)
My own feeling when I first read this was the statement that ended it "Believe it or not, ’68 Gibson is overrated." was an argument without an opponent. If you want to prove that Bob Gibson's 1968 season is overrated the first thing you have to demonstrate is where it is "ranked" by whatever entity is overrating it. Without that ranking there is no overrate or underrate to be debated.
3-2, 3-1, 3-2, and 3-1 (yeah, I guess he could have sucked it up and thrown better);
and 1-0, 2-0, and 1-0 (shutouts by Perry, Drysdale, and Woodie Fryman in ten innings, of all people).
He also gave up five runs in 11 innings of a no-decision that the Cardinals lost to the Cubs in 13. He won a 12-inning CG and an 11-inning CG, as well as the CG he lost to Fryman.
As for 23% of his runs being unearned, he gave up so few runs to begin with that it's a grand total of nine unearned runs. Five of the nine came in those two lopsided losses I mentioned at the start of this comment.
It was a pretty good year. And then he went 2-1 in three complete games in the World Series, with an ERA of 1.67 (all runs earned), and 35 strikeouts.
Further proving how overrated his season was; after putting up a 1.12 ERA in the regular season, his ERA in the WS ballooned by almost 50 percent. What a choker!
As for McLain's, I'm not sure the WAR methodology has him right at 176th, either, but it's pretty clear that, outstanding as he was, he was nowhere near peak-Pedro (or -Clemens or -Koufax or -Gibson) good in 1968.
He also had an unusually very good year in BABIP (for him). The same can be said for his AVG allowed with RISP. I wrote about this at
http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/story/2006/7/7/14244/53010
I don't think there would be many greater wastes of your time and effort than trying to understand it.
In 1999 Pedro Martinez had a 1.39 FIP ERA. The league average ERA was 4.87. So 1.39/4.87 = .29
As great as Gibson was in 1968, Martinez was even better. This is only one stat but to beat Gibson's 1968 season by this much is incredible
I wasn't alive for it, but all the retrospectives I've seen on that season, clearly claimed that Gibson's was the story of the year. I've seen Tiger players talk about how they were paying attention to Gibson's performance and using any runs scored against him as evidence he could be scored on. (It was pretty obvious they were going to be playing the Cardinals in the World series, according to these accounts)
And if fip was based upon actual results that might be somewhat impressive. It's a borderline useless stat as a backwards performance evaluation tool.
Of course the problem as others have mentioned in other threads, is that there is a bottom limit to the performance that you can get, no matter what the scoring environment is. I'm not knocking Pedro's performance, who is the best performance relative to league of all time. But you have the innings pitched difference, you have the complete game difference, and several others that it's not an open and shut case.
Great hitting seasons are only limited by AB's so looking at how impressive hitting was over the decades is easier to see than pitching.
As late as 9/5/1968, Gibby had a sub-1.00 ERA...
Those last 23 words should be mandatory accompaniments to every one of those "Everything you thought you knew about baseball is wrong" books or articles. And I'd suggest that Ray might consider using those words of wisdom as a screensaver.
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Oddly enough, my longterm memory tells me that, in 1968, Gibson wasn't even considered as having the best season of 1968. Denny McLain got more attention; the 1.12 and the thirteen shutouts were nice, freaky even, but winning 31 games was the bigger story. That season now ranks 176th in pitcher WAR since 1960: talk about (in retrospect) wildly overrated. Over the years, it's become clearer that Gibson's achievement was a good deal more impressive.
McLain's quest for 30 wins was the dominant pitching story for most of the year once Drysdale's and Gibson's scoreless innings streaks were snapped, but Gibson's ERA feat was definitely noticed. And when Gibson easily topped McLain in their two head-to-head World Series matchups, I don't think that a single person outside of Detroit was in the slightest bit surprised, since Gibson had already proven his big game mettle in the previous year's World Series and McLain had rung up his 31 wins in what was universally thought to be the inferior league.
So... hats off again to Gibson.
Even better: if you count only Gibson's losses, his ERA (2.14) would've been sixth-best in the NL. Double yow.
True. The greater surprise was McLain sucking it up (with a lot of help) to win Game Six, and then Lolich becoming the unheralded star of the whole Series. No, you're right, as big a celebrity as McLain became in those years, it was Gibson's picture on the annuals, and his image in advertising and news photographs was iconic. For one thing, McLain looked like a good ol' boy who was about to be had up on gun charges. Gibson looked like he was sent down from a higher league to teach us how to play baseball.
Pedro Martinez was 7th in innings pitched in 2000 (20 behind the leader), and 2nd in complete games (2 behind), more or less duplicating both his numbers and standing from 1999.
Gibson doesn't throw 304 innings against the 2000 AL. Martinez doesn't strike out 12 per inning against the 1968 NL. When dealing with two distinct eras, shouldn't the main comparison between any two players be their proportional proportionality?
He's misusing "minutiae" in two different ways. And a mixed metaphor. I think it's code for, "you may safely ignore the rest of this article."
True. The greater surprise was McLain sucking it up (with a lot of help) to win Game Six, and then Lolich becoming the unheralded star of the whole Series. No, you're right, as big a celebrity as McLain became in those years, it was Gibson's picture on the annuals, and his image in advertising and news photographs was iconic. For one thing, McLain looked like a good ol' boy who was about to be had up on gun charges. Gibson looked like he was sent down from a higher league to teach us how to play baseball.
From what I've read, McLain's arm was pretty much gassed by the end of the season, which may explain his poor World Series performance. He was ahead 12-0 when he got to the third inning in game 6 and didn't need to bear down after that. What impressed me the most about McLain was his 24-9 / 134 ERA+ followup the next year before his arm finally conked out completely from those 661 innings in 2 years.
One small correction: The 1969 Street and Smith annual featured both Gibson and McLain on the cover.
I seem to remember a lot of ink being spilled with respect to Lolich getting a cortisone shot and starting on 2 days rest. He did get the MVP for that Series.
In the quoted part I flat out stated that relative to league, Pedro's was the best performance of all time. I do not think that you can rely solely on proportional proportionality when comparing best of all time though. Pedro's era+ is helped by the higher scoring environment, he is helped by the lack of fatigue over the course of a season, that allows him to stay strong for the entire year, thanks to the bullpen. Pedro missed a start, he was rested an extra day, he missed another start. I just find it hard to call the most dominant year by a pitcher as a guy who takes a week off for a twinge here or there. Give him two league average starts for his missed games, and how much closer does that bring him to the pack? (note I consider a missed start or pushed back, any time his team went more then 5 consecutive games with Pedro throwing a ball)
Gibson from apr 26-sep 2 pitched 239 innings with a .86 era, giving him an era+ of 336. 20 more innings than Pedro, and a better performance relative to peers. Again, not saying it was a better year, just saying that it's not an open and shut case, and to focus only on the rate stats is not the only way to look at the situation.
Bob Gibson "missed" five starts in 1968 under your system.
Drawback of pitching in an era where teams played double headers.
What numbers would Pedro have put up in Gibson's era? The margin for error to keep his era+ so high is miniscule, that it's very likely Pedro puts up the exact same numbers (It's just as likely after his third consecutive complete game, Pedro would have been out for the year)
I mean, I just have a real problem letting arguments like this go. Pedro was pitching 200-220 innings a year, 217 in his incredible 2000 season. Pedro only made 29 starts; Gibson made 34 starts and pitched 87 more innings. Pedro pitched 20.1 innings past the 7th in 2000; Gibson pitched 66.2.
Gibson pitched to 1,161 batters in 1968, Pedro pitched to 817. You'd have a hard time thinking that one great player had a better year than another great player if he only had 300 plate appearances and the other guy had 640.
This is illustrative:
Pedro pitched 217 innings in 2000 with a 291 ERA+. The best reliever on the Red Sox that year was Derek Lowe, who pitched 91 innings (a high total in 2000 baseball) and had a great year: 2.56 ERA, good for a 199 ERA+. FWIW, Lowe led the league in saves and made the All-Star team. Lowe was, I believe, second in the AL in Win Shares among pitchers.
Pedro and Lowe combined for 308 innings and a 261 ERA+. Gibson pitched 304 innings with a 258 ERA+. Gibson's 1968 season is about equal to Pedro and Lowe's (as a reliever) career seasons.
And, pretty much this. You can make a lot of assumptions when comparing players from different eras, but simply era-adjusting away the difference in innings pitched between Pedro and 1960s pitchers is ridiculous. If you want to say Clemens or Randy Johnson would have been tossing 280+ innings per year, I'm fine with going along with that, while understanding that their ERA+ numbers and other ratios are going to suffer.
There's no way in hell Pedro would manage that workload, when top starters, even injury-prone guys like Koufax, were routinely completing 25 games a year and pitching well into extra innings on occasion.
There has *got* to be a way, I just know it, to add up a pitcher's total contribution from a season and compare *that* to everyone. Not WAR, I mean a linear weights style FIP-based system where you award a guy X for every strikeout, Y for every groundball or flyball (including the ones that turn up as hits), and subtract for BBs and HBP/WP/Bks... and then either bake homeruns into fly balls or kind of halfway do that but also take points off for HRs directly. You'd have to adjust for BABIP and that sort of thing every year but ball-in-play outs and hits would, from the beginning of the game to the present day, be worth very little because those ultimately become the responsibility of the fielders behind the pitcher rather than the pitcher himself. Am I making sense here?
I'm convinced that this would have the effect of normalizing eras pretty well, especially the 19th century. There was a time when guys threw like 70 games a year, sure, but if you look at their stats... just pulling a year at random, Grasshopper Jim Whitney led the NL in innings with an astounding 552 in 1881 and had 90 walks and 162 strikeouts (and 46 wild pitches!!!). Just looking at the raw stats, I think you can see that Pedro Martinez's 1999 with his 313 Ks and 37 walks had a greater impact on his team's performance even though he threw well under half as many innings as r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r. I you'd still wind up with guys from the Deadball Era having the highest "runs saved" or whatever you want to call them, but you'd see a great deal more modern era guys on that list.
Felix Millan, Sandy Valdespino, Adolfo Phillips, Jerry May, Julio Gotay, Tommy Agee, Hector Torres, Mike Ryan, Paul Popovich, Hal Lanier, Don Bosch, John Bateman, Marty Martinez, Leo Cardenas, Randy Hundley, Jerry May (2), Wes Parker, Hal Lanier (2), John Bateman (2), Bud Harrelson, Clay Dalrymple, Jerry Buchek, Adolfo Phillips (2), Marty Martinez (2), Adolfo Phillips (3), Clay Dalrymple (2), Jerry May (3), Chris Cannizzaro, Leo Cardenas (2), Hal Lanier (3), Paul Popovich (2), Hal Lanier (4), Bart Shirley, Dave Adlesh.
These are the #8 hitters faced by Pedro Martinez in 2000:
Dan Wilson, Matt Walbeck, Eric Chavez, Mike Lamb, Richie Sexson, Kevin Stocker, Mark Lewis, Alex Gonzalez, Jose Cruz Jr, Ricky Ledee, Richie Sexson (2), Shane Spencer, Jim Leyritz, Alberto Castillo, Benny Agbayani, Michael Barrett, Herb Perry, Jeremy Giambi, Dan Wilson (2), Benjie Molina, Aubrey Huff, Royce Clayton, Gregg Zaun, John Flaherty, Dan Wilson (3), Scott Brosius, Russell Branyan, Russell Branyan (2), Tony Graffanino.
What my longterm memory tells me: in 1968, where I lived was covered part of the time by Cardinal radio affiliates and by KMOX itself at night on ionospheric skip. Inside that particular bubble, suggestion that McLain or anyone else was having a better year than Gibson was simply not permitted.
In his last game before the start of his June-July hot streak, Gibson allowed a run in the 7th but pitched a scoreless 8th and 9th. Harry Caray kept trying to claim the portion of the 7th after he allowed the run as part of the scoreless inning streak. I don't think it's supposed to work that way.
I've also pointed out that Gibson had what might be the best injury recovery ever. He was having a fairly blah year in 1967 with the Cardinals locked in a pennant race when a Clemente line drive broke his leg on July 15. Not a trivial injury - a broken bone. In his absence, such pitchers as Dick Hughes and Nelson Briles were magnificent and the team ran away with the pennant. On Sept. 7, Gibson pitched 5 innings, getting lifted after a leadoff single in the 6th with an 8-1 lead (that run scored anyway). Note that modern usage would have had him pitch that particular game in the minors as a rehab assignment; not so in '68. Then: 6+ innings with no runs; a complete game with 1 run; an 8 inning complete game 2-1 loss; a complete game win with one run, unearned. For his 5 September starts: 37.1 IP, 0.96 ERA. Then the '67 WS: 27 innings, ERA 1.00. Then the whole '68 season, now under discussion. Then two fabulous games in the '68 WS, including the shutout with 17 K's. So add in September-October of '67, and October '68: his approximately 400 IP back after that injury were all at an ERA very near 1. And his '69 was none too shabby as well.
Oddly, perhaps, Sports Illustrated's 1969 baseball preview cover featured Bill Freehan..
I mean, I just have a real problem letting arguments like this go. Pedro was pitching 200-220 innings a year, 217 in his incredible 2000 season. Pedro only made 29 starts; Gibson made 34 starts and pitched 87 more innings. Pedro pitched 20.1 innings past the 7th in 2000; Gibson pitched 66.2.
Gibson pitched to 1,161 batters in 1968, Pedro pitched to 817. You'd have a hard time thinking that one great player had a better year than another great player if he only had 300 plate appearances and the other guy had 640.
This is illustrative:
Pedro pitched 217 innings in 2000 with a 291 ERA+. The best reliever on the Red Sox that year was Derek Lowe, who pitched 91 innings (a high total in 2000 baseball) and had a great year: 2.56 ERA, good for a 199 ERA+. FWIW, Lowe led the league in saves and made the All-Star team. Lowe was, I believe, second in the AL in Win Shares among pitchers.
Pedro and Lowe combined for 308 innings and a 261 ERA+. Gibson pitched 304 innings with a 258 ERA+. Gibson's 1968 season is about equal to Pedro and Lowe's (as a reliever) career seasons.
Perfectly put. As great as many modern starters may be, collectively they also force their team to divert roster space in order to have enough pitchers to continue their effectiveness into the late innings. Rate stats are important, but if they don't fully account for total innings or total AB's, they're missing something.
Of course there's also the question of the quality of the batters, especially towards the bottom of the order. No question that the ones Pedro faced were much tougher than the ones Gibby faced, and that needs to be taken into account beyond the ERA+ adjustment, because it's an important fatigue factor that contributes to those lesser number of innings in the modern era.
Truth is that I don't think that pitchers can be fairly compared across eras, at least beyond putting them into broad categories of rough similarity of value.** Given a hypothetical cross-era trade, I seriously doubt that either Pedro or Gibson could have duplicated their career years. Pedro's arm couldn't have taken all those extra innings, and Gibson wouldn't have been able to coast through as many creampuff hitters.
**Which is what WAR does here when it gives Gibson's 1968 an 11.1 and Pedro's 2000 an 11.4, effectively confirming (at least by that metric) that it's impossible to say that one was better than the other.
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Then two fabulous games in the '68 WS, including the shutout with 17 K's.
And a third WS game in '68 where only a misplayed fly ball stopped him from taking another shutout into the eighth inning.
Not just the bottom. These were the #5 hitters faced by Bob Gibson in 1968, in order:
Clete Boyer, Clete Boyer (2), Ernie Banks, Donn Clendenon, Doug Rader, Ed Kranepool, Bob Aspromonte, John Briggs, Tom Haller, Jim Davenport, Kevin Collins, Jim Wynn, Art Shamsky, Johnny Callison, Ed Kranepool (2), Ernie Banks (2), Tito Francona, Ernie Banks (3), Bill White, Willie Stargell, Donn Clendenon (2), Johnny Bench, Jim Ray Hart, Len Gabrielson, Jim Ray Hart (2), Bill Sudakis, and Doug Rader (2).
And these were the #5 hitters faced by Pedro Martinez in 2000:
Edgar Martinez, Garrett Anderson, Matt Stairs, David Segui, David Justice, Fred McGriff, Harold Baines, Brad Fullmer, Brad Fullmer (2), Jorge Posada, David Justice (2), Tino Martinez, Tino Martinez (2), Brad Fullmer (3), Robin Ventura, Lee Stevens, Paul Konerko, Ben Grieve, John Olerud, Garret Anderson (2), Jose Guillen, Ricky Ledee, Joe Randa, Steve Cox, John Olerud (2), David Justice, Jim Thome, Jim Thome (2), and Carlos Lee.
It's about the same in every slot. The three least intimidating cleanup hitters Martinez faced were probably Olmedo Saenz, Jermaine Dye and Tino Martinez; Gibson's equivalents were Ron Fairly, Lee Thomas and J.C. Martin.
Martinez's least stressful pitches against the #3 position were thrown to the likes of Ben Grieve, B.J. Surhoff and Raul Mondesi; Gibson's easiest matchups in the #3 slot were John Briggs, Art Shamsky and Ty Cline.
And obviously the #9 hitters are beneath discussion.
How is pitching more innings a caveat, in a negative sense, for a rate stat? You seem to be approaching it as if it is equivalent to Maris needing eight more games in the schedule to break Ruth's HR record.
Also we can be pretty sure that starting pitchers as a whole in 1968 held a lot more value than starting pitchers in 2000. This shouldn't be surprising or controversial really. It's like saying basestealers in the 1980s were more valuable than basestealers in the mid-1990s, or that the top home run hitters in the 2000s are more valuable than Gavvy Cravath.
The 2000 Red Sox used 24 pitchers. Their worst 14 pitchers pitched about 330 innings. The 1968 Cardinals used 13 pitchers. The Cards' Nos. 11-13 pitchers threw 56.2 innings. Their top 10 pitchers threw 96% of their innings. The Cardinals' top 6 pitchers -- top 4 starters and top 2 relievers -- pitched 74% of their innings. The 2000 Red Sox...well, I'm not sure how to even figure out who the top 4 starters are, but their top 4 starers + top 2 relievers pitched about 45%-50% of their innings.
Multiply that by every team in the league and you have a lot of innings absorbed by terrible pitchers. So you're talking about hundreds of innings per team used by below average/replacement level pitchers that drive the overall performance of the league down and creates a greater gap between the top pitchers and the "average." It's a lot easier to outperform a team where you get 700 innings from 3 good starters and 2 good relievers and 700 innings from 20 guys like Scott Kamieniecki and Steve Woodard, than a team getting 1100 innings by Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, Ray Sadecki, Mike McCormick and Bobby Bolin.
Why the hell not? Seriously. For five years from ages 24-28 he averaged 230 innings between the regular season and the postseason. Yes, I cherry picked my endpoints, but isn't that kind of the point? Despite the myths perpetuated for years here by Cardsfanboy and others, Pedro went through a stretch of his career where he was pitching a ton of innings at an insanely high quality. For five other seasons outside of the above stretch I identified, he is still making his 30 starts and pitching 200 innings -- at high quality.
I don't claim that he would have withstood a 60s-era workload for his entire career, but he didn't get hurt until age 29, and before that point he was putting up a lot of innings -- and after that point he still had four seasons where he averaged 200 innings.
Umm, doesn't that hurt your argument? That injury prone guys like Koufax were doing this?
And I wouldn't say "routinely." People act like Koufax was putting up 300-inning seasons for a decade. In actuality, Koufax is a guy who had exactly three seasons beyond the workload that Pedro was going in the 1990s even if we compare innings to innings (Koufax had season highs of 341, 347, and 329 innings including the postseason). And Koufax was pitching in a much easier run environment, where it didn't take as many pitches to get through an inning and where the hitters weren't as strong. Koufax had a fourth season of 255 innings, but Pedro had two seasons of 240 innings himself. Koufax had one more year of 200 innings (223), and then every other season he was below 200.
The idea that Pedro couldn't have pitched exactly the innings that Koufax did is irrational. Koufax only had three seasons of 300+ innings. Koufax broke, and we can assume Pedro would have also, but we _cannot_ assume that Pedro would have broken right away. Pedro could have pitched three years of 300+ innings also.
Sorry, I meant unheralded going into the Series. Lolich had had a nice year (17-9), but at that point he'd never even been an All-Star. He's one of the best examples of somebody breaking into stardom after a single great postseason (the Gene Tenace club?)
What you're saying so far is that while Gibson couldn't have done what he did in 2000, Pedro could've simply added 83 more innings to his workload in 1968 and not suffered in his effectiveness. Talk about unproven assertions.
I'll repeat my position: No metric that claims that one of those two seasons was significantly "better" than the other one in any overall sense is worth the paper it's printed on. Both of these HoF pitchers adjusted to the requirements and conditions of their respective eras, and performed in ways that set new standards for those eras. I'm not sure what more you can conclude beyond that.
I took baudib's underlying claim to be that Pedro was overrated, as a product of a particular time and place who could not have succeeded elsewhere. I think that's wrong, or at least I think that being so certain of that is unsupportable.
Andy, I don't know what you're responding to. I wasn't saying anything about Gibson vs. Pedro. I was talking about Pedro's workload, and specifically in relation to Koufax's.
He wasn't talking about WAR, or talking to you. He was replying directly to baudib's post #42. baudib was arguing that Pedro simply could not have handled the workload of a pitcher in the 1960s. Ray, I think rightly, casts significant doubt on that certainty.
Fine, but setting aside the question of whether or not Pedro himself (as opposed to Clemens or Randy Johnson) could have handled 83 extra innings without suffering an injury, the real question is what all those extra innings would have done to Pedro's effectiveness. By claiming that Gibson (with an 11.1 WAR) is "wildly overrated" because of his era, whereas another Pedro (with an 11.4 WAR) fully deserves his accolades, he's clearly implying that only Pedro would have been capable of transferring his skill set from one era to another and still retain his effectiveness. To me that's nothing but an assertion backed by unprovable conjecture, pure and simple.
I was responding to the full context of what you've been saying in this thread, beginning with that "wildly overrated" comment. But since I'm always willing to allow for a clarification of a misunderstanding, just tell me this:
Would either Pedro or Gibson have been more capable of an era adjustment than the other? What is it that would make you think either of those things?
Since the WAR numbers for the two seasons in question are virtually identical (11.4 / 11.1), what would you think that a hypothetical cross-era switch would have done to each of those numbers? Why would you think that one of those numbers would have suffered more than the other, if in fact you do think that?
And a related question: If you think that the WAR numbers are within reason, then given their near-equality, how "overrated" would you say that Pedro's 2000 was?
B-R does not do individual babip regression in its WAR calculations, and the difference between their methods and babip regression methods would come out as around two wins, depending on how heavily you regress toward career means.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not talking about full population-mean babip regression (which is what FIP does), which is clearly a bad methodology for evaluating player-seasons in retrospect. But I can see the case for some amount of player-mean babip regression, given that we know that babip fluctuations significantly affect runs allowed but also significantly depend on chance. If a player has an established babip talent at a certain point, and in one season does significantly better or worse, then returns to his mean, it's not crazy to suggest that he was partly just lucky or unlucky. I wouldn't regress all the way to whatever player-mean you determine, but a partial regression isn't a crazy idea. And it would help Pedro's '99 while hurting Gibson's '68.
Even with the vacation he got in the first half of 1970 for cavorting with gamblers and other lowlifes.(*) A few months later, he was suspended again for dumping two buckets of ice water on two Detroit sportswriters.
Denny gets nowhere near the pub he deserves for being a degenerate for the ages. He's been convicted of a series of financial swindles and combines the worst traits of Dave Kingman, T.I., Lenny Dykstra, and Pete Rose in one utterly misanthropic package.
(*) From which he returned to a raucous and lengthy standing ovation from the Tiger Stadium faithful, or so it seemed to my 6 year old ears.
Andy, you're dragging me into an argument I wasn't having and ascribing to me an argument I wasn't making.
But to comment on this issue specifically, for the first time:
WAR is based on run prevention (quality) and innings (quantity) and takes into account things like defense. So Gibson's WAR comes out very high because he only allowed 1.4 runs per 9 (or whatever his unearned rate was). I argued that WAR overrates how impressive his season was. Yes, he had a great season (as I conceded in my first comment), but his run prevention was flukey. I pointed out that his peripherals, while excellent, weren't historic, and he benefited by a low BABIP that was below his career norms and was a bit lucky.
I wasn't time-warping Pedro back to the 60s (or saying anything about him, really), but my comment is that Pedro in his era was more impressive than Gibson was in his, and Pedro's best seasons were more impressive than Gibson's best (even Gibson's 1968). Pedro's peak run prevention was historic, and his peripherals were off the charts (K rate, walk rate, hit rate, home run rate, and doing it in Fenway Park in the 1990s AL), which meant that his ERA+ was far more the product of his talent level than Gibson's 258 ERA+ was of his. Gibson at his peak wasn't leading the league in strikeouts, or routinely leading in hit rate or home run rate.
If we transport Pedro to the 60s and ask him to pitch an extra 50-100 innings? It's guesswork. He'd probably lose some effectiveness, it's reasonable to say. But it's not reasonable to say that he would have immediately gotten injured, as people here seem to be saying. People underrate the workload Pedro _was_ pitching under -- again, Cardsfanboy has been doing this for years -- and I think it's reasonable to say that Pedro would have held up under the workload for a few years before breaking.
My guess? Pedro handles Koufax's workload while being better than Koufax and then breaks.
I am saying that Pedro was a better pitcher than Gibson. Plainly, and simply. Pedro was more impressive in his era than Gibson was in his. Gibson was _not_ putting up eye popping numbers within his own league, with the exception of the 1.12 ERA (which I commented on as being flukey) in one season, and with a smattering of leading the league in things (once in H/9 and WHIP, once in HR/9).
You're playing this game of shifting eras, which is unknowable, but why would we think Gibson was on Pedro's level -- even Gibson's 1968 -- when Gibson's peripherals weren't leading his own league other than his somewhat flukey H/9 rate that helped drive his 1.12 ERA?
My conclusion: Since Pedro was a better pitcher than Gibson, as measured by performance against his peers, Pedro would have been better than Gibson in Gibson's era, and Pedro would have been better than Gibson in Pedro's era. This really isn't that hard.
Yes. So why are people concluding based on pure speculation that he couldn't have handled Koufax's workload?
Gibson pitched 8.2 extra innings in 1968, by which I mean he pitched 8.2 innings after the ninth inning. (Pedro in 2000, of course, didn't pitch any extra innings.) That's five separate starts in which he went into the tenth inning.
Gibson gave up two runs (both earned) in extras. His earned run average through nine innings was just 1.09.
Pedro 2000 pitched 9 more innings than Mike Marshall, a reliever, did in 1974. Is Pedro's strikeout rate (11.8/9 IP) in 2000 a more free-swinging era, appreciably more impressive than Goose Gossage's 10.2 in 134 innings in relief in 1975? Look what scaling back 80 innings did for Gossage between 1974 and 1975.
All of the assertions regarding peripherals are dependent on the extra 80-90 innings. They don't really tell us much.
EDIT: Gossage 1977, not 1975; scaleback between 1976 and 1977, not 1974 and 1975.
Regarding the workload/era skirmish: don't forget that Gibson started five games on three day's rest.
QMAX agrees with Ray--at least partially. The basic measure there, averaging the matrix values, shows Gibson slightly ahead, 3.68 to 3.78. But the era adjustment on the win values pushes Pedro ahead of Gibson: his QWP is .835, while Gibson's is "only" .817.
One of the more mindblowing things about Pedro's 2000 season was the May 6th game where he struck out 17 Devil Rays--and lost the game, 1-0, "outduelled" by Steve Trachsel, who gave up just three hits and fanned eleven. The 2000 Red Sox lineup was not exactly a thing of beauty--it ranked 12th in the league in R/G that year. Dan Duquette went to work on that, however, and had them up to 2nd in the league in 2002 before Theo-cracy was declared.
But Gibson never led his league in K/9.
At least Koufax was doing this.
One way to think about points that baudib and Tom have been making:
Pedro in 2000 had 26 7-inning starts with an ERA of 1.69; 16 setup appearances with an ERA of 3.14, and six appearances as a closer with an ERA of 0.00.
Gibson in 1968 had 34 7-inning starts with an ERA of 1.21, 32 setup appearances with an ERA of 0.56, and 31 appearances as closer with an ERA of 1.04.
I'm leaving out three starts where Pedro didn't make it through the seventh, which of course biases things to his advantage a bit in the comparison.
The era differences are just unavoidable. Given a more relaxed rotation, given Fenway, given the 1990s, those 26 starts of Pedro's are arguably better than those 34 of Gibson's, at least pro rata. (And nobody's really arguing otherwise.) And Pedro was a decent setup man for himself, and an outstanding, if rarely-used, closer.
Gibson's team had a great "closer" that year, Joe Hoerner, who threw 49 innings in 47 games and finished 33, with an ERA of 1.47. Gibson threw 67 8th/9th/extra innings in 32 games and finished 31, with an ERA of about 1.00.
They were both amazingly great. Their jobs were somewhat different.
Your #63 and #65 clarify your position, and state it very well. Without your previous hyperbole, it's not all that unreasonable. My problem is simply this: It's a lot easier to transfer numbers on paper than it is to transfer actual pitchers across three decades and radically different conditions. I can easily imagine Pedro not lasting out that season while attempting to throw 83 more innings, and I can just as easily imagine Gibson being bedeviled by the sheer number of good power hitters who existed in 2000 at rates far above that of 1968, especially when he also wasn't getting those chest high strike calls that were a big part of his arsenal.
Overall, I do think that Pedro was a "better" pitcher, but that's based on having seen both of them pitch within their respective contexts, and it doesn't mean that you could make any real predictions about how each of them might have fared in different eras, other than to say that they'd both be at or near the top of the heap whenever they pitched.
Why? We all seem to agree that Pedro would lose effectiveness if he had to pace himself more for 320 innings. So why aren't we also assuming that pacing himself more would increase his durability? Don't the two go together?
http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/hall_of_merit/discussion/most_meritorious_player_1968_results/
http://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2009/01/positional-hitting-over-time.html
I looked at SLG relative to the league average every year for each position and the 60s look low for 2B and SS. I know it is not conclusive, but if you have fewer batters to worry about who might hit HRs or 2B's, you might relax a little. Martinez could have pitched more innings then. How many more I don't know.
In the other link of mine I mention above, I show that Gibson had for him an unusually good BABIP that year. He had .230 and the Cards staff had .264. So he was .034 better. It looks like he was normally about .007 better, on average. So this was a highly unusual year for him
Why? We all seem to agree that Pedro would lose effectiveness if he had to pace himself more for 320 innings. So why aren't we also assuming that pacing himself more would increase his durability? Don't the two go together?
To an extent, but how much is what we can't quantify. And beyond the fact that 83 innings is a lot of innings, we also don't know how much effectiveness he'd lose. Remember, those 83 innings represent 9 added complete games, with two of them going 10 innings. I have no idea how anyone can confidently predict what sort of effect that such an added work load might have on a pitcher's effectiveness. When I say I can "easily imagine" a breakdown, that doesn't mean I'd guarantee it or even predict it. I'm simply saying that it's far beyond the realm of mere possibility. And of course if Gibson could reduce his workload by 83 innings, what makes you think that with his ferocious talent, he wouldn't have more than made up for the increase in the level of competition?
Again, I'm not saying that any of these hypothetical scenarios would necessarily happen. I just don't see how we could possibly know with any degree of certainty that any one of them would be more likely than another.
Again the point remains that Gibson wasn't dominating his league the way Pedro was his.
Conclusion: Don't grow up.
Again the point remains that Gibson wasn't dominating his league the way Pedro was his.
Pedro's chief competition in 2000 was Tim Hudson, David Wells, Andy Pettitte, and off-years of Roger Clemens (3.70 ERA) and Mike Mussina (3.79). Gibson's rivals for dominance in 1968 included Tom Seaver, Ferguson Jenkins, Don Drysdale (in the year he set the consecutive shutout innings record), Juan Marichal and Jerry Koosman. With Clemens having a more normal year, there's every likelihood that Pedro's historic dominance would have been taken down more than a few notches. And the fact that he didn't was little more than random luck on Pedro's part.
Again, I'm not saying that Pedro didn't have a better (or more impressive) year than Gibson when you consider all the factors, only that it was nowhere remotely as one-sided as you seem to be saying that it was.
Keep in mind that a lower run environment raises the replacement level pitching. My sense is that this sort of comes out in the wash with WAR, and it's reasonable to conclude that 11 ~= 11.
Do your really think this would not correlate to WAR with a .88 or something? This is essentially splitting the difference between bWAR and fWAR (although we don't have xFIP for 1968, so...)
It also goes to an issue I have with the extra innings that Gibson threw: Nobody threw that number of innings in 2000 (Mussina led the AL with 237.2.) I don't think anything changed in the pitchers themselves and that most could throw close to 300 IP in 1968. Most of the difference in IP is in the number of pitches and intensity of facing deep lineups. The difference in innings doesn't seem as significant and the 38% difference in IP is just a big, scary number without context.
In discussing Gibson (or indeed any season) it is not reasonable to adjust for BABIP "luck" or "luck" with RISP ... whatever ... if you're talking value. If he pitched in front of an excellent defense, it's worthy of note, but whether or not the other aspects of run prevention were fluky it has real value for the team and shouldn't be waved away. In a sense it's like Brady Anderson's single big HR year. Sure, not an ability level, but it still counts.
Edit/footnote: Bob Gibson threw 913 innings in 1968-70, but then scaled back considerably for the last five years of his career.
And I do think that a flukey BABIP is less impressive, for any pitcher. Just as I wouldn't bet on a pitcher with a flukey BABIP to repeat his ERA+ the next year, neither would I bet that Gibson's 1968 level talent would translate to a 258 ERA+ in the 1990s AL. I mean, it wouldn't even lead to a 258 ERA+ if Gibson were to repeat in the 1968 NL. But Pedro could and did repeat his historic seasons over and over and over again. Because they were being driven by insane peripherals (e.g., an 8-1 K/BB ratio).
But if you look at the WAR pitching leaders in the 1968 NL and the 2000 AL at Baseball Reference, the range of the #2-#10 guys is about the same. In the 2000 AL it is from 5.9 to 3.8. In the 1968 NL it is 6.7 to 4.1. So Martinez and Gibson dominated the best pitchers in their leagues about the same (Martinez would probably be a bit better if you divided his WAR by the average WAR of the rest of the top 10, but not hugely better than Gibson).
The "wait until you get something good to hit then swing as hard as you can" approach just isn't going to be effective against elite pitchers -- and it wasn't.
1950-1960 - 3
1961-1970 - 6
1971-1980 - 5
1981-1992 - 5
1994-2005 - 19
Um that's a bunch.
No it wasn't. It may have been easier to put up high ERA+ numbers. But not to put up dominating K/BB/HR numbers.
Yes, to put up dominant K/BB/HR numbers. The Moneyball Era offenses weren't set up to beat Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson; they were set up to wait out Pedro and RJ and then destroy Scott Kamieneicki and Steve Woodard. And they got much more Kamienicki and Woodard than 1968 offenses did. The very same approach that made Pedro look more dominant than he (likely) would have looked in 1968 was tailor-made to destroy Kamienicki and Woodward, guys with meh stuff and command, prone to making tateriffic mistakes. A BP fastball in 1968 is a single to left or maybe a shot up the gap by Felix Millan; in 2000 it's a 400 foot blast by John Jaha.
With guys like Pedro, the thought process was something like, "Well, he's only going to pitch 6 or 7, maybe we can stay close and rough up their bullpen, and if not it's only one game anyway, Frank Castillo's going tomorrow." You got a Pedro once every 5 (sometimes 6 games); you got a Gibson once every 4.
1951-1960: Warren Spahn, Billy Pierce
1961-1970: Dean Chance, Joe Horlen, Sandy Koufax (2), Luis Tiant, Bob Gibson
1971-1980: Wilbur Wood, Tom Seaver, Vida Blue, Steve Carlton, Ron Guidry
1981-1993: Nolan Ryan, John Tudor, Dwight Gooden, Bret Saberhagen, Roger Clemens
1994-2005: Greg Maddux (4), Randy Johnson (5), Roger Clemens (2), Pedro Martinez (5), Kevin Brown, Johan Santana
To what degree was it easier, and to what degree were the pitchers just better? It makes sense that it's easier to put up big ERA+ numbers when you don't have to throw as many innings, but I think the raw total of seasons of that quality overstates the differential. The sillyball era didn't have pitchers who aren't inner-circle HoFers putting up those huge ERA+ numbers - it was some of the best pitchers ever, dominating.
It's also a list dominated by Clemens, Maddux, Johnson, and Pedro. It's not like every good pitcher was doing this.
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