Bill James Ranks The Lefties

Bill James ranked the 100 greatest pitchers in baseball history in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. The book was written after the 1999 season (and ultimately published in 2001) and consequently greats like Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and Mariano Rivera are not as elevated in James's rankings as they would be today (ranking 11th, 14th, 29th, 49th and unranked, respectively). Based on more recent commentary by James I think it's pretty clear that Randy Johnson, in particular, would make a huge jump in James's ranking.

Here is James's list of the top 20 southpaws of all time through 1999 (my list is here; open it up in a new window and do a side-by-side comparison of the lists):

A pretty good list, Mr. James. Bill's list is based on his Win Shares analyses, which combine career Win Shares, top three Win  Share seasons, Win Shares over the pitcher's best five consecutive seasons and career Win Shares per season. Accordingly, Bill has Sandy Koufax ranked ahead of Steve Carlton despite having barely half Carlton's career Win Shares.

Bill's top 10 would look pretty much the same today, I believe, with two exceptions: Randy Johnson would jump ahead of Koufax and probably even Spahn, taking the two spot behind Grove; and Glavine would likely crack the top 10 given his superior 2000 to 2002 seasons (55-27, 133 ERA+).

It's harder to speculate about what Bill's second 10 would look like today. Bill and his buddy Rob Neyer seem to think fairly highly of Andy Pettitte (Bill has said Andy will likely make the Hall of Fame, and Neyer has said that Andy is "qualitatively" better than Jack Morris). And Johan Santana is probably already on the cusp of Bill's second 10. However, the presence of Wilbur Cooper and Eppa Rixey on Bill's list suggests to me that he perhaps adhered too slavishly to his Wins Shares index, and I don't think either Pettitte or Santana fare too well on that basis (although Santana will certainly get there with another four or five good years).

Bill has seven pitchers ranked ahead of Guidry who I'd ranked behind: Plank, Newhouser, Waddell, Cooper, Pierce, John and Kaat. Conversely, Bill has Gomez ranked one spot behind Guidry whereas I had ranked Gomez one spot ahead of Guidry. The difference between our approaches to Plank and Waddell is easily explainable: I copped out and argued that it was simply to difficult to compare "deadball era" pitchers to post-1920 era pitchers. As for the rest, this is my take on Bill's take:

If You Had To Win One Game...

If you had to choose one pitcher to start a critical, late September game in a tight division race, who would you choose? Sabathia? Halladay? Santana? Carpenter?

I know who I would choose, and you know who I'd choose, too, because his picture is to the right. I'd choose Roy Oswalt, the Astros ace, hands down. Year after year Roy has put up Guidry-like numbers in September with the Astros in contention for a division title or wild-card spot. He's as close to infallible in a battle for the post-season as any pitcher of his generation.

Thanks to the three division, wild-card format, the Astros have been in contention for a post-season berth in every year of Oswalt's career other than 2007 and 2009. Oswalt has made 40 September starts in the seven tight races in which he's participated and his record is 28-7 with a 2.49 ERA in 267.1 innings pitched. However, two of his losses came in late September 2002 after the Astros had been eliminated (the only two starts of his 40 September starts that occurred after the Astros had either clinched or been eliminated). Take away those starts and Oswalt is 28-5 with a 2.39 ERA in 38 September starts while the Astros were still in contention.