So I didn’t write any this past weekend and I was way behind on keeping up with game logs but I think I have a pretty good excuse; I was in Washington surprising my dad for his birthday (Happy b-day again dad! It was a blast!).
Anyways, back to the starting pitchers, not of 2010 this time, but of every year from 1956 to 2009. Now that time period is not arbitrary; it marks the length of time that the Cy Young Award has been handed out at the end of each season, marking pitching excellence within that season. This posting is going to focus on 89 such pitchers. This number is less than two per season for two reasons; first, only one Cy Young Award was given the first few years and two, relievers can’t exactly get a Game Score as a starting pitcher…
89 starting pitchers have won the Cy Young Award for excellence in the past 54 years. The obvious question is who had the best single season as a pitcher? At this point most casual baseball fans and certainly all the hardcore fans will come up with a quick answer; Bob Gibson in 1968, also known as the Year of the Pitcher. Well, without drawing it out too much to artificially increase suspense, you’d be right if you guessed that. Gibson’s average GS over that entire season was 74.18. To give you an idea of just how good that is, so far this season (through May 22nd) there have been 79 games in which a starter posted a GS of 75 or better… out of 1300 games started thus far. In 1968, 19 of Gibson’s 34 starts topped 75 and four of them topped 90.
So that much was obvious. We had one of the most intimidating pitchers in the game’s history pitching from a mountain (as I’m sure 1968 National League hitters would describe the 15 inch mound with Gibson atop it) in a league where only five guys managed to hit above .300. Here’s a tougher question for you; who would be the second best in average GS amongst Cy Young winners?
Casual fans might be able to remember what this guy did to the American League at a time when home runs were flying out of the ballpark at an alarming rate. Hardcore fans should be able to remember that the guy who set the modern (post 1900) record for adjusted ERA+ was Pedro Martinez in 2000 with a mark of 291. That meant that his ERA, adjusted for park factors and the era in which he played, was 191% better (almost three times as good) than the average pitcher. The ERA of Major League Baseball was 4.77 and Pedro’s was 1.74.
Before I go into some more in-depth analysis of these numbers, I want to pause, as I always do, for some completely trivial notes.
- Most wins in a Cy Young season? 31 by Denny McLain in 1968
- Fewest wins in a Cy Young season? 13 by Fernando Valenzuela in the strike shortened 1981 season
- Most strikeouts per start? 10.63 by Randy Johnson in 2001 (372 in 249.2 innings), narrowly edging Pedro Martinez in 1999 (10.55)
- Fewest strikeouts per start? 2.33 by Randy Jones (93 in 315.1 innings)
- Most walks per start? 4.13 by Bob Turley in 1958 (128 in 244.1 IP)
- Fewest walks? 0.82 by Greg Maddux (what a shocker) in 1995 (23 in 209.2 IP)
- Most IP per start? 8.96 by Bob Gibson in 1968 (304.2 IP in 34 starts)
- Fewest IP per start? 6.49 by Roger Clemens in 2004 (214.1 IP in 33 starts)
Now, back to seriousness. In other words, what does all this data mean? I have a feeling that in the end, we’ll discover that even though Game Score is a good overall metric in boiling down an entire start to one number, but there are certain areas where it lacks credibility.
For instance, Bob Gibson had the best average GS in a Cy Young winning season at 74.18 but was his performance in the summer of 1968 the most dominating Cy Young performance in the history of the award? Humbly, I would say no. Those of you who know me know that Bob Gibson is one of my all-time favorite baseball players so it’s incredibly hard for me to say this but I believe it to be true. So why, if he didn’t have the most dominating season ever, did he end up at the top of the heap in the average GS rankings? Because of two words; innings pitched. In ’68, he pitched in 34 games. If he threw 9 innings in every start, that works out to 306 innings pitched. In that season, he missed that total by four outs by throwing 304.2 innings. This is important because the formula for GS rewards you for every out you record with one point and then another two points for every complete inning after the fourth. If you throw 9 innings, you’ll have a GS of 87 before you take into account how good those 9 innings were, as opposed to a 6 inning start where you’re starting from a GS of 72.
Therefore, the easiest way to minimize the impact of innings pitched is simply to take it out of the equation and reward pitchers for their rates per inning. So, to minimize the effect of Gibson throwing so many innings in 1968, I simply prorated all of their stats for a complete game and then recalculated their GS. Obviously, artificially increasing their innings pitched increased their Game Scores but it also showed who did the overall best in allowing the fewest hits, runs, earned runs, and walks, while maximizing their strikeouts.
Not surprisingly, of the ten pitchers most helped by this adjustment, 9 of them were in the past ten years and the lone exception was Pedro Martinez’s season in 1999. To state the obvious again, Bob Gibson’s 1968 season was the least helped by this method since he was already averaging 8.96 innings per start in that season (I’m sorry, I just can’t get over that particular stat).
So, what were the results of this adjustment? Well, Bob Gibson’s 1968 season plummeted from the number 1 spot all the way to the number 2 spot… so yes, he was superb throughout that season. He just wasn’t the best of the Cy Young era. That distinction goes to Pedro Martinez’s 2000 season and the side by side comparison of the two is quite interesting. Gibson allowed more hits per start than Pedro (5.82-4.41) while Pedro allowed more runs (1.52-1.44) and more earned runs (1.45-1.12). The stark difference lies in the fact that Pedro walked only 1.10 batters per start (to Gibson’s mark of 1.82) and he also struck out 9.79 batters per start against Gibson’s 7.88. The only reason Pedro wasn’t on top from the beginning was because he averaged ONLY 7.48 innings per start. Gibson pitched at least 9 innings 26 times and in 4 of those games, he pitched more than 10 innings. Martinez pitched 9 innings just 6 times and never went beyond those 27 outs.
On that last note, I’d like to throw a shout out to one of the most unsung pitching performances in the history of baseball; Steve Carlton’s 1972 season for the abysmal Philles. He went 27-10 with a 1.97 ERA, pitching 30 complete games (8 shutouts) and striking out 310 in 346.1 innings. Why then, with his average GS of 68.44 (good for 9th best) does he deserve this shout out? The Phillies went 59-97 in that season. I’m going to let you do a little math so that can sink in… no, no math?
Ok, no biggie, I already did the math. Every other pitcher on the Phillies staff combined to go 32-87 with a 4.23 ERA and a WHIP of 1.43 versus Carlton’s numbers of 27-10, 1.97, and 0.99. Just how many games would he have won if he played for a contender?
So in conclusion, who among today’s pitchers are stacking up to this historic standard set by former Cy Young Award winners? For ease (more rigorous calculations will be forthcoming in this space) I simply took the top ten starters in ERA. As of now, their average GS are;
69.90 – Ubaldo Jimenez
64.40 – Adam Wainwright
62.56 – Jaime Garcia
61.70 – Roy Oswalt (who sports a lovely 3-6 record)
60.80 – Roy Halladay
59.33 – John Danks (the first AL pitcher on the list)
59.11 – Doug Fister
58.67 – Tim Hudson
57.78 – Livan Hernandez
55.70 – Jon Garland
Interesting food for thought and most definitely, updates in the realm of average GS will be frequent as the season goes on.
That’s all for right now sports fans. I haven’t quite decided what my next column is going to entail but I’m thinking something to do with unbreakable records and what it would actually take to break them in this day and age…
Until next time, I leave you with this couplet, one of my favorites and one that has seen me through many dark times:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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