What a cranky response. It's not "wrong" but innings pitched and ERA+ (or ERA) is 7 digits of information that tells you even more than W-L. WAR is only 4 digits if we count the decimal point and (rather pointlessly) report the decinal; I suppose win shares pushes that out to 3 digits because, for no good reason, we multiply wins by 3 to get win shares. WAR and WAA together can provide a sense of quantity and quality. But I've got something like 8 TB of storage space in a couple of drives that (combined) are smaller than a sandwich sitting on the table next to me as I type, I don't think saving a handful of bytes on the internet is sufficient reason to present just the one (really two) stat that does an adequate job.

But sure, if you tell me a guy was 220-130 then I know he threw a large number of innings and he was at least good enough to hang around for 15+ years. It doesn't though help me compare that guy to a guy (if such exists) that went 190-160 because all I know about him was that he threw a lot of innings and was at least good enough to hang around for 15+ years. It also doesn't tell me if the first guy was as good (in quality or value) as the guy with the 190-80 record (if such a guy exists).

203-105
324-256
254-186
270-153
256-153
214-191
251-161
243-132
284-226
216-146
213-155

What question do these answer? Are these answers all the same? Which are the three best? Which are the three worst? Again, what question are we trying to answer?

And if you dare even give a hint of a suggestion of an implication that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'll block you! (Admittedly, I sometimes am overly touchy but I don't block people.)

On the other hand, it really is long past time folks got off Bill's lawn.

What a cranky response.

On his site, I posted, "Look, Bill, if I wanted to see an angry grandpa rant, I'll watch Joe Biden."

256-153
219-100

Each guy won more then 100 games then they lost, so pretty darn good.

Pitcher #1 was pretty durable, played for good teams and lasted longer
Pitcher #2 was otherworldly for a 7 year period and had what is considered one of the greatest peak periods of pitching ever.

I assume without even looking this up, most of the guys here can name these 2 recently retired hurlers.

“With all of the pitcher’s stats available, why did you choose to show won-lost records?” I blocked him immediately.

That is really is just a super douchy response.

Among the many other issues here, any W/L record that's 7 digits is...not two syllables.

He's saying "won" "loss" is two syllables. Why, I'm not exactly sure.

Whatever I think of his methods I appreciate the old dude putting himself out there. Sure maybe he's a cranky old ####. I give old people a lot of latitude. Not knowing if you are going to wake up tomorrow. Aching all the time. Probably taking anywhere from 1-10 meds several times a day. And then someone is going to give you #### because you shared your work? #### that

Koufax who gets made out to be overrated comes out looking like he really was amazing. Dave Stieb, holy ####.

Bill James has been a cranky old fart since he was 29

#8 In his Breaking the Wand essay he talks about the Dear Jackass letters he used to write. And as I recall said that he wasn't happy that he was writing more of them. That this played into the decision to stop writing the Abstract.

#7 - bringing up Koufax reminds me of a study I did some years back that illustrated, for better or worse, why Sandy had the reputation he did per the writers. Of course, anecdotally, when you pitch the clincher against the Yanks in 1963 and win, 2-1, and when you follow that up 2 years later with an even more impressive G7 win against the Twins, 2-0, on only 2 days rest, the writers will say you're just about the greatest clutch pitcher ever. It isn't just that Koufax pitched brilliantly with the season on the line, it's that he did so in games with a bit of additional pressure because he didn't get much in the way of run support. That got me to thinking - Sandy pitched in the 1960s, a pitching dominant era, in a home park that was also friendly to pitchers, and with his reputation you often heard people say, hey, there's your run, Koufax, make it stand up! Could he really do that? So I looked at his 5 year peak from 1962-1966 and decided to see just how he did in games with poor run support. Was his reputation earned? Or was it just an illusion? (Images of Jack Morris coming to mind).

I defined poor run support as any game in which the Dodgers scored 2 runs or fewer through 9 innings. Yes Sandy pitched a lot of complete games, but there are some shorter outings as well. For that matter there are some starts where he took it into extra innings, too. The team is tied 1-1 through 9 but scores 4 in the 10th? Still counts as poor run support for Sandy. If he only goes 7 innings and left the game behind 1-0, but the team scored 6 in the 8th, that does not count as a poor run support start. I know it's harsh, as they actually scored 0 runs while he was in there, but I was trying to look at 2 things to measure - 1) which pitchers get bailed out by their teams as opposed to which pitchers really get screwed on their W-L record, but also 2) in the early days of baseball, you know, Cy Young and such, we may not have complete box scores of some games but we do know what the final scores were and who the pitchers of record were and, in most cases, almost all the starts were complete games. So if Young has a game he lost 3-2, I can pretty much guarantee his team scored 2 or less runs through 9. So I thought it made it easier to compare pitchers across eras this way.

At any rate, back to Sandy. From 1962-1966 in the starts that met the poor run support criteria, Koufax had a record of 27-24. I thought, ok, that's actually pretty impressive to have a winning record over a 5 year period when getting poor run support. I had no idea at the time just how impressive that was. So I looked at all the big name starting pitchers in MLB history (as I said, I did this some years ago so no Negro League pitcher data was part of the study)and I was shocked to find that Koufax was apparently the only pitcher in history able to accomplish this! It's really hard to win when your team doesn't score runs! I looked at Cy Young, I looked at both Johnsons, Walter and Randy, I looked at Christy and Lefty and Whitey and all the other big names throughout history. And to my surprise Koufax was the ONLY one to post a winning record over a 5 year peak when given poor run support. So maybe he really lived up to the reputation!

If you want to see more details of the study, I can do that one one of these days if you're interested. I will say one thing that didn't surprise me was that some of the seasons we think of as historically among the greatest pitching seasons ever, such as 1913 Walter Johnson or 1933 Carl Hubbell or 1968 Bob Gibson do hold up pretty well under the poor run support scrutiny.

Interesting, Moe. That's akin to the Jackson-Terrell study James did back in one of the old Abstracts, back when he was worth reading.

I would think Gibson does well in 1968. Seemed like he won a bunch of games when the Cards scored 0,1,2 runs through 9

Ehhh.
Two runs in support of Koufax in 1966 or Gibson in 1968 in that low scoring environment is a team just slightly held down more than average by the opposing pitcher.

Two runs in support of Dazzy Vance in 1930 means half the team's hungover or the opposing pitcher's got hellacious stuff.

This will naturally favor pitchers who worked in low scoring environments like Koufax and hurt guys like Dazzy Vance who pitched almost exclusively in very high scoring environments.

Bill James did a similar study in the first HA, in the Drysdale evaluation. He only looked at 1963-64, and found that Drysdale won when he got run support but was 8-27 when he got 3 runs or less. When Koufax got 3 runs or less, he was 18-4.

I actually like Bill's Twitter strategy of immediately blocking anyone who insults you--anyone who insults anyone, really--to avoid wasting too much of your limited time dealing with angry people.

My very favorite strategy, granted, is to not use Twitter at all. But if you absolutely must use the damn thing, that's the way to go about it.

More than any one thing, Bill James' central, defining personality trait is contrarianism. When he got started, declaring that a pitcher's Won-Lost record isn't a very useful indicator of his performance was almost universally considered the loony ravings of a crackpot. Through decades of hard work, he and a small handful of others successfully persuaded the world that, in fact, a pitcher's Won-Lost record isn't a very useful indicator of his performance. Once it became the universal dogma and saying otherwise became the loony ravings of a crackpot, of course Bill James began to argue that a pitcher's Won-Lost record is a useful indicator of his performance after all.

I actually like Bill's Twitter strategy of immediately blocking anyone who insults you--anyone who insults anyone, really--to avoid wasting too much of your limited time dealing with angry people.

It's a good policy, which I employ! When I'm not employing the better policy of just not logging in.

Not sure it serves the purpose, though, if you supplement with an additional policy of blocking people and then bragging about it in print.

I actually like Bill's Twitter strategy of immediately blocking anyone who insults you

If I were to respond to this by asking “Why do you like that?” would you consider it to be an “insult”?

On his site, I posted, "Look, Bill, if I wanted to see an angry grandpa rant, I'll watch Joe Biden."

Donald Trump works just as well for that comment.

Hmm...
176-137 vs 254-186
or
122 ERA+ 2895 IP vs 105 ERA+ 3824 IP
or
56.4 WAR vs 43.5 WAR
or
30.7 WAA vs 9.4 WAA

Two pitchers from the 80's. I suspect many know who these 2 are, one in the HOF, the other a 1 and done for voting. One in the Hall of Merit, the other has no shot (reverse of the HOF).

For the kids here I'll give the names - Dave Stieb and Jack Morris respectively. Stieb won an ERA title in 1985 (171 ERA+) but his team just couldn't score for him so he was 14-13. Morris had an ERA+ of 101 one year but was 21-6 that year.

So much for W-L as an indicator of quality over any other measure IMO.

But to be fair, James is not saying its an indicator of quality (or value) per se. He's saying its an indication of the "shape and size" of a pitcher's career. Whatever those terms mean. But we can sort of define them as having to do with longevity and perhaps how sucessful his team was and how much he was part of that. Maybe.

Of course its one thing to talk about famous, long career pitchers. Everyone associates 511 wins with Cy Young, 373 w/ Mathewson, etc. So there's perhaps a bit of bias in that we know certain pitchers w/l records by heart, or we have an idea of their record. A better criticism might be to look at pitchers who arent hall of famers I wonder what if anything their w/l record says. YOu could probably find tons of guys who went 44-44 or 55-70 and some of them might have been really good at one pt.; some of them might have labored in obscurity for years; some of them might have been had stretches where they were on one level and other stretches where they werent recognizable of their former selves.

Still I guess its better than win shares.

Finally getting a chance to get back to this. Sorry for the delay.

#13 - that's what I thought, too, when I did the study on Koufax. I thought "a winning record over 5 years when getting less than 3 runs per start of support is good, but shouldn't be that unexpected in the context of the situation at the time."

Then I started looking at all these other pitchers, both in low scoring and high scoring environments throughout baseball history and realized that Sandy was the only starting pitcher to accomplish this feat. Truly unique.

For example, his teammate Don Drysdale was pitching in the same league for the same team in the same home ballpark. Was he getting the same results? In a word, no. Not even close.

For Koufax it was easy to pick the 5 year peak, it sticks out like a sore thumb in the context of his career. For Drysdale, not so easy. He was a good pitcher before Sandy got good, was good during the great Koufax years, and after Sandy was gone. I decided to go with 1961-1965, as that was the period with Don's best W-L record, although that doesn't necessarily encompass all his excellent seasons. I actually think it's interesting that in the Bill James article upon which this thread is based, James makes the case that Drysdale may have been the best pitcher in MLB during the 1959, 1960, 1962 and 1964 seasons. Had Don actually won 4 Cy Young Awards in his career instead of just the one in 1962, he might not be viewed as a borderline lower echelon HOF, but as a legitimate first ballot type pitcher.

At any rate, during the 1961-1965 stretch, Don had a combined W-L of 98-64, an average W-L record of almost 20-13. How did he do in his starts where the Dodgers gave him less than 3 runs of support?

11-41 with 9 no decisions (that means Don was 87-23 when given at least 3 runs of support). 11-41 is a far cry from Sandy's 27-24 (with 9 no decisions. Sandy was 84-10 when given at least 3 runs of support). It looks like Drysdale didn't do nearly as well when given limited support, and there is some credence to that. There are some circumstances, however, that show some differences in the run support each dealt with. Although Drysdale had 61 starts with poor support and Koufax 60, which looks like similar amounts of poor support, the similarities end there. Here are some key differences:

# of times given a 1-0, 2-0 or 2-1 lead to work with during these games: Koufax 36, Drysdale only 19. Sandy was given leads in these types of games almost twice as often as Don was. Koufax made that lead hold up from the beginning in 18 of the 36 games, while 18 times he couldn't protect the lead. Drysdale was less successful, making the lead stand up in only 7 of the 19 games. You may be wondering how Koufax won 27 of these games when he only made a lead hold up from the beginning 18 times? There were some games where he was given a 1-0 lead, allowed the game to be tied up 1-1 but then later L.A. scored a second run giving him a 2-1 win.

# of times the team scored 0 runs for the pitcher: Koufax only 10 times while the Dodgers gave Drysdale nothing to work with at all on 24 occasions. So Don was almost 2 and a half times as likely to get nothing but goose eggs for support. I think that's a significant difference. It's awful tough to win when the team doesn't score any runs for you at all.

Koufax was clearly better at making a slim 1-0 lead stand up. In the games where he was basically told "there's your run, now hold them" he held on to get the 1-0 win 10 times, while 15 times he couldn't make that lead stand up. Drysdale was less successful, making a 1-0 lead stand up in 5 games, whereas 10 times he couldn't hold the lead. I realize, even in a pitching dominant era, having to make a 1-0 lead stand up is putting the pitcher under a lot of pressure. There's really no margin for error with such a slim lead.

Finally, I looked at how each pitcher performed when getting 0 runs of support from another angle - namely, how many runs were they giving up in these games? Were they at least keeping the games close so that the Dodgers still had a chance to win?

Koufax: allowed an average of 2.91 runs/9 innings (that's total runs allowed, not just earned runs) in starts where he got 0 runs of support.
Drysdale: allowed 2.95 runs/9 innings in these games. Actually, I think both pitchers acquit themselves well in this situation.

The main conclusion I came to was that although the two pitchers had a similar number of games each with less than 3 runs of support, Koufax was much more likely to get at least 1 or 2 runs to work with, and he did a pretty good job of making that stand up so the team could win. Drysdale was much more likely to get nothing at all in the way of support, and I think that had a lot to do with his having a much poorer record in these games. I do agree, however, that Koufax has a big edge in the games where the pitcher did get 1 or 2 runs to work with. For example, in the 24 games where Drysdale got 0 runs of support, his record was 0-19 (5 no decisions). That means Don was 11-22 when he received 1 or 2 runs of support. Koufax, on the other hand, was 0-9 in his starts with 0 runs of support (with 1 no decision), whereas he was 27-15 in the starts where he was given 1 or 2 runs to work with. That's pretty impressive!

More than any one thing, Bill James' central, defining personality trait is contrarianism. When he got started, declaring that a pitcher's Won-Lost record isn't a very useful indicator of his performance was almost universally considered the loony ravings of a crackpot. Through decades of hard work, he and a small handful of others successfully persuaded the world that, in fact, a pitcher's Won-Lost record isn't a very useful indicator of his performance. Once it became the universal dogma and saying otherwise became the loony ravings of a crackpot, of course Bill James began to argue that a pitcher's Won-Lost record is a useful indicator of his performance after all.

In fairness to Bill, once the conventional wisdom shifts enough, the opposite argument does start to hold water…. I’m old enough to remember when all the smart SABR guys decided defense was nearly irrelevant. Then, the contrarians arguing we actually undervalue outfield defense had a bit of a point.

Why should I care what an obese night watchman thinks?

I quit that night watchman gig; I’m now a Walmart greeter.
As such, I expend very little time thinking.

Two runs in support of Koufax in 1966 or Gibson in 1968 in that low scoring environment is a team just slightly held down more than average by the opposing pitcher.

Average runs per game
1969 4.05
1968 3.43
1967 3.84
1966 4.09
1965 4.03
1964 4.01
1963 3.81
1962 4.48
1961 4.52

1968 is the outlier, 2022 avg rpg is 4.38 This is a difference, but outside of a couple of years, of which only one falls within the timeline of Moe's research scoring was fairly respectable in the 60's.

(in comparison)

1970 4.52
1971 3.91
1972 3.91
1973 4.15
1974 4.15
1975 4.13
1976 3.98
1977 4.40
1978 3.99
1979 4.22

(note all these numbers are NL average)

Bill James has been a cranky old fart since he was 29

I mean, at age 29 he was working at a pork and beans cannery so...

Since I already looked at Drysdale, the most directly comparable to Koufax, and saw that he didn't have the same results, I thought I would look at some other contemporaries from the pitching dominant 1960s and early 1970s:

Bob Gibson - like Drysdale, he had so many excellent seasons it was difficult to pick just 5 for the purposes of the study, but since what I'm really trying to look at is poor run support and its impact on W-L record, I decided to look at the most successful period of each career in terms of W-L since I think that will show the biggest contrasts. For Gibson I chose 1966-1970.

So here's the tale of the tape, so to speak, for Gibson - from 1966-1970 he had a combined W-L record overall of 99-48, an average seasonal record of about 20-10.

Record when given less than 3 runs of support: 22-37.
Times shut out: 13 about half as often as Drysdale did. He went 0-12 in those games.
Record when given 1 or 2 runs of support: 22-25. Respectable - not as good as Koufax (27-15), but considerably better than Drysdale's 11-22.
Record when given at least 3 runs of support: 77-11, compared to Koufax' 84-10 in his peak years and Drysdale's 87-23.
Times given a lead of 1-0, 2-0 or 2-1 and made the lead stand up: 15 times
Times he was given a lead and couldn't hold it: 18 It should be noted, however, that some of these games he was given a 1-0 lead, couldn't hold it, but then eventually won 2-1. Overall he was 6-11 in these games.
Times given a 1-0 lead and he held on to win 1-0: 5
Times given a 1-0 and he couldn't hold it: 14
How many runs/game did he allow when he got shut out: 3.18/9 innings, a little bit higher than Koufax or Drysdale, but still pretty good, especially considering he wasn't pitching his home games in Dodger Stadium.

Highlights from this period:

1) Of course 1968 was the peak. Gibson had a 10-8 record that year when given less than 3 runs of support, 12-1 when getting at least 3 runs

2) This was such a bizarre season - at his peak think Orel Hershiser 1988 but even better. Imagine if you had Orel's 59 consecutive shutout innings (Bob's actual longest shutout streak was 48 innings) and then surrounded it with 67 additional innings where you only allowed 4 total runs, only 2 of which were earned. In 1968 Gibson had a stretch of 14 consecutive starts in which he pitched complete games in every start (in fact winning all 14), 10 of them were shutouts and in the other 4 he only allowed 1 run apiece. 14 consecutive starts never giving up more than 1 run. I can't find another pitcher in history who even comes close to matching this.

3) Gibson had 34 starts that season and 31 decisions. Given that he was 10-8 in games with poor run support, that means he received poor support in over half of his starts. Early in the season it got so bad that there was a stretch where the Cardinals gave him less than 3 runs of support in 8 consecutive starts, the longest streak of bad luck I saw for any pitcher in the study. From June into September, however, there were 6 times St. Louis staked Bob to a 1-0 or 2-0 lead with no more runs to follow and he made the lead stand up by pitching a shutout in all 6 of these games.

4) In 1970 Gibson went 23-7 and won the Cy Young Award for a second time. That season Bob was only 2-6 when given less than 3 runs of support but a whopping 21-1 when given at least 3 runs!

21. Thank you; question I have is it surprising that Koufax got more run support than Drysdale, for one b/c Drysdale was a much better hitter; how much difference does that make?

Also, was Koufax apt to start more against other lefties? I thought LA had the all switch hitting infield in the mid 60's, was there any difference b/c of that?

Did either one have a personal catcher? Torborg was not a very good hitter (but I think he caught a no-hitter of Koufax's; and also one of Ryan's, I think); but did he catch both of them? Roseboro was the better hitter.

This from the man who brought you Win Shares

#29 One of the first times James got national attention was in the Britt Burns arbitration hearing after the 1983 season. It came out that the White Sox argued Burns' won-lost record showed he wasn't worth what he was asking, and Burns' agent had hired James to prepare a counter (since this was an obvious argument to make). They weren't attempting to argue he was as valuable as Hoyt and Dobson (I mean there was a fair difference in innings in 1983 and that matters) but rather that Hoyt and Dotson had much better run support so the difference in records didn't say anything meaningful.

The reaction to that was interesting. I mean nobody knew what any given pitcher's run support was. It wasn't like everybody agreed with the point James was making, it was more a thoughtful lack of vehement pushback. I mean he hadn't suddenly broken the sense that W-L records carried signal, but it did make sense that run support might matter.

Thanks Moeball for all the Koufax vs Drysdale studies. Fascinating stuff!

Can't find Greg Spira's studies on run support versus W-L record -- so much work done on rec.sport.basebaball is proving tough to find.

Bottom line though. Koufax's W-L record is pretty much what you'd expect given his run support and runs allowed. Don't recall if he looked at Drysdale. I do know he looked at Jack Morris (W-L record is consistent with runs scored and runs allowed). And I know I looked at Steve Carelton (ditto).

You can find the odd years that simply applying using run support and runs allowed doesn't work all that well, but we never found anybody who was a big miss over time. And what you'll often find in those miss years is that the bullpen support was weirdly bad (or unexpectedly good. Vuckovich was bailed out a lot in 1982.)

Nolan Ryan's 1987 is remarkable in both respects. The Astro offense wasn't terrible -- except when Ryan was pitching. (To be clear, it wasn't good. Or even average) The Astro bullpen was generally pretty good. Except in games Ryan started.

#28 - I was hoping that one of Drysdale's 1-0 wins would be a game where his home run was the only run, but didn't find any such examples, at least not during these specific seasons in question. It was clear, however, that he was a much better hitter over his career than Koufax was.

I know that by the mid 1960s Roseboro was the regular catcher but I don't know that either Koufax or Drysdale had a personal catcher in the same way that, for example, Steve Carlton always wanted Tim McCarver to be his catcher.

Speaking of Carlton, his 1972 season, of course, is one of the often cited greatest pitching seasons ever. Won 27 games (went 27-10) for a last place team that only won 59. Here are some interesting highlights:

Getting less than 3 runs of support: was 10-7, excellent! This means he was 17-3 when getting at least 3 runs of support.
Got shut out: only 3 times. Went 0-2 in those games with one no decision. This means that when the Phillies gave him only 1 or 2 runs of support he went 10-5, which is outstanding!
Given a 1-0, 2-0 or 2-1 lead: 12 times, made the lead stand up 8 times, 4 times he couldn't hold the lead. Of these, 2 were games where he was given a 1-0 lead and that was it but he got the 1-0 win.
What did he give up when his team got shut out: 4.03 runs/9 innings

Overall an outstanding season, I guess we shouldn't be surprised. I think it lives up to the hype as one of the greatest pitching seasons ever.