Hank, I see what you mean - 25 games difference would make his W/L PCT 442 - 254 (.635) instead of .599, which would probably be enough to silence silence all the arguments for anyone else as GOAT.
I was mainly reacting against the "he'd 'a won 4.5 more games a year!" stuff, which is just wacky. If we play that 4.5/year out over 20 years, we get a pitcher who goes 517-179 with a .743 W/L.
Lefty Grove went .680 and Whitey Ford .690 with some of the greatest teams in history behind them - that's pretty much the upper limit for a pitcher's career W/PCT. Grove's teams were at .578, Ford's teams PCT were at .600. Notice a pattern? The greatest pitchers seem to have a PCT about 90-105 points higher than their teams. Johnson's is right in line with that. If his team was holding him back a whole bunch, we would expect that difference to be larger.
PITCHER W/L PCT TEAM W/L PCT
Alexander .643 .528
Johnson .599 .495
Grove .680 .578
Young .619 .526
Ford .690 .600
Mathewson .665 .576
This chart suggests that it was Alexander, not Johnson, who outperformed his teams by the greatest amount.
(I wonder how that would play out with all the pitchers in the HOF...
Here are a few I chose at random:
Drysdale .557 .547 (ugly)
Mussina .638 .559 (not bad)
Maddux .609 .554
Gomez .649 .635
Lyons .530 .458
Thought experiment: swap Lyons for Gomez in 1931. Gomez goes 137-153 for the White Sox (slightly better than the team) and visits the HOF as a paying guest in his later years. Lyons goes 340-150 for the Yankees (about as much better than his teams than he was in real life) and is thought of as one of the GOATs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hankphenom
Interesting analysis, Tim. The Nationals were only truly wretched his first five years, with two last-place and three seventh-place finishes. After Clark Griffith arrived in 1912, they had scrappy good-defense, good-baserunning, fairly competitive teams before assembling a truly world-class squad for the pennant seasons of 1924-25. Question: if Walter might have won an extra 25 games in his career with better teams, does that mean he would he have also lost 25 fewer games? If so, that would be pretty transformative for his career winning %. Of course, as you say, how much better does he need to be?
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