Net54baseball.com Forums - Johnson, Mathewson, or Young? Which one do you think was the best?

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Actually, the quality of the other pitchers on the staff have a real, though indirect effect on the record of a given starting pitchers' record:

The burden of being the team's ace is not only that you are almost always going against the opponents' best, which means, on average, less offensive support, but also starts frequently moved up to get more total starts.

Back in the 'day', ace starters would routinely pitch on two days rest and even one in extreme situations. Lesser pitchers' starts would be passed over to accommodate more starts by the ace - plus those same aces would always be available for relief appearances on their day or days of rest.

All this definitely impacts great pitchers' records, so for Someone like Johnson to do all he did is even more amazing.

These points would be reflected by run support. If Walter Johnson got 2.1 runs a game support and the rest of the staff got 3.4 that would make sense. Aces do not always match up, because the schedules are not all the same. If you took a lineup of the best hitters in the game today that averaged 6 runs a game and gave them a pitching staff of Clayton Kershaw and 4 AAA level pitchers - Kershaw would be like 28-3 and the rest of the staff would probably finish around 20 games under .500. That would not make Kershaw any more impressive, because the rest of his staff stinks.