During the 1999 World Series, comments were made to the effect that Pedro
Martinez had possibly the most dominating year that a pitcher has ever had in
Major League Baseball history. One purpose of this book is to see if that is
indeed the case. Another is to rank the pitchers from all eras.
The ranking for pitchers is done in a very similar fashion as it was for
hitters in The Triple Crown Contenders.
It is my hope that this book will also appeal to rabid fans, casual fans, and
non-fans alike. So first a little background is necessary.
Just what is Pitching’s Triple Crown? It’s an unofficial award, but
one that is mentioned quite often. It’s a bit more common than the Triple
Crown awarded to hitters—but still rather rare. A pitcher has to be very good
to win it—he has to lead his league in Wins, Strikeouts, and ERA.
Anyone who even casually listens to or reads any sports news during
baseball season has heard the term “twenty-game winner”, and most people
have heard of Nolan Ryan, the all-time Strikeout King. But ERA may not mean
anything to most people. So let’s familiarize ourselves with a few pitching
stats.
Anyone who ever had baseball cards as a kid is familiar with the
following table:
GIPWLPct.BBSOERA
Here’s what all those strange-looking letters mean:
G-Games Played. I think the rule is now that a pitcher has to pitch to at
least one batter before he can be replaced. The rule used to be that he had to
RETIRE at least one batter. Pitchers used to almost always pitch complete games,
but by the end of the 1920s fewer than half the games pitched were complete
games. Relief pitching has increased in importance in every era, so that today
only about one in every eight games pitched is a complete game. Some relief
pitchers have appeared in over 100 games in a season, while starters today only
get 25 or 30 starts.
IP-Innings Pitched. Every time a pitcher gets a batter out (or his
teammates get a runner out) he is credited with one-third of an inning pitched.
Nine innings is a complete game, unless it’s a loss on the road—then it’s
just eight innings (since the home team doesn’t bat in the bottom of the ninth
if they’re ahead). Partial innings used to be listed as fractions, such as 215
2/3. But now that number of IP is shown as 215.2, which saves space, I
guess—but in adding up all of a pitcher’s yearly IP, it must be remembered
that .2 plus .2 equals 1.1, that is, 2/3 plus 2/3 equals 1 1/3.
W-Wins, or Games Won. The rules for determining which pitcher won the
game have evolved a bit through the years, so that now a pitcher is considered
to have won the game if he was the “pitcher of record” when the winning run
scored. What that means is if John Smith’s team scored the winning run with 2
outs in the seventh inning and he was the pitcher with two outs in the seventh
inning, then he’s the winner. Of course, occasionally it can be a bit more
complicated—what if several pitchers pitched with two outs in the seventh?
Then the win goes to the pitcher who was “more effective”. Also, starters
must pitch at least five innings to get credit for a Win.
L-Losses, or Games Lost. About the same as for wins—if a pitcher gives
up what proves to be the winning run for the other team, then he is tagged with
the loss. No minimum number of IP is required for a loss. A pitcher could
theoretically give up a homerun on his first pitch, be taken out, and wind up
the loser if his team scores no runs. That’s probably never happened, but many
times the starter has given up 5 or more runs in the first inning without
getting anybody out, then been yanked, and ended up the loser with 0 IP.
Pct.-Winning Percentage. Wins divided by Decisions (Decisions equals Wins
plus Losses). Thus a won-lost record of “16 and 4” (written simply 16-4 )
would give a Pct. of .800, which is very good.
BB-Bases on Balls or Walks. This is the number of batters the pitcher
walked, both intentionally and unintentionally. The fewer the better, of course,
because “a walk is as good as a hit”, at least from the standpoint of
scoring runs and winning games. The great control pitchers give up very few
bases on balls—they let the batters hit the ball, and let their fielders do
their jobs.
SO-Strikeouts. From the pitcher’s standpoint, this is even better than
letting the hitters make contact and the fielders make putouts. Usually the
pitchers who lead the league in SO are the ones with the blazing fastballs and
great curves, although some knuckleballers and other “junk” pitchers have
placed quite high on the SO list many years. But the all-time leaders and the
strikeouts-per-game leaders are all known for their “heat”.
ERA-Earned Run Average. First off, just what is an earned run as opposed
to a plain old run? Earned runs are runs the opposing team scores as a result of
hits, walks, hit batsmen, and wild pitches—in other words, those runs that are
the pitcher’s fault. Runs scored as a result of errors do not count as earned
runs—that includes fielding or throwing errors by the pitcher himself. In
baseball’s early years, before fielders started using gloves, sometimes as
many as a third of a pitcher’s runs might be unearned. Thus sometimes a
not-so-great pitcher on a plain lousy team might have a very good ERA. ERA is
the average number of earned runs given up by a pitcher per nine innings
pitched. So to figure it for a season, you take ER times 9 and divide by IP. So
50 ER in 300 innings would give an ERA of 50 times 9, which is 450, divided by
300 equals 1.50, which is very good in any era. The lower the ERA the better, of
course.
So, as was mentioned, to win Pitching’s Triple Crown, a pitcher has to
lead his league in Wins, SO, and ERA. This has been done just 33 times in the
240 or so league seasons in Major League Baseball History—a bit more common
than the 17 Triple Crowns that batters have won (or should have won—for more
on that subject see The Triple Crown
Contenders).
There are some parallels between hitters’ Triple Crown categories and
those of pitchers. For hitters, power is measured by Home Runs—for pitchers,
it’s Strikeouts. League-leading totals in both HR and SO have steadily
increased through the years, and those records are expected to fall. Batting
Avg. and ERA both have minimum requirements to qualify. Both have also
fluctuated quite a bit throughout baseball’s history, and the record
single-season numbers for each are not expected to ever be matched again.
Likewise with Wins and RBI—those top league-leading totals will certainly
never be matched in Wins, and despite Juan Gonzalez and Manny Ramirez being on a
pace at the All-Star breaks the past two years to catch Hack Wilson, neither
ended up anywhere near breaking that 70-year-old record. Another parallel
between Wins and RBI is that both are very dependant on what the rest of the
team does. A pitcher can strike out a lot of batters and fashion a very low ERA
on his own, but can’t win games if his team doesn’t score any runs.
Similarly, a batter can blast a lot of HR and hit for a high average by himself,
but if there aren’t men on base when he comes to bat, he can’t get a lot of
RBI.
There are, of course, other measures of pitchers’ value to their
teams—low walk-per-nine-inning totals, low opponents Batting Avg., exceptional
fielding ability, good hitting (in the National League, where the bunt and the
stolen base live on...), and so on. But the three Triple Crown categories are
the most-used and best-known of all pitchers’ stats, and really have always
seemed to define pitchers.
So this book will be about Pitching’s Triple Crown Contenders—those
who have won that award and those who have come closest to it. This allows for a
fair comparison of pitchers from different eras—fifth place in ERA is fifth
place, whether it be for an ERA of 2.34 or 3.79. Fourth place in SO is just as
valuable in 1894 as in 1994, and surprisingly those fourth-place totals are not
all that different. There will never be another 40-game winner, although 30 is
still possible, if very unlikely.
As in The Triple Crown Contenders,
I lament the fact that there are no statistics available to prove what most
baseball people agree on—that Satchel Paige was the greatest pitcher to ever
hurl the old horsehide. Since writing that first book, I have come across a few
stats for some Negro League players. I’ve also read a bit more of the history
of black baseball. Recall how under-paid white players were, which led directly
to the Black Sox scandal. Black players were treated even worse, especially as
there were many white owners, and several of the few black owners were
well-known in the gambling world. Often teams in the Negro Leagues didn’t play
out their schedules, opting instead to go on barnstorming tours so they could
make a living. If there are any newspaper accounts of those barnstorming games,
possibly somehow those stats could be combined with the stats from scheduled
games to provide some fairly accurate TCC numbers.
The system I used to calculate Pitcher’s TCC points is essentially the
same as for TCC points. The Top Ten players in each category got the points,
from 10 for 1st down to 1 point for 10th place. In the case of ties, the points
were divided evenly amongst the tied players. As far as ties go, Wins for
pitchers compares to HR for hitters—a lot of ties, although it’s reversed
time-wise. For hitters, there were many more ties in the early years when few HR
were hit, while for pitchers, there have been more ties in later years as the
number of Wins it takes to lead the league has decreased. There have been a fair
number of ties among the Top Ten in Strikeouts, as there were for RBI. But for
ERA, there have been only five ties among the Top Ten finishers: for 7th place
in the Player’s League in 1890, for 4th Place in the National League in 1903,
and the other three in the American League: for 4th in 1953, for 10th in 1955,
and again for 10th in 1971. Interestingly enough, five was also the number of
ties among all Top Ten finishers in Batting Average.
Another similarity exists between Batting Avg. and ERA, already touched
on briefly. Both have minimum requirements to qualify, which have varied
somewhat through the years. For hitters, however, there is an official rule
which lets them win the batting title if they are a few Plate Appearances short
of the required number. Remember how it goes? “A player who falls short of the
required 502 PA can still win the title if the difference between his PA total
and 502 can be added as hitless at-bats and he still has the highest average”.
The requirement for pitchers is one IP per game played by his
team—since 1962 that’s meant that 162 IP have been required. But for many
years it was felt that relief pitchers didn’t qualify for the ERA title,
regardless of the number of IP—although it was very rare for a reliever to get
enough innings. But it did occasionally happen. And what if a pitcher was just a
dozen or so innings short of qualifying, but led the winner by a wide margin,
say 1.65 to 2.34. He really should get credit for winning. But what could the
rule say? If he’s short IP, we can’t ADD “runless IP”, for that would
further lower his ERA. What I came up with, which seems to be fair and to work
quite well is this: “A pitcher who falls short of the required 162 IP can
still win the title if the difference between his IP total and 162 can be
SUBTRACTED from his IP total and he still has the lowest ERA”. This makes it
possible for a pitcher with as few as about 120 IP to still make the Top Ten,
but a pitcher couldn’t pitch just half the required innings with a miniscule
ERA and win.
So then it was simply a matter of adding the numbers—30 points in one
year for a Triple Crown, 20 points for a power pitcher leading in SO and ERA but
on a crappy team with, therefore, few wins (although occasionally an exceptional
pitcher has won a lot of games for a crappy team), 10 points for a pitcher just
leading in Wins, as well as all the other possible combinations of first through
tenth-place finishes.
In pondering the hitters’ rankings in The
Triple Crown Contenders, I was a bit troubled by the fact that the
highest-ranking modern player, Mike Schmidt, had just over 58% as many points as
The Babe. I wondered if perhaps the fact that there are now twice as many teams
per league showed a need to give a bit more weight to more recent points. But,
on the other hand, if hitters are supposedly better, why have there been no
Triple Crown winners since 1967? Or does that also indicate that the competition
is fiercer today and thus hitters should get more points? But then I recalled
that until the 1950s or so, there were many more Minor Leagues than there are
today. Possibly there are actually fewer professional ballplayers altogether
today (Majors and Minors combined) than there were 30 or 40 years ago. It’s
just that our population has become more and more urban, and there are now more
Metro Areas that can support Major League teams.
But I still was a bit uneasy over the seeming shortage of modern players
among the top Triple Crown Contenders. What I found when I totaled the
pitchers’ numbers did away with much of that un-ease, for there are quite a
few modern pitchers near the top of the list of Pitching’s Triple Crown
Conteders, including some active players. And this at a time when pitching
supposedly stinks, and great hitters are so abundant. I think that the truth is
that the caliber of play is, over-all, better than it’s ever been. Truly great
pitchers have been rather rare throughout the game’s history. Add to that the
fact that fans love hitting—and it is truly more exciting—and that great
hitting feats have been much more publicized, and it’s not surprising that
many truly exceptional pitchers have been overlooked.
Without further ado, then, Pitching’s Triple Crown Contenders follow.
