Final game of the World Series. Johnson, Mathewson, Cy Young?
 

Who would you want on the mound? I'll go with Matty with Wojo a close second....

If it were against the Baltimore Orioles, Steve Blass.

Is it the 9th inning of Game 7? Mariano Rivera.

It could be 8th inning too. Still Mo.

Incorporate my prior answer. :)
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=223981

Peter, I hear you. My first choice was Johnson originally until I looked at alot of numbers. Talk about a toss up!

To me Johnson is by a significant margin the best pitcher of all time. Therefore, I would take him. Hard to go wrong with any of these though, or Alexander.

Johnson 417-279, ERA 2.17
Mathewson 373-188, ERA 2.12

These two were about as good as it gets....

Man,
I Love da "BiG SiX" iN THiS Arena,
Especially if they Played da Tigers!
Mr. Cobb Out RiGHT Suck'd in the WS
And He Nevar Faced Mr. Mathewson!

Howevar, Mr. Johnson Against Mr. Cobb,
Different Story All tagether...
Ole' Cobb had Mr. Johnson's Number Down Pat ~

Woulda Still Been Interesting ta See?
How Matty would of handled the Peach & All !?!?

imho Ole' Mr. Young woulda been a coin toss...

Honorable Mention Goes ta Mr. "BiG Ed" Walsh,
He was Certainly No Slouch Either!

Mr. Mathewson woulda certainly of gotten the nod from me!!!

Postseason ERA
Johnson 2.52
Mathewson 0.97

I'll take Matty.

Great pick! Any love for Babe Adams or Nick Maddox in the rain?

Small sample size, plus Johnson's was at the very end of his career.

You seem to like Johnson. Not me.

What do you base that on?

Johnson's postseasons came in 1924 and 1925, at the tail end of his career. In his prime he was the best. His 1913 season was literally the best season any pitcher has ever had IMO. I'll take Walter for one game in his prime.

Off topic, but I would love to match him against Bumgarner in a game 7. :D

All the statistical analysis I have read, including that of Bill James, plus all the information on Baseball Reference, plus lots of anecdotal history.

Baseball Reference.


Hall of Fame Statistics





Black Ink
Pitching - 150 (1), Average HOFer ≈ 40

Gray Ink
Pitching - 420 (2), Average HOFer ≈ 185

Hall of Fame Monitor
Pitching - 364 (1), Likely HOFer ≈ 100

Hall of Fame Standards
Pitching - 82 (2), Average HOFer ≈ 50

JAWS
Starting Pitcher (1st):
165.6 career WAR / 89.5 7yr-peak WAR / 127.5 JAWS
Average HOF P (out of 62):
73.9 career WAR / 50.3 7yr-peak WAR / 62.1 JAWS

You bet I do, you might be the only person I've ever heard in the hobby that didn't....

In 1924 Wajo was the same age as Jack Morris when he threw 10 scoreless innings in game 7 of the 1991 World Series. If a nonHoF pitcher can be clutch, why should we expect the same from one of the greatest in his most important moment of his career?

I find it unpersuasive to make an argument based on one game by one pitcher.

Larry,

Thank you. Good to hear from a fellow Pirates fan. Adams and Maddox I like for a seventh game.

As for Johnson, and Val Kehl, please forgive me, but the Pirates did beat Johnson in the seventh game of the 1925 World Series.

Also the live ball era vs. the dead ball era.

Matty
1905 World Series

That is something I felt was accurate. I'm not into Johnson's nearly as emphatically as that, but hey, to each their own.

not an option but...
 

If the pitcher also gets to hit in this hypothetical, I'm going with Babe Ruth...with Bob Gibson getting an honorable mention.

Yet you are asking for a pitcher to pitch one game. If I want someone to pitch one game on the biggest stage, I want the guy who has done it, Matty. If we are talking a season or career, Wajo.

By that measure you should take Don Larsen. :D
Seriously, I think the best predictor of how a guy is going to pitch in one game is his career, not a small sample of WS games. and certainly not very late in his career Now if a pitcher has pitched enough playoff/WS games that he seems to have an issue, like Kershaw, I could see not using that metric.

How is 89 innings a large enough sample size and 50 insufficient? As far as Larsen, if he had an ERA under 1 for all his post season appearances, he would be in the discussion, but he doesn't. Some pitchers pitch better under pressure, some don't and some pitch much worse.

Strongly disagree about great career equating to pitching in the clutch. Kershaw is the prime example of that. The two are not the same. The regular season is completely different than the World Seried where every game is against a great team. For a pressure game, pick the guy who can handle the pressure, not the guy who is slightly better in the regular season, but doesn't excel under pressure.


And what does late in the career have to do with anything? In 1924 Wajo led the AL in wins, ERA, Ks, games, shutouts, win %, Whip, Fip, etc and was the AL MVP. That is just a lame excuse.

Brian, you are correct. However, I suspect you are aware that WaJo did beat the Pirates in Games 1 & 4, with Game 4 being a shutout. Most observers felt that Game 7 should have been postponed due to the sloppy condition of the field - rain did fall during the game plus there was a mist that reduced visibility. If I remember correctly, Clark Griffith was adamant that the game should be played. Yes, the Pirates beat WaJo by the score of 9 - 7, however, 4 of the Pirates runs were unearned (all of the Senators runs were earned), hence WaJo should have been the winning pitcher by the score of 7 - 5!

BTW, Brian, you should also ask for forgiveness from Hank Thomas!

Walter Johnson. Not close.

All of your postseason sample sizes are too small to predict postseason performance in a single game better than a career's worth of regular season performances do.

It's the only thing I ever blogged about other than sex:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...-base-and-more

Fair enough on the late in the career if Johnson was still in peak form, but I still think the sample size is too small to draw any conclusions here. At what point does it get large enough? I don't know, honestly, but a handful of games doesn't seem enough to me.

Who would ever have enough WS innings to satisfy you? Ford has 146. Matty is 2nd at 101 and he has an ERA under 1. Wajo has 50. That is only 14 less than Jim Palmer for 10th all time. I am not surprised that many want Wajo. He is the greatest regular season pitcher. If he had pitched in the WS in his prime, would he be the greatest WS pitcher too? We don't know. I am just taking what I see as a sure thing. If I couldn't have Matty or Koufax, I would definitely take Wajo for a game 7.

I completely disagree with your hypothesis and conclusions. I don't think it is a matter of anyone playing better. It is some great players who play at their normal high level while others are not able to maintain their's. That results in superior performance from those "clutch" players. It is natural for people to freeze or shrink when put under pressure. Some it doesn't effect. Some can overcome it with experience or at times. Some are Clayton Kershaw. Sorry, but postseason games are different than regular season games. Regular season performance doesn't necessarily predict postseason performance, see Clayton Kershaw.

You'd want, ballpark (see what I did there), a sample of 100 games to assess how good the pitcher is likely to be in games outside of that sample. Obviously you can't get that just from World Series games, so you should look at how they do in the regular season over their career rather than how they did in the postseason over their career. The differences between pitching in the regular season and pitching in the post-season are essentially negligible, whereas the difference in predictive validity between a sample of say 6 games versus 600 games of data are enormous.

Don't believe me? Pick a number between 100 and 500. 220 let's say. Then look up how the pitcher performed in games 220 through 225 of his career. See if you can tell which numbers belong to Greg Maddux versus Jamie Moyer versus Dennis Martinez vs. Randy Johnson. You could probably match Randy Johnson with the right K total, but with W/L%, WHIP, ERA+? You can't tell much from 6 games.

I'll be happy to make a public wager with you if you honestly think Kershaw won't have a sub-3.00 postseason ERA over the years 2017-2025. Quite likely you could win the bet given how small the sample will be, but probably you won't, given that regular season performance is the better predictor of postseason performance.

Kershaw has had what, 15 or so post season starts, and his stats are just dramatically different from his regular season ones. I am not sure I could defend it mathematically, but that feels like enough to say that at least so far, he does seem to have an issue with post-season pitching. 6 starts by Johnson, or 10 by Mathewson (in which he was 5-5 by the way, and yes I know the ERA) don't feel like enough to draw a meaningful comparison. I'm still handing the ball to Johnson, although I would feel pretty good about handing it to Mathewson or Young or Alexander too.

I take it you studied Psychology by your blog. I studied Math and Statistics. You want to dismiss small sample size, but you can't do that. With a pitcher like Matty, his 101 WS innings are backed up by his career. Any random sample from a regular season is irrelevant to postseason. Now if you had an average player that had a great postseason, Larsen perfecto, you can dismiss as it is out of his normal range.

Statistics uses small sample sizes all the time. The bigger the better, but they don't ignore small ones, it just leads to less confidence in the result. When there is significant regular season performance to back up that sample size, it produces a higher confidence. Your flaw is your opinion that postseason games aren't significant and no different than regular season ones.

Pollsters use a small sample size of 1000 to predict an election of over 120 million. They do it very accurately. Even the last election when they missed the result of the electoral college, the result of the general election was right on as well as most individual states.

But you still have the question whether Johnson's 6 games (at the end of his career) are really representative, in order to make a comparison with Mathewson.

Ok, so he is post-war, but Koufax.

Pre War: have to go with Matty - Three Straight Shutouts!

Post-War only:

Based on how they pitched in the World Series (not the regular season),

I'd have to go with Bob Gibson followed by Sandy Koufax and then
Johnson - but Randy, not Walter.

Schilling and Smoltz would be runners up (and I also thought about adding
Jack Morris too).

1916-18 era Babe Ruth would be my choice.

Pedro Martinez is my choice. Circa 2000. I'm not sure there is a close second.

Tom C

Talking about the three greatest pitchers ever and not a single card shown? You guys are losing it. Here's my choice.

Who cares who's on the mound? Just make sure Buckner isn't playing first base (unless, of course, you're a Mets fan :D).

quoting Stengel:
You can forget that other fella. You can forget Waddell. The Jewish kid is the best of any of them.---Casey Stengel, on Sandy Koufax. ("The other fella" referred to Walter Johnson.

Here ya go,

http://www.net54baseball.com/picture...ictureid=10126http://www.net54baseball.com/picture...ictureid=10124http://www.net54baseball.com/picture...ictureid=10123

Tough choice. I'd have to go Matty and his pinpoint control. Really there's no wrong answer.

Some of that is correct.

How is it that no one thinks of Bumgarner among the best modern pitchers?

I'll take whomever didnt pitch game 6
 

And you can't compare pitchers of today with these guys. Too many variables. these guys get 5 days rest and with the exception of a handful of guys, no one ever goes 8 innings, let alone 9...todays pitchers learned from Matty, Young and Johnson...different era, different pitchers, no comparison. Same goes for hitters. It irritates me when someone compares Aaron, Bonds or ARod to Cobb, Gehrig or Ruth... If Ruth didnt pitch for the first 5 years, he'd have 900 homeruns...and Aaron would still have 755

BTW, Brian, you should also ask for forgiveness from Hank Thomas![/QUOTE]

None required, Val or Brian. Although I never mind making his case, Walter's record speaks for itself. I love this quote from Clyde Milan from "Walter Johnson: King of the Pitchers."
"Tell you about Walter? I can tell you this. If I were manager of a team that had one game to play--the one most important ball game in all the world to play--and the good Lord called down and said, 'Milan, you can choose your own pitcher for this. Jut tell us what you want and we'll make up a pitcher to fit your specifications. He can have Matty's curve, or Rusie's speed, or Griffith's shrewdness and anything else you want.' Well, if that happened, I'd say never mind the specifications. Don't make me up anything fancy. Just send me Walter Johnson when he was about twenty-six years old, and you don't have to add even one little item. He'll do for me, thank you kindly."