Big Unit, Indeed

It's an amazing sight when you're watching great athletes compete at the highest levels in their sport and one competitor is so great that the opposition is just overmatched. I mean dominated; not just beat, not just bested, but dominated, almost completely helpless. In the realm of baseball, the greatest pitchers, at their best, will do this. Major league hitters, the best in the world, men with preternatural reflexes and freakish hand-eye coordination, are left to wave futilely at pitches or are so flummoxed they can't even swing.

I remember watching Clemens pitch against the Yanks in '97 and wondering how in the hell anyone ever hit the guy. I remember watching Pedro against the Yanks in September '99, the game he struck out 17, and feeling sorry for Yankee batters. Jorge Posada couldn't even get the bat off his shoulder. He had no idea what was coming - 96 mph fastball, or slider, or change-up or curveball. Yankee after Yankee left the plate after striking out shaking their head on the way back to the dugout, no doubt feeling the way Mickey Mantle felt after facing Koufax for the first time in the '63 World Series, when he said to the umpire as he was turning to leave the plate after striking out, "now how in the hell am I supposed to hit that shit."

But for sheer dominance, the ability to induce not only helplessness in big league batters but terror, there has perhaps never been anyone like Randy Johnson. It was sometimes like watching little league baseball, where the big kid is on the mound, the one that seemed to mature about two years ahead of the rest of the kids, and the ball is blowing by the batter before they can even think about swinging. One kid gets smoked and the next batter approaches the batters box looking like they're going to the gallows. They have no chance. When he was at his best, that was Randy Johnson on the mound.  Too big, too nasty, too fast. And that slider - Christ, you pitied lefthanded hitters who had to face Randy Johnson.

More Team Relative Analyses: Lefty Grove

Lefty Grove weighs in at 36%. I didn't realize what tremendous run support Grove got from the Athletics in the early 30's.

It may be a shade behind Seaver and Maddux, but it doesn't change my opinion that Lefty was The Man among post-1920 pitchers. What it does do is make me appreciate how great Seaver and Maddux were. Man, that 35%+  improvement over team performance is one upscale neighborhood.

Reappraisals of Palmer, Bunning and Drysdale

The analyses of pitcher performance relative to his team have yielded some interesting results.

As I described in the "The Theory of Relativity" post, it is possible to compare a pitcher's W-L record and winning percentage to his team's and adjust for factors that distort the comparison. These adjustments involve adjusting the pitcher's run support to equalize it with the run support the team provided to the other pitchers on the team and normalizing the ERAs and runs allowed by the rest of the staff to league average. These two adjustments assure that a pitcher won't benefit or suffer by virtue of run support that deviated from team average, or by virtue of the fact that the rest of the pitching staff, to whom the pitcher is effectively being compared, were either better than league average or worse than league average. A pitcher may be a great pitcher but his W-L record relative to his team's won't be very impressive if the rest of the team's pitching staff is comprised of great pitchers. In comparing Greg Maddux's W-L record to his team's it is obviously necessary to adjust for the fact that the Braves' pitching staffs were great and produced tremendous winning percentages because of the presence of guys like Glavine and Smoltz.

Here are the new results. Curt Schilling's ten-year peak from 1997 to 2006 was pretty impressive, as his excellent winning percentage and ERAs would suggest. Schilling outperformed his team by approximately 27% over that decade. Bob Gibson outperformed his team by approximately 28% over his nine-year peak of '64 to '72; not sure whether people will find that disappointing or impressive. Both these results obviously cast Ron Guidry in a very good light, because Schilling's and Gibson's team relative performance figures are right in Guidry territory. Ron is in good company.

Here are the results I found surprising. I ran the numbers on Bunning, Drysdale and Palmer. I've always thought of Bunning and Drysdale as being very similar, and I've conceived of Palmer as an American League version of Tom Seaver, although a shade behind Tom Terrific. My team relative analyses have fundamentally changed my appraisals of these pitchers.

The Theory of Relativity

I love a lot of the new pitching stats. They're great analytical tools. Take FIP, for example ("fielding independent pitching"). It's based on the proposition that what happens on a ball put in play is frequently a function of random chance and team fielding. Bill James recognized its utility and cited Wally Bunker's 1964 season as an example of a pitcher apparently benefiting from some good luck insofar as his BAbip that year was .216. It turns out that Bunker in fact had a pretty good facility for generating low BAbip's in his career, presumably because, like Maddux in his prime, he was adept at keeping the ball away from the fat part of the bat and inducing batters to hit pitches outside the hitter's sweet spots in the strike zone. But Bunker never again came close to posting the .216 BAbip he posted in '64, despite being backed by the legendary team defense of the '60s Orioles.

FIP tends to understate the effectiveness of a pitcher with a demonstrated ability to consistently generate very low BAbips. Take The Great Rivera, for example. I was skeptical of Mariano's decision in '97 to move almost exclusively to the cutter because it seemed to sharply cut into his strikeouts. "Throw the high fastball!", I would shout, longing for Mariano's incredible strikeout ratio in '96 when he K's 130 batters in 107 innings. Still, I had to admit that batters seemed almost incapable of getting good wood on the cutter, but bloops and dribblers can and do become hits, while strikeouts can't and don't. Bloops and dribblers that found holes in the defense became, in my mind, "Mariano Specials." Obviously Mariano's decision to go with the cutter has been thoroughly vindicated and my early concerns were unfounded. But Mariano never fares too well in the FIP stat, and that's misleading because Mariano has demonstrated an ability to consistently generate low BAbips (Mariano's career BAbip is .265, as compared to a major league average of .299).

As Bill James has noted regarding FIP and various other new and sophisticated measures of pitching performance, they have a tendency to throw out a lot of information in an effort to isolate and identify a pitcher's performance independent of non-pitching factors. Bill is a little unsettled by this, and so am I. As he's argued, W-L records are the antipode to FIP and similar stats, incorporating all information, including unfortunately things that have nothing to do with a pitcher's performance, like offensive support and team fielding. However, the inclination of the stat geeks to summarily dismiss W-L records is extremely misguided. It is possible to start with W-L records and make appropriate adjustments, and that's what I'm about to propose.

The Theory of Relativity, in contrast to FIP, throws out nothing but attempts to adjust for everything (or at least most things) that happens outside of the pitcher's performance. Simply put, it compares a pitcher's W-L record to his teams record in games where the pitcher was not the pitcher of record (i.e., it subtracts the pitcher's W-L record from the team's), adjusting for factors that effect the pitcher's and team's W-L records  but are largely unrelated to the pitcher's own performance. If a pitcher received run support better or worse than the run support a team generally provided its pitchers, the pitcher's W-L record is adjusted (via the Pythagorean theorem) to reflect what his W-L record would have been had he received run support equal to his team's average. It also adjusts for the performance of the rest of the team's pitching staff, because even a good pitcher who receives excellent run support will appear to fare poorly relative to his team's W-L record if the rest of the starting pitching staff is comprised of Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Tom Seaver and Randy Johnson, with Gossage, Eckersley and Rivera coming out of the bullpen.

The Guidry Decade

I've noted before the fact that Ron Guidry is the only pitcher in baseball history to lead the major leagues in wins and lead his own league in ERA and SO over a ten-year period and yet be rejected by the Hall. He averaged nearly 17 wins per season in the decade between '77 and '86 and had a 3.23 ERA (121 ERA+). When apprised of this achievement by Guidry, my fellow baseball fans have had remarkably similar reactions, initially expressing some surprise at Guidry's accomplishment but then arguing that Guidry's statistics during this period, while impressive, were pre-eminent during his ten-year peak only because this decade happened to occur at an odd interregnum in baseball, when greats like Seaver, Palmer and Carlton had just passed their prime and before the rise of Clemens, Maddux, Johnson and Martinez. They suggest that Guidry's performance really wouldn't have been that exceptional in any other era in baseball.

I must admit that I was inclined to give some credence to this argument. I assumed the win total wouldn't be that impressive when compared to all the titans who pitched during the eras of four-man rotations that prevailed in baseball until the '80s. I believed it was probably true that averaging about 17 wins a season over a decade while posting an ERA+ of 120 or greater was not all that unusual during many other eras in modern baseball history, and so I decided to check the record book. It turns out I was wrong. Averaging nearly 17 wins a season over a decade while compiling an ERA 20% better than the park-adjusted ERAs of your contemporaries has always been an achievement only the greats have attained. It turns out that this level of excellence over a decade gives a pitcher an almost automatic entree into Cooperstown. By my count, there have been 27 pitchers who accomplished this since 1920. All but four have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame or are almost certain to be inducted upon eligibility. And it further turns out that Guidry's accomplishment is becoming exceedingly rare in the age of the five-man rotation and seven inning starts.