Hall of Fame Pyramid - HM Starting Pitchers Part 3
Aug 6, 2019 20:29:17 GMT -5
Rich - Former GM, Texas Rangers, and 1 more like this
Post by sansterre - Milwaukee Brewers on Aug 6, 2019 20:29:17 GMT -5
A surprise in the Honorable Mention section, Don Sutton! Sutton is certainly one of the best regarded pitchers on this floor. He pitched over 5000 innings, mostly for the Dodgers (from 1966 to 1980, not retiring until 1988). He pitched a lot of innings and he accumulated a lot of stats: 321 wins (MLB 14th all-time), 3,574 strikeouts (7th all-time) and 58 shutouts (10th all time). He has an impressive list of top tens: BB/9 (13), K/9 (12), shutouts (11, one led league), HRA/9 (5, one led league), WHIP (14, four led league), ERA (8, one led league) and rWAR (four). It’s an impressive resume, and he made Cooperstown on his fourth ballot. What’s he doing in Honorable Mentions?
Few pitchers were helped as much by their situation. Sutton played fifteen years for excellent Dodgers teams in a pitchers’ park. Over his career his defenses saved him an estimated 50 runs and his parks an estimated 112 runs; these are big numbers. Pro-rated across his career, assuming a 250 IP season (normal for Sutton), 0.8 of a WAR per year is attributable to things besides him. This doesn’t help, especially given that Sutton was never a particularly dominant pitcher. He was consistently really good (though not as good as he looked) for a very long time but, even the voters of his day only let him in four All-Star games and gave him no Cy Youngs (he never finished higher than third in the voting). His rWAR breakdowns: fifteen seasons at 2+, nine at 3+, five at 4+, three at 5+ and two in the sixes. Fifteen seasons above average is amazing, but only five above 4 rWAR is pretty underwhelming, as is having no seasons above 7 rWAR. Sutton, without putting too fine a point on it, is exactly the kind of pitcher that our system is designed to punish. He racked up a lot of counting stats by pitching for a long time (at a respectable level), but a pitcher that was only in the top ten in rWAR four times in his career is going to have an uphill battle arguing that he’s one of the greatest ever.
A short career with a high peak, Ron Guidry! Guidry (also known as ‘Louisiana Lightning’ or ‘Gator’) was a rarity, a two-pitch starter. He had an excellent fastball that he could control, but his slider was considered by many the best of his day (excepting perhaps that of Steve Carlton). He was drafted in the 3rd round of the 1971 draft by the Yankees and played with that organization his whole career. He was not brought into a full-time role until he was 26 (1977) for several reasons. First, he struggled with control through age 24; in 60 innings in AAA he struck out 11 per 9, but walked 5.4 per 9. By age 25 his control problems were gone, with his BB/9 down below 3. But that year the 1976 Yankees won the AL and boasted a rotation with all winning records and only one starter having an ERA above 4, so breaking in wasn’t easy. But by ‘77 Guidry could not be denied, exploding into the majors with 16 wins, 7.6 K/9 (3rd best in the AL) the best FIP in the league and the best ERA on the team. The Yankees won the World Series that year and Guidry pitched superbly. His next season, 1978, was even better. He went 25-3 and led the league in ERA, shutouts, FIP, WHIP, H/9 and rWAR (9.6), while finishing 2nd in K/9 (behind Nolan Ryan) and the Yankees won the Championship again (RAW credits this season with an 11.5, but a pitchers’ park and good defense bring that down). I know this will shock you, but Guidry won the Cy Young that year, getting every single first place vote. When you have the quinfecta of: 1) leading the league in wins, 2) leading the league in ERA, 3) actually being the best pitcher in the league, 4) for the best team in the league and 5) in a big market . . . yeah, the odds are ever in your favor.
Guidry continued to be very good but his K/9 slowly dropped (after all, he was already 28 in his third serious season). In ‘79 he was still very good (6.5 rWAR) but from 1980 and on he became merely a good pitcher. His control slowly improved but Guidry’s pitches were getting driven out of the park more and more often. By age 33 injuries had started to derail him and by age 35 he was more or less out of a starting role. Guidry only pitched 2392 innings, but pitched them well. He has six 4+ rWAR seasons, only three 5+, two 6+ and that one, shining 9.6 season. And honestly, that 1978 season is the reason he made Honorable Mention. It was a great year and just puts him over into admission.
Up next, Frank Viola! Viola was a workhorse, from age 24 (1984) to age 32 (1992) he pitched 230+ innings every single year. This is one of the major sources of his value, as peripherals aren’t particularly impressive. His fastball / curveball / change arsenal combined for a K/9 that was generally above league average (5.9 K/9 career, with three seasons in the 7s), a BB/9 that was generally better than league average (2.7 BB/9 career, with one season below 2) and a HRA/9 that was generally around league average. Yet his peak, combining solid stats with long innings was actually very successful. At age 27 for the Twins he was worth 8.1 rWAR (a key component in the Twins’ jump from 71 wins to the World Series championship) and he followed it up with a 7.7 rWAR campaign in 1988 (for which he won the Cy Young). Traded to the Mets for a horde of prospects in 1989 Viola put together a 6.4 rWAR season in 1990 and a 6.2 rWAR season in 1992 for the Red Sox. At 33 he underwent Tommy John surgery and never recovered.
Where does Viola rank? His peak is excellent (two 7+ rWAR seasons is quite good) but his career is pretty narrow; there’s only about ten years where he was average or above. For a guy who pitched a ton in his prime, he didn’t break 3000 IP for his career. For his ten year peak / career in fWAR he was one of the top ten starters in the league, but by RAW and WPA he was #2 (behind Clemens). That was consistently the interesting thing about Viola, he always managed to give up fewer runs than you’d guess. He also shined in the 1987 World Series against the Cardinals, starting three games and striking out 16 in 19 innings, deservedly winning the series MVP (that said, he struggled in the ALCS against the Tigers as much as he dominated against the Cards). One of the best pitchers of his day.
A tragic story, Dwight Gooden! Instead of talking about Gooden, for the moment I’m going to tell you about his 1985 season. The year before, at age 19, he broke into the league and led it in strikeouts, K/9, FIP, HRA/9, H/9 and WHIP (he won Rookie of the Year but he should have won the Cy Young as well). At age 20 he pitched another 60 innings at an even higher level, leading the league with a 1.53 ERA, 24 wins, 16 complete games and 268 strikeouts, while also leading the league in FIP and ERA+. It wasn’t that his peripherals were unstoppable, it’s that they were combined with an incredible ability to control BABIP (259) and an unfailing ability to suppress baserunners (86.9%, the third highest LOB% ever with 180+ IP). How good is that 1985 season? It was worth 12.2 rWAR (the best rWAR number since 1913, and in the 20th century only Walter Johnson and Cy Young have done better). It was worth 12.8 RAW, 8th best ever, the best since 1972. It was worth 9.93 WPA, the second best WPA pitching season ever (Lefty Grove in 1931 is #1). He also won the Cy Young, for what it’s worth. His fWAR was less impressive (only top 50 all-time), and FIP devotees would argue that his LOB% and BABIP were fluky-good and so his ‘85 season is overrated. As far as indicating consistent skill perhaps there’s something there, but as far as flat-out dominating hitters for a season, few have ever done it better. (It was also probably the best season by a 20-year-old ever.)
Okay moving on to . . . oh wait, you want more? Why is he only in the Honorable Mention section when he has one of the best pitching seasons ever? Well, he started his career off with a 5.5 rWAR season, then a 12.2 rWAR season . . . would you believe he never even broke 5 rWAR again? He put up four 2s, four 3s and a 4 but that’s it. In short, take his 12.2 rWAR out and he doesn’t even sniff this building. In fact, technically, even with that ‘85 season he doesn’t make the cut for Honorable Mention. But you can’t leave the guy out of the building with a season like that; it’s too important historically.
So what happened? Well, predictably, it’s complicated. Tom Seaver observed that Gooden’s fastball had remarkable movement on it, but by age 21 the pitch had flattened out and never regained its old dominance. But there were other factors that entered into it. Gooden was groomed by his father to become a pitcher; by age 7 he had a viable overhand curve. At age 9 he was a key player on a 10-14 year-old little league team that qualified for the LLWS (though Gooden was disqualified for being too young). Intermixed with this obsessive dedication to baseball was a variety of trauma, from his father’s heavy drinking to his sister being gunned down by her husband in front of Dwight when he was only five years old. In High-A ball (age 18) he began frequent drinking assuming that, between his father and his adult-ballplayer peers, it was normal to do so. Even as he conquered the league in 1985 his drinking intensified and in the offseason he developed an addiction to cocaine. For the rest of his career he struggled with sobriety, and never recaptured his former glory.
It’s hard to place the narrative here. Was he a once-a-generation phenom who was derailed by childhood trauma and substance abuse, who could only derive value from his success as a player and had no way to cope with the possibility of failure? Or was he a skilled pitcher who enjoyed two fluky-good years, lost the pitch that made him unhittable and never quite adjusted? It’s easy to characterize him as Icarus, but pitching is really hard, and sometimes your go-to pitch becomes a gopherball and if you can’t adjust you’re never the same. One thing is for sure; there’s no way we’d have this section without Gooden. He’s almost the precise kind of player for which the Honorable Mention section exists.
Winner of two Cy Youngs, Bret Saberhagen! Sabes was an excellent pitcher for the Royals in the 80s who went on to pitch for the Mets and Red Sox as well. He broke into the majors at age 20 (1984) and at 21 he won his first Cy Young with a 7.1 rWAR season and a 2.87 ERA. For much of the rest of his career he enacted a curious even/odd dichotomy in his performance; every great season would be followed by a merely good season. Here are his rWAR numbers in order, from 21 to 31: 7.1, 2.0, 8.0, 3.8, 9.7, 3.6, 5.1, 1.5, 2.6, 5.5, 2.2. It was a strange pattern, compounded by the fact that his FIP was generally pretty comparable year to year, which is to say, the difference between his up and down years was how hard he was hit, but it had little to do with his strikeouts, walks or home runs allowed.
What kind of pitcher was Saberhagen? From 1985 to 1995 (his ten-year peak) his rankings out of 45 pitchers to pitch at least 1500 innings: K% (12th), HRA/9 (13th), BB% (1st), BABIP (26th), LOB% (14th), ERA- (3rd). That BB% is crazy-good; to put it in context Saberhagen walked fewer batters than Greg Maddux. In fact, Maddux is a very interesting comparison for Saberhagen. Their K% is almost identical (Maddux slightly better), BB% almost identical (Sabes slightly better), HRA is close (Maddux definitely better), BABIP pretty identical, LOB% pretty identical . . . They’re pretty much the same pitcher except that Maddux gave up fewer home runs and pitched way more innings. Waayyyyy more. Saberhagen topped out at 2566, pitching over 200 only four times and wearing down from injuries the older he got. Maddux, in contrast, pitched seventeen 200+ inning seasons at that level.
In short, Saberhagen was very good, an amazing control pitcher with good stuff who had a very nice peak. But his inability to pitch many innings really limited his value, both per season (because once you’re only pitching 150 innings in a season, even a world-beating season comes out looking only very good) and for his career (because 2500 career IP means that to make Bronze or above you need to be a freaking murderer and Saberhagen, while excellent, was not - the sub 2500 IP Bronze and up list is four deep: Sandy Koufax, Adam Wainwright, Jimmy Smith and Jhoan Brown). In fact, the correlation coefficient between IP and Tier is actually about 0.6, which is to say, 36% of what tier you end up on is purely how many innings you pitched.
In fact, here are the average innings pitched for each tier:
Pantheon: 5,024
Diamond: 4,540
Gold: 4,531
Silver: 3,648
Bronze: 3,314
Honorable Mentions: 3,066
It’s hard to pitch 2,500 innings and be placed too highly in here.
From the same era, Chuck Finley! Finley was an unusually durable and reliable starter for the Angels in the 80s and 90s; he came on in 1986 (age 23) but didn’t start full time until two years later, pitching for the team until 2000 (age 37) when he went to the Indians. For that thirteen year span for the Angels Finley never dipped below 2 rWAR, putting up three seasons at 7+ rWAR, three seasons in the 4s, three more in the 3s and three in the 2s. From 1988 to 2001 here are Finley’s rankings (of 58 starters who threw at least 1500 innings in that timespan): K% (11th), BB% (52nd), HRA/9 (30th), BABIP (44th), LOB% (10th), ERA- (16th), FIP- (17th), fWAR (10th), WPA (12th), Clutch (5th), RAW (9th) and IP (4th). What does all this say?
Well, he was clearly a dominant strikeout pitcher, though also wild and prone to being hard-hit. The most interesting stat to my mind is his LOB%; he ranks higher there than any of the other rate stats, despite having honestly not exciting peripherals. The best conclusion, supported by his very high Clutch rating, is that Finley with runners on was simply a better pitcher than he was with bases empty (in particular with a man on first for some reason - with a man on first his walk rate dropped but strikeout rate remained pretty much the same). So combine his solid peripherals with being durable and clutch and you have a guy who pitched a lot of innings at a high (though not extremely high) level and was quite valuable to his team. From an rWAR point of view he had ten 3+ WAR years, seven 4+ WAR years and three years in the 7-WAR range. A really solid career.
Up next, Kevin Appier! You may be surprised to see him here but this isn’t a mistake; Kevin Appier is an Honorable Mention. From 1990 to 1997 (ages 22-29) he was an ace for the Royals, putting up 46.4 rWAR in 8 seasons (a 3, two 4s, three 5s, an 8 and a 9). In fact he led the AL in rWAR in 1993 (the 9.3 rWAR year) and led the AL in WPA in both ‘92 and ‘93. Over that span (‘90-’97) here are his rankings among the 57 pitchers to throw 1000 innings: K% (8th), BB% (35th), HRA/9 (5th), BABIP (17th), LOB% (8th), ERA- (4th), FIP- (4th), Clutch (3rd), WPA (3rd, behind Maddux and Clemens), fWAR (3rd, behind Maddux and Clemens) and RAW (3rd, behind Maddux and Clemens).
Sweet Mary McGillicuddy, that’s an impressive set of rankings. For that eight-year span he was the 3rd best pitcher in baseball, behind two Hall of Famers. He was ahead of Randy Johnson (still learning control), ahead of Glavine (Appier was straight-up better, though Glavine pitched much longer) and ahead of Mike Mussina (who was a year younger and took a little longer to get going). This isn’t really ambiguous; Kevin Appier was a great pitcher. So why did he get 0.2% of the vote for Cooperstown his first time up?
Part of it’s that his skillset was somewhat subtle; he was a great strikeout pitcher but definitely not overwhelmingly so; his best skills were not giving up the long ball and stranding runners, both of which are not ostentatious skills. Also, Appier broke his collarbone at age 30 and had surgery for that and the partial UCL tear he’d developed over the prior years. He almost missed the entire 1998 season and when he came back he wasn’t the same. His K% was much lower and while he was still an above average pitcher (especially with runners on base) he wasn’t much better than that, never again breaking 4 rWAR. The above rankings are a bit cherry-picked (anytime you build rankings for the years of one player’s eight-year peak, that player will come out looking pretty good), but even if I just said “for the 90s” he’d still finish 4th in WPA (with Randy Johnson 3rd). His career ended relatively uneventfully, and that’s a shame. He may not have received much love because his peak was spent in a small market (Kansas City), but that eight-year stretch was Bronze-level. It’s just that he didn’t have enough decent seasons outside of his peak to boost is rating. Appier has a higher JONS than Saberhagen, and is honestly quite close to Bronze. Anytime a great pitcher is great for a small market, then jumps to a big market for his waning years it hurts his image. If Appier had pitched for the Yankees during his peak he’d have won 20+ games two or three times, won 1-2 Cy Youngs and pitched in several World Series (presumably well because, you know, he was great). And if he’d been injured in a car accident (a la Roy Campanella) and never played again, he’d guaranteed be a Cooperstownian. Instead he’s a footnote. He deserves more love for being a fantastic pitcher than he’s received.
Speaking of narrow peaks, Johan Santana! Santana came up with Houston but was snatched up by the Twins in the Rule V draft in 1999 when he was 20. Santana worked in the bullpen for a few years; in 2002 the Twins let him start and he proceeded to put up a K/9 of 10+ and lead the league in wild pitches, putting up 2.7 rWAR in only 108 innings. In 2003 he pitched well, putting up 4.1 rWAR. And from 2004 to 2006 he was the best pitcher in the league, leading it (over those three years) in fWAR, rWAR, RAW, WPA, ERA, K/9, WHIP, H/9 and K%. It is that three-year stretch of unambiguous dominance (he won two Cy Youngs) that really jumps out at you. He then put up another strong year (5 rWAR), before being traded to the Mets and signed to a lucrative extension. Santana had one great season for New York before being worn down by injuries. By age 32 he needed to miss a year for surgery and retired a year later.
How good was his peak really? Well, he only pitched for more than 150 innings eight times in his whole career, but in those eight times he put up (in rWAR) a 3, two 4s, a 5, three 7s and an 8. It’s a pretty good peak (comparable to Appier) but that ‘peak’ is actually Santana’s whole career. Santana barely pitched 2000 innings over his career, and that makes it pretty much impossible to make the Hall unless you’re Pedro Martinez-level. You know who his old-timey doppleganger is? Dizzy Dean. As long as they were pitching they were fantastic. They just didn’t pitch that long.
Let’s hop to Houston and learn about Roy Oswalt! Oswalt is Santana’s NL doppleganger (technically Santana played some for the Mets, but you know what I mean). Oswalt broke in for the Astros in 2001 at 23 and established his excellence very quickly. In the 2000s he established himself as the Ace on the team, leading them to four playoffs over his career and one World Series berth (he pitched badly in the series, but had pitched brilliantly in the NLCS, winning the series MVP). And if you were to look at the top pitchers of the 2000s Oswalt is consistently at the top. In fWAR he ranks 2nd (behind Roy Halladay), in RAW he ranks 3rd (behind Halladay and Santana) and in WPA he ranks 4th (behind Halladay, Rivera and Santana). There’s no way around it; he’s one of the best pitchers of the decade. While he relied on a fastball and slider as his best two pitches, you would be wrong in guessing he was a strikeout artist. Of 103 pitchers with more than 1000 IP for the decade Oswalt is: 23rd in K%, 15th in BB%, 11th in HRA/9 and 5th in LOB%. He was a very well-rounded ace.
In aggregate Oswalt suffers from the same problems as Santana; he didn’t pitch long enough. Not breaking 2300 IP over his career, Oswalt didn’t hit the majors until 23 and retired at age 35, not breaking 200 IP after 32. And his JONS is lower than Santana’s, due to his lower peak. He has twelve 2+ rWAR seasons, eight 3+, and his top five seasons are 4.7, 5.9, 5.9, 6.7 and 7.0. He was consistently excellent but rarely overwhelming (as his three All-Stars and zero Cy Youngs suggests). An excellent Honorable Mention.
A stark contrast to Santana and Oswalt, Andy Pettitte (the contrast is only Stark because Pettitte was an Iron Man . Pettitte is like a souped-up Jack Morris; he pitched a pretty decent number of innings (3316) for really good teams (almost all Yankees with a few years in Houston). He racked up 250+ wins, some big postseason performances (it helped that he pitched 270+ playoff innings) and put up the 64th most rWAR among MLB starting pitchers ever (better than it sounds; there are 73 starting pitchers in Cooperstown). Pettitte was a machine, putting up a whopping sixteen seasons above average (above 2 rWAR), an impressive nine at 3+ rWAR but only three at 4+ (5.6, 6.8 and 8.4). Between 1995 and 2010 (the major years of his career) 28 pitchers threw 2000+ innings. Of those 28 he ranks: 7th in fWAR, 11th in WPA, 9th in RAW, 13th in K%, 15th in BB%, 6th in HRA/9, 5th in groundball rate, 27th in BABIP, 19th in LOB% and 2nd in IP.
What do we make from all of this? It’s hard to look at the above and conclude that the guy was a dominant pitcher; we’re talking about K% and BB% rates that are slightly better than average, if at all. His big skills are endurance (lots of innings and little time missed to injury) and keeping the ball on the ground and inside the park (his sky-high BABIP is some of his high GB% and some of the shoddy defenses behind him in New York). His reasonably decent placings in fWAR, WPA and RAW suggest his good aggregate value but that is mostly owed to pitching lots and lots of generally above-average seasons. He was only one of the top ten in his league three times in rWAR. Perhaps his most impressive contribution might have been the postseason, where he put up 3.51 WPA in 276 innings. He pitched especially well in the ‘98-’01 stretch where he contributed 2.53 WPA over those four postseasons (2.53 WPA in 100 innings is fantastic). His best moment was in the 2001 ALCS against the Mariners (one of the best teams ever), where he put up 0.66 WPA in the series, leading the Yankees to a 4-1 upset. He sneaks into the Honorable Mentions on the back of his excellent postseason performances and his high fWAR; he was consistently very good but his peak was nowhere near good enough to make Bronze.
Up next, Dan Haren! Haren had the most traditional possible career arc. Broke into the league for St. Louis in 2003 and had two decent seasons on part time duty. He was traded to Oakland where he immediately put up three strong years (3.9, 4.1 and 5.8 rWAR). As he hit his second year of arbitration the A’s flipped him to the Diamondbacks for a hoard of prospects. His two years in Arizona, ages 27 and 28, were excellent (5.8 and 7.0 rWAR). He then hit free agency, signing with Tampa Bay and having another three excellent seasons (16.2 rWAR between them). By the time he was 32 he had been traded to Washington where injuries sapped his innings though not his ability, as he put up 6.8 rWAR over only 318 innings in those two seasons. And at age 34 he retired. Haren was a solid strikeout pitcher but never dominant (7.4 K/9 career, only two seasons above 8), relying on his excellent control for success (2.1 BB/9 career). He was actually quite good during his ten-year peak, though never dominant. Certainly worth an Honorable Mention!
Up next, Mark Buehrle! Wait a minute, I hear you asking. Mark Buehrle? You’re damned right Mark Buehrle. So what if the guy never broke 6.1 rWAR? So what if he never struck out more than 6.2 per 9 in a full season? Buehrle had two big things going for him: control and durability. As far as control goes, he averaged 2.0 BB/9 over his career which was 6th best of 58 qualifying pitchers (1500+ IP between 2001 and 2014). As far as durability goes, from age 22 to age 36 he broke 198 IP every single year, leading the league in IP twice. While his ERA was not particularly great he had two things working against him: playing in a moderate hitters park for most of his career and playing in front of generally poor defenses with the White Sox (for whom he pitched almost 2500 of his career 3283 innings). Adjusted for those things he had an incredibly reliable career. Listen to these years of rWAR: fourteen years at 2+, eleven years at 3+, eight years at 4+, four at 5+ and his top two years being 6.1 and 6.0 rWAR. Is that a shallow peak? Absolutely. But eleven years at 3+ WAR? That’s fantastic! He’s honestly kind of like a better version of Don Sutton (blasphemy!). Low peak, long quality career. It’s just that Sutton played in a pitcher’s park, in front of good defenses, on a good team, in a big market. Buerhle had, well, the opposite of those things (I know he played in Chicago, but the White Sox have never really been a media darling). But he did have one of the best fielding plays ever:
And with that, we come full circle! On to Honorable Mention Coaches / GMs before we wrap up the Honorable Mention with the exclusively PBL starting pitchers!
Few pitchers were helped as much by their situation. Sutton played fifteen years for excellent Dodgers teams in a pitchers’ park. Over his career his defenses saved him an estimated 50 runs and his parks an estimated 112 runs; these are big numbers. Pro-rated across his career, assuming a 250 IP season (normal for Sutton), 0.8 of a WAR per year is attributable to things besides him. This doesn’t help, especially given that Sutton was never a particularly dominant pitcher. He was consistently really good (though not as good as he looked) for a very long time but, even the voters of his day only let him in four All-Star games and gave him no Cy Youngs (he never finished higher than third in the voting). His rWAR breakdowns: fifteen seasons at 2+, nine at 3+, five at 4+, three at 5+ and two in the sixes. Fifteen seasons above average is amazing, but only five above 4 rWAR is pretty underwhelming, as is having no seasons above 7 rWAR. Sutton, without putting too fine a point on it, is exactly the kind of pitcher that our system is designed to punish. He racked up a lot of counting stats by pitching for a long time (at a respectable level), but a pitcher that was only in the top ten in rWAR four times in his career is going to have an uphill battle arguing that he’s one of the greatest ever.
A short career with a high peak, Ron Guidry! Guidry (also known as ‘Louisiana Lightning’ or ‘Gator’) was a rarity, a two-pitch starter. He had an excellent fastball that he could control, but his slider was considered by many the best of his day (excepting perhaps that of Steve Carlton). He was drafted in the 3rd round of the 1971 draft by the Yankees and played with that organization his whole career. He was not brought into a full-time role until he was 26 (1977) for several reasons. First, he struggled with control through age 24; in 60 innings in AAA he struck out 11 per 9, but walked 5.4 per 9. By age 25 his control problems were gone, with his BB/9 down below 3. But that year the 1976 Yankees won the AL and boasted a rotation with all winning records and only one starter having an ERA above 4, so breaking in wasn’t easy. But by ‘77 Guidry could not be denied, exploding into the majors with 16 wins, 7.6 K/9 (3rd best in the AL) the best FIP in the league and the best ERA on the team. The Yankees won the World Series that year and Guidry pitched superbly. His next season, 1978, was even better. He went 25-3 and led the league in ERA, shutouts, FIP, WHIP, H/9 and rWAR (9.6), while finishing 2nd in K/9 (behind Nolan Ryan) and the Yankees won the Championship again (RAW credits this season with an 11.5, but a pitchers’ park and good defense bring that down). I know this will shock you, but Guidry won the Cy Young that year, getting every single first place vote. When you have the quinfecta of: 1) leading the league in wins, 2) leading the league in ERA, 3) actually being the best pitcher in the league, 4) for the best team in the league and 5) in a big market . . . yeah, the odds are ever in your favor.
Guidry continued to be very good but his K/9 slowly dropped (after all, he was already 28 in his third serious season). In ‘79 he was still very good (6.5 rWAR) but from 1980 and on he became merely a good pitcher. His control slowly improved but Guidry’s pitches were getting driven out of the park more and more often. By age 33 injuries had started to derail him and by age 35 he was more or less out of a starting role. Guidry only pitched 2392 innings, but pitched them well. He has six 4+ rWAR seasons, only three 5+, two 6+ and that one, shining 9.6 season. And honestly, that 1978 season is the reason he made Honorable Mention. It was a great year and just puts him over into admission.
Up next, Frank Viola! Viola was a workhorse, from age 24 (1984) to age 32 (1992) he pitched 230+ innings every single year. This is one of the major sources of his value, as peripherals aren’t particularly impressive. His fastball / curveball / change arsenal combined for a K/9 that was generally above league average (5.9 K/9 career, with three seasons in the 7s), a BB/9 that was generally better than league average (2.7 BB/9 career, with one season below 2) and a HRA/9 that was generally around league average. Yet his peak, combining solid stats with long innings was actually very successful. At age 27 for the Twins he was worth 8.1 rWAR (a key component in the Twins’ jump from 71 wins to the World Series championship) and he followed it up with a 7.7 rWAR campaign in 1988 (for which he won the Cy Young). Traded to the Mets for a horde of prospects in 1989 Viola put together a 6.4 rWAR season in 1990 and a 6.2 rWAR season in 1992 for the Red Sox. At 33 he underwent Tommy John surgery and never recovered.
Where does Viola rank? His peak is excellent (two 7+ rWAR seasons is quite good) but his career is pretty narrow; there’s only about ten years where he was average or above. For a guy who pitched a ton in his prime, he didn’t break 3000 IP for his career. For his ten year peak / career in fWAR he was one of the top ten starters in the league, but by RAW and WPA he was #2 (behind Clemens). That was consistently the interesting thing about Viola, he always managed to give up fewer runs than you’d guess. He also shined in the 1987 World Series against the Cardinals, starting three games and striking out 16 in 19 innings, deservedly winning the series MVP (that said, he struggled in the ALCS against the Tigers as much as he dominated against the Cards). One of the best pitchers of his day.
A tragic story, Dwight Gooden! Instead of talking about Gooden, for the moment I’m going to tell you about his 1985 season. The year before, at age 19, he broke into the league and led it in strikeouts, K/9, FIP, HRA/9, H/9 and WHIP (he won Rookie of the Year but he should have won the Cy Young as well). At age 20 he pitched another 60 innings at an even higher level, leading the league with a 1.53 ERA, 24 wins, 16 complete games and 268 strikeouts, while also leading the league in FIP and ERA+. It wasn’t that his peripherals were unstoppable, it’s that they were combined with an incredible ability to control BABIP (259) and an unfailing ability to suppress baserunners (86.9%, the third highest LOB% ever with 180+ IP). How good is that 1985 season? It was worth 12.2 rWAR (the best rWAR number since 1913, and in the 20th century only Walter Johnson and Cy Young have done better). It was worth 12.8 RAW, 8th best ever, the best since 1972. It was worth 9.93 WPA, the second best WPA pitching season ever (Lefty Grove in 1931 is #1). He also won the Cy Young, for what it’s worth. His fWAR was less impressive (only top 50 all-time), and FIP devotees would argue that his LOB% and BABIP were fluky-good and so his ‘85 season is overrated. As far as indicating consistent skill perhaps there’s something there, but as far as flat-out dominating hitters for a season, few have ever done it better. (It was also probably the best season by a 20-year-old ever.)
Okay moving on to . . . oh wait, you want more? Why is he only in the Honorable Mention section when he has one of the best pitching seasons ever? Well, he started his career off with a 5.5 rWAR season, then a 12.2 rWAR season . . . would you believe he never even broke 5 rWAR again? He put up four 2s, four 3s and a 4 but that’s it. In short, take his 12.2 rWAR out and he doesn’t even sniff this building. In fact, technically, even with that ‘85 season he doesn’t make the cut for Honorable Mention. But you can’t leave the guy out of the building with a season like that; it’s too important historically.
So what happened? Well, predictably, it’s complicated. Tom Seaver observed that Gooden’s fastball had remarkable movement on it, but by age 21 the pitch had flattened out and never regained its old dominance. But there were other factors that entered into it. Gooden was groomed by his father to become a pitcher; by age 7 he had a viable overhand curve. At age 9 he was a key player on a 10-14 year-old little league team that qualified for the LLWS (though Gooden was disqualified for being too young). Intermixed with this obsessive dedication to baseball was a variety of trauma, from his father’s heavy drinking to his sister being gunned down by her husband in front of Dwight when he was only five years old. In High-A ball (age 18) he began frequent drinking assuming that, between his father and his adult-ballplayer peers, it was normal to do so. Even as he conquered the league in 1985 his drinking intensified and in the offseason he developed an addiction to cocaine. For the rest of his career he struggled with sobriety, and never recaptured his former glory.
It’s hard to place the narrative here. Was he a once-a-generation phenom who was derailed by childhood trauma and substance abuse, who could only derive value from his success as a player and had no way to cope with the possibility of failure? Or was he a skilled pitcher who enjoyed two fluky-good years, lost the pitch that made him unhittable and never quite adjusted? It’s easy to characterize him as Icarus, but pitching is really hard, and sometimes your go-to pitch becomes a gopherball and if you can’t adjust you’re never the same. One thing is for sure; there’s no way we’d have this section without Gooden. He’s almost the precise kind of player for which the Honorable Mention section exists.
Winner of two Cy Youngs, Bret Saberhagen! Sabes was an excellent pitcher for the Royals in the 80s who went on to pitch for the Mets and Red Sox as well. He broke into the majors at age 20 (1984) and at 21 he won his first Cy Young with a 7.1 rWAR season and a 2.87 ERA. For much of the rest of his career he enacted a curious even/odd dichotomy in his performance; every great season would be followed by a merely good season. Here are his rWAR numbers in order, from 21 to 31: 7.1, 2.0, 8.0, 3.8, 9.7, 3.6, 5.1, 1.5, 2.6, 5.5, 2.2. It was a strange pattern, compounded by the fact that his FIP was generally pretty comparable year to year, which is to say, the difference between his up and down years was how hard he was hit, but it had little to do with his strikeouts, walks or home runs allowed.
What kind of pitcher was Saberhagen? From 1985 to 1995 (his ten-year peak) his rankings out of 45 pitchers to pitch at least 1500 innings: K% (12th), HRA/9 (13th), BB% (1st), BABIP (26th), LOB% (14th), ERA- (3rd). That BB% is crazy-good; to put it in context Saberhagen walked fewer batters than Greg Maddux. In fact, Maddux is a very interesting comparison for Saberhagen. Their K% is almost identical (Maddux slightly better), BB% almost identical (Sabes slightly better), HRA is close (Maddux definitely better), BABIP pretty identical, LOB% pretty identical . . . They’re pretty much the same pitcher except that Maddux gave up fewer home runs and pitched way more innings. Waayyyyy more. Saberhagen topped out at 2566, pitching over 200 only four times and wearing down from injuries the older he got. Maddux, in contrast, pitched seventeen 200+ inning seasons at that level.
In short, Saberhagen was very good, an amazing control pitcher with good stuff who had a very nice peak. But his inability to pitch many innings really limited his value, both per season (because once you’re only pitching 150 innings in a season, even a world-beating season comes out looking only very good) and for his career (because 2500 career IP means that to make Bronze or above you need to be a freaking murderer and Saberhagen, while excellent, was not - the sub 2500 IP Bronze and up list is four deep: Sandy Koufax, Adam Wainwright, Jimmy Smith and Jhoan Brown). In fact, the correlation coefficient between IP and Tier is actually about 0.6, which is to say, 36% of what tier you end up on is purely how many innings you pitched.
In fact, here are the average innings pitched for each tier:
Pantheon: 5,024
Diamond: 4,540
Gold: 4,531
Silver: 3,648
Bronze: 3,314
Honorable Mentions: 3,066
It’s hard to pitch 2,500 innings and be placed too highly in here.
From the same era, Chuck Finley! Finley was an unusually durable and reliable starter for the Angels in the 80s and 90s; he came on in 1986 (age 23) but didn’t start full time until two years later, pitching for the team until 2000 (age 37) when he went to the Indians. For that thirteen year span for the Angels Finley never dipped below 2 rWAR, putting up three seasons at 7+ rWAR, three seasons in the 4s, three more in the 3s and three in the 2s. From 1988 to 2001 here are Finley’s rankings (of 58 starters who threw at least 1500 innings in that timespan): K% (11th), BB% (52nd), HRA/9 (30th), BABIP (44th), LOB% (10th), ERA- (16th), FIP- (17th), fWAR (10th), WPA (12th), Clutch (5th), RAW (9th) and IP (4th). What does all this say?
Well, he was clearly a dominant strikeout pitcher, though also wild and prone to being hard-hit. The most interesting stat to my mind is his LOB%; he ranks higher there than any of the other rate stats, despite having honestly not exciting peripherals. The best conclusion, supported by his very high Clutch rating, is that Finley with runners on was simply a better pitcher than he was with bases empty (in particular with a man on first for some reason - with a man on first his walk rate dropped but strikeout rate remained pretty much the same). So combine his solid peripherals with being durable and clutch and you have a guy who pitched a lot of innings at a high (though not extremely high) level and was quite valuable to his team. From an rWAR point of view he had ten 3+ WAR years, seven 4+ WAR years and three years in the 7-WAR range. A really solid career.
Up next, Kevin Appier! You may be surprised to see him here but this isn’t a mistake; Kevin Appier is an Honorable Mention. From 1990 to 1997 (ages 22-29) he was an ace for the Royals, putting up 46.4 rWAR in 8 seasons (a 3, two 4s, three 5s, an 8 and a 9). In fact he led the AL in rWAR in 1993 (the 9.3 rWAR year) and led the AL in WPA in both ‘92 and ‘93. Over that span (‘90-’97) here are his rankings among the 57 pitchers to throw 1000 innings: K% (8th), BB% (35th), HRA/9 (5th), BABIP (17th), LOB% (8th), ERA- (4th), FIP- (4th), Clutch (3rd), WPA (3rd, behind Maddux and Clemens), fWAR (3rd, behind Maddux and Clemens) and RAW (3rd, behind Maddux and Clemens).
Sweet Mary McGillicuddy, that’s an impressive set of rankings. For that eight-year span he was the 3rd best pitcher in baseball, behind two Hall of Famers. He was ahead of Randy Johnson (still learning control), ahead of Glavine (Appier was straight-up better, though Glavine pitched much longer) and ahead of Mike Mussina (who was a year younger and took a little longer to get going). This isn’t really ambiguous; Kevin Appier was a great pitcher. So why did he get 0.2% of the vote for Cooperstown his first time up?
Part of it’s that his skillset was somewhat subtle; he was a great strikeout pitcher but definitely not overwhelmingly so; his best skills were not giving up the long ball and stranding runners, both of which are not ostentatious skills. Also, Appier broke his collarbone at age 30 and had surgery for that and the partial UCL tear he’d developed over the prior years. He almost missed the entire 1998 season and when he came back he wasn’t the same. His K% was much lower and while he was still an above average pitcher (especially with runners on base) he wasn’t much better than that, never again breaking 4 rWAR. The above rankings are a bit cherry-picked (anytime you build rankings for the years of one player’s eight-year peak, that player will come out looking pretty good), but even if I just said “for the 90s” he’d still finish 4th in WPA (with Randy Johnson 3rd). His career ended relatively uneventfully, and that’s a shame. He may not have received much love because his peak was spent in a small market (Kansas City), but that eight-year stretch was Bronze-level. It’s just that he didn’t have enough decent seasons outside of his peak to boost is rating. Appier has a higher JONS than Saberhagen, and is honestly quite close to Bronze. Anytime a great pitcher is great for a small market, then jumps to a big market for his waning years it hurts his image. If Appier had pitched for the Yankees during his peak he’d have won 20+ games two or three times, won 1-2 Cy Youngs and pitched in several World Series (presumably well because, you know, he was great). And if he’d been injured in a car accident (a la Roy Campanella) and never played again, he’d guaranteed be a Cooperstownian. Instead he’s a footnote. He deserves more love for being a fantastic pitcher than he’s received.
Speaking of narrow peaks, Johan Santana! Santana came up with Houston but was snatched up by the Twins in the Rule V draft in 1999 when he was 20. Santana worked in the bullpen for a few years; in 2002 the Twins let him start and he proceeded to put up a K/9 of 10+ and lead the league in wild pitches, putting up 2.7 rWAR in only 108 innings. In 2003 he pitched well, putting up 4.1 rWAR. And from 2004 to 2006 he was the best pitcher in the league, leading it (over those three years) in fWAR, rWAR, RAW, WPA, ERA, K/9, WHIP, H/9 and K%. It is that three-year stretch of unambiguous dominance (he won two Cy Youngs) that really jumps out at you. He then put up another strong year (5 rWAR), before being traded to the Mets and signed to a lucrative extension. Santana had one great season for New York before being worn down by injuries. By age 32 he needed to miss a year for surgery and retired a year later.
How good was his peak really? Well, he only pitched for more than 150 innings eight times in his whole career, but in those eight times he put up (in rWAR) a 3, two 4s, a 5, three 7s and an 8. It’s a pretty good peak (comparable to Appier) but that ‘peak’ is actually Santana’s whole career. Santana barely pitched 2000 innings over his career, and that makes it pretty much impossible to make the Hall unless you’re Pedro Martinez-level. You know who his old-timey doppleganger is? Dizzy Dean. As long as they were pitching they were fantastic. They just didn’t pitch that long.
Let’s hop to Houston and learn about Roy Oswalt! Oswalt is Santana’s NL doppleganger (technically Santana played some for the Mets, but you know what I mean). Oswalt broke in for the Astros in 2001 at 23 and established his excellence very quickly. In the 2000s he established himself as the Ace on the team, leading them to four playoffs over his career and one World Series berth (he pitched badly in the series, but had pitched brilliantly in the NLCS, winning the series MVP). And if you were to look at the top pitchers of the 2000s Oswalt is consistently at the top. In fWAR he ranks 2nd (behind Roy Halladay), in RAW he ranks 3rd (behind Halladay and Santana) and in WPA he ranks 4th (behind Halladay, Rivera and Santana). There’s no way around it; he’s one of the best pitchers of the decade. While he relied on a fastball and slider as his best two pitches, you would be wrong in guessing he was a strikeout artist. Of 103 pitchers with more than 1000 IP for the decade Oswalt is: 23rd in K%, 15th in BB%, 11th in HRA/9 and 5th in LOB%. He was a very well-rounded ace.
In aggregate Oswalt suffers from the same problems as Santana; he didn’t pitch long enough. Not breaking 2300 IP over his career, Oswalt didn’t hit the majors until 23 and retired at age 35, not breaking 200 IP after 32. And his JONS is lower than Santana’s, due to his lower peak. He has twelve 2+ rWAR seasons, eight 3+, and his top five seasons are 4.7, 5.9, 5.9, 6.7 and 7.0. He was consistently excellent but rarely overwhelming (as his three All-Stars and zero Cy Youngs suggests). An excellent Honorable Mention.
A stark contrast to Santana and Oswalt, Andy Pettitte (the contrast is only Stark because Pettitte was an Iron Man . Pettitte is like a souped-up Jack Morris; he pitched a pretty decent number of innings (3316) for really good teams (almost all Yankees with a few years in Houston). He racked up 250+ wins, some big postseason performances (it helped that he pitched 270+ playoff innings) and put up the 64th most rWAR among MLB starting pitchers ever (better than it sounds; there are 73 starting pitchers in Cooperstown). Pettitte was a machine, putting up a whopping sixteen seasons above average (above 2 rWAR), an impressive nine at 3+ rWAR but only three at 4+ (5.6, 6.8 and 8.4). Between 1995 and 2010 (the major years of his career) 28 pitchers threw 2000+ innings. Of those 28 he ranks: 7th in fWAR, 11th in WPA, 9th in RAW, 13th in K%, 15th in BB%, 6th in HRA/9, 5th in groundball rate, 27th in BABIP, 19th in LOB% and 2nd in IP.
What do we make from all of this? It’s hard to look at the above and conclude that the guy was a dominant pitcher; we’re talking about K% and BB% rates that are slightly better than average, if at all. His big skills are endurance (lots of innings and little time missed to injury) and keeping the ball on the ground and inside the park (his sky-high BABIP is some of his high GB% and some of the shoddy defenses behind him in New York). His reasonably decent placings in fWAR, WPA and RAW suggest his good aggregate value but that is mostly owed to pitching lots and lots of generally above-average seasons. He was only one of the top ten in his league three times in rWAR. Perhaps his most impressive contribution might have been the postseason, where he put up 3.51 WPA in 276 innings. He pitched especially well in the ‘98-’01 stretch where he contributed 2.53 WPA over those four postseasons (2.53 WPA in 100 innings is fantastic). His best moment was in the 2001 ALCS against the Mariners (one of the best teams ever), where he put up 0.66 WPA in the series, leading the Yankees to a 4-1 upset. He sneaks into the Honorable Mentions on the back of his excellent postseason performances and his high fWAR; he was consistently very good but his peak was nowhere near good enough to make Bronze.
Up next, Dan Haren! Haren had the most traditional possible career arc. Broke into the league for St. Louis in 2003 and had two decent seasons on part time duty. He was traded to Oakland where he immediately put up three strong years (3.9, 4.1 and 5.8 rWAR). As he hit his second year of arbitration the A’s flipped him to the Diamondbacks for a hoard of prospects. His two years in Arizona, ages 27 and 28, were excellent (5.8 and 7.0 rWAR). He then hit free agency, signing with Tampa Bay and having another three excellent seasons (16.2 rWAR between them). By the time he was 32 he had been traded to Washington where injuries sapped his innings though not his ability, as he put up 6.8 rWAR over only 318 innings in those two seasons. And at age 34 he retired. Haren was a solid strikeout pitcher but never dominant (7.4 K/9 career, only two seasons above 8), relying on his excellent control for success (2.1 BB/9 career). He was actually quite good during his ten-year peak, though never dominant. Certainly worth an Honorable Mention!
Up next, Mark Buehrle! Wait a minute, I hear you asking. Mark Buehrle? You’re damned right Mark Buehrle. So what if the guy never broke 6.1 rWAR? So what if he never struck out more than 6.2 per 9 in a full season? Buehrle had two big things going for him: control and durability. As far as control goes, he averaged 2.0 BB/9 over his career which was 6th best of 58 qualifying pitchers (1500+ IP between 2001 and 2014). As far as durability goes, from age 22 to age 36 he broke 198 IP every single year, leading the league in IP twice. While his ERA was not particularly great he had two things working against him: playing in a moderate hitters park for most of his career and playing in front of generally poor defenses with the White Sox (for whom he pitched almost 2500 of his career 3283 innings). Adjusted for those things he had an incredibly reliable career. Listen to these years of rWAR: fourteen years at 2+, eleven years at 3+, eight years at 4+, four at 5+ and his top two years being 6.1 and 6.0 rWAR. Is that a shallow peak? Absolutely. But eleven years at 3+ WAR? That’s fantastic! He’s honestly kind of like a better version of Don Sutton (blasphemy!). Low peak, long quality career. It’s just that Sutton played in a pitcher’s park, in front of good defenses, on a good team, in a big market. Buerhle had, well, the opposite of those things (I know he played in Chicago, but the White Sox have never really been a media darling). But he did have one of the best fielding plays ever:
And with that, we come full circle! On to Honorable Mention Coaches / GMs before we wrap up the Honorable Mention with the exclusively PBL starting pitchers!