Two Pitchers
More as an experiment, or exploration, than anything else, I decided to look at a pair of pitchers from the same team side-by-side. It’s basically an exercise in public perception and legacy-building.
Let’s start with the basics.
Both pitchers were exclusively starters. They each started 33 games, for the same team. Neither of them made any relief appearances. Their team was equally successful in their starts. They had a 22-11 record when Pitcher A started, and an identical 22-11 record when Pitcher B started. Both of them starter, on average, on 4.5 days of rest, so their usage by the team was basically the same.
Pitcher A had an ERA of 3.48. Pitcher B’s ERA was nearly the same, 3.44. Their home stadium slightly favored pitchers, with a one-year park factor of 97 for pitchers. Just by the luck of how the team’s rotation fell, Pitcher A got to start 18 of his 33 games at home, while Pitcher B had to start 19 of his 33 games on the road. Putting all of that together, you’d have to say Pitcher B has a very slight edge so far. He had a tiny bit lower ERA despite pitching most of his games away from their pitcher-friendly home park.
Pitcher A closes that gap a bit with his innings. He threw 222.2, compared to 209.0 for Pitcher B, which translates into getting roughly one extra out per game, not a huge difference but it’s something. Pitcher B allowed 290 baserunners in those 209 innings, 1.39 per inning. Pitcher A surrendered 261, or 1.17 per inning. That’s a more significant difference, a clear edge for A.
But B struck out considerably more hitters, 199 to 157, achieving that in almost 14 fewer innings. He also gave up far fewer home runs than A, half in fact, just 13 allowed compared to 26 for Pitcher A. Pitcher A was much better at controlling the running game, for whatever that’s worth. Runners made only 6 stolen base attempts while A was pitching, and were successful just twice, while B allowed 11 steals in 19 attempts.
Because he had more strikeouts and fewer homers, Pitcher B recorded a better FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, score. His was 3.10, while Pitcher A’s was 3.75, and that’s a pretty significant gap. The greater number of innings for A closes it, as does his control of the running game somewhat, and we see their overall WAR marks reflecting exactly how close their respective performances were. Pitcher A had 4.0 WAR, Pitcher had 4.3, and that narrow margin for B seems just about right.
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All things considered, I think you’d have to judge the two as being essentially equal. If you had to choose one, the slightest of edges would likely go to B based on his ability to get strikeouts while surrendering fewer long balls.
In real life, though, as these two were posting these extremely similar performances, they were viewed vastly differently by the Baseball Writers Association of America.
Pitcher A won the Cy Young Award.
Pitcher B didn’t get a single vote.
Pretty startling, isn’t it? Well, the explanation is very simple. Pitcher A is Bartolo Colon of the 2005 Anaheim Angels, and his won-loss record that year was 21-8. Pitcher B is his teammates, John Lackey, and his won-loss record that year was just 14-5.
And that’s all it took for the award voters to decide that Bartolo Colon was the best pitcher in the American League, and that his essentially equally valuable and effective teammate didn’t deserve any consideration at all.
They didn’t look at the fact that the Angels went 22-11 in each pitcher’s respective starts. They didn’t look at the fact that the Angels scored 5.55 runs in Colon’s starts but just 4.64 in Lackey’s. They didn’t look at any of the ancillary statistics, and they didn’t have WAR or FIP to help guide them. They looked at wins and losses and nothing more, and handed an award to Colon that permanently altered his résumé, while passing over his teammate who performed equally well, if not better.
To be clear, neither Colon nor Lackey deserved the Cy Young that season. The best pitcher in the league was defending Cy Young-winner Johan Santana of the Twins, with his league-leading 7.2 WAR and 238 strikeouts and 155 ERA+ and 2.80 FIP. Had the BBWAA voters properly given Santana the award, he’d have won three Cy Youngs in a row, having already won it in 2004 and again in 2006. That’s a feat accomplished by just two pitchers in history, Hall of Famers Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux, and it would have likely insured Santana’s place in the Hall of Fame as well.
Santana started 33 games, too, just like Colon and Lackey did. He pitched more innings, struck out more batters, allowed fewer runners and runs, had a lower ERA and FIP, a much higher ERA+ and WAR, and his team won more of his starts, 24 to be exact. He did all of this despite his home stadium favoring hitters, and despite receiving less run support, 4.47 runs per game, than either Colon or Lackey received.
He was better, period, in every way you can be better, with the exception of his won-loss record which was “only” 16-7. But, in 2005, won-loss record was still the primary metric voters used to judge a pitcher. Just three years later, voters had started to realize that wasn’t the smartest way to judge them, and they correctly voted to award the Cy Young to Tim Lincecum in 2008, Lincecum and Zack Greinke in 2009, and Félix Hernández in 2010, all with significantly fewer wins, but significantly better overall numbers, than their competitors.
I’ve written before about Santana, and how we should probably review his career more closely for Hall of Fame consideration. And I just wrote about how the voters treated Dave Stieb so poorly, certainly altering the perception of his accomplishments when his career was being judged for the Hall. Cases like these are frustrating in retrospect, and though I remind myself that the voters didn’t have most of the advanced metrics available to us now, they had enough to make better judgements.
You just read my comparison of Lackey and Colon side-by-side, which didn’t mention any new metrics until the very end. Voters had their innings and team records and ERA and run support and strikeouts and so on available to them in 2005.
They just didn’t do their jobs. And they altered legacies in the process.