sigh...... WAR is cumulative, it is not a score. so a borderline HOF'er who threw for 24 years like Perry will have a higher score than Mathewson , seriously go lookat the innings counts and it will show both who A- had the better peak and B- who had the slowest decline. it depends on the rater on which of those two they value.


and why the argument against Nolan Ryan? 9.55 K rate when avg was under 6, a career ERA of 3.19 and an FIP of 2.98 nearly 5400 innings pitched. that's pretty damn elite stuff.

look at this table showing most innings pitched and see how it impacts total WAR score

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.asp...ers=0&sort=8,d

and yes fangraphs is simply better. It uses park and league adjusted stats instead of treating a sub 2 ERA in the deadball era as equal to one in the steroid era.

War
 

Steroid era? You forgot one major fact that most people neglect....pitchers weren't immune to taking steroids as well (let's start with Clemens who rescued his career with PEDs) and good pitching ALWAYS stops good hitting. I can prove that notion by a .300 average or 70% failure rate making a hitter a hall of fame candidate. Bottom line is when a statistical methodology places pitchers like Perry & Blyleven (I'll give you Ryan although he could NEVER measure up to Grove and Seaver...NEVER!) are rated ahead of the likes of Seaver, Grove, Pedro, Matty, etc., it's philosophy has more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese!

War
 

The other issue you continue to dodge is the logging of late innings which 80s and later pitchers seldom had to do. To average only 6.77 innings per start (Maddux) tells a HUGE story that consistenly runs ramped among post 80s starters. They DIDN'T have to pace themselves! There's a big difference going out there in the first inning knowing you can lay it on the line for 7 innings as opposed to saving something for the 8th and the 9th innings. It shortened the game for great pitchers like Maddux (just one example of course) who could utilize their 100% stuff until they were gassed at 90-100 pitches. No WAR or JAWS charts could ever measure that concept. Bottom line is there are so many caviats and intangibles statistics can never measure. I've been watching baseball since 1970 and Seaver is the best pitcher, COMBINED peak value and long career, I've ever seen (discounting Clemens since he obviously cheated after leaving Boston). Interestingly enough, the best peak value pitcher was Pedro Martinez until Clayton Kershaw came along and Clayton just may wind up as the greatest pitcher ever before he is done. His statistics are absurd; off the chart supernatural numbers for Ks/walks ratio, WHIP & ERA. Peace!

actually there aren't many people in the HOF with a 70% failure rate, because walks are important.

and you still don't understand WAR . WAR tells us their total wins above replacement accrued. It does NOT tell us who the best pitcher was when it comes to a career. (tho it may do this in a smaller sample such as 1 season)

if you don't get why Maddux is easily higher than Pedro and the others as far as total WAR. He pitched at high level for 20+ years, so did Perry ,so did Ryan.

examples:

Perry pitched 5350 innings and has 100.1 WAR

Mathewson has 4780 innings and has 90. WAR

that means Perry accumulated 10 more WAR over 570 MORE innings. It doesn't say Perry was the "better" pitcher.


HOWEVER, if you take WAR and analyze how many innings it took, you can get a pretty good idea of their value per inning pitched.

Maddux- 5008.1 innings 116.7 WAR = 0.0233 WAR per inning for their career ( or 23.302 WAR per 1000 innings)


Mathewson - 4780 inn, 90 WAR = 0.018 per inning or 18.82 (per 1000 innings)


Cy Young- 7354 inn, 131.5 WAR = 0.01788 per inn or 17.88 WAR per 1000 inn


Walter Johnson- 5914.2 inn, 117.1 WAR = 0.01979 per inn or 19.79 per 1000 inn


Seaver- 4782 inn, 92.4 WAR = 0.0193 per inn or 19.30 WAR per 1000 inn


Pedro- 2827 inn, 84.5 WAR = 0.02988 per inn, or 29.99 WAR per 1000 inn


NOW, it's well known Pedro had just about the greatest peak of all time, so it comes down to how do you judge pitchers? If it's by peak, then Pedro would be your man, if it's by length of career it's Cy Young, if it's by combination of the two? It's pretty obviously Maddux (unless you ignore Clemens and his double peak roid red flags)



confirmation bias and eye witness accounts don't carry much weight in sports, you need hard data, hand waving it away because it doesn't match your opinions does not improve the level of discourse. evidence does and I presented above that of the above ,oft discussed, top pitchers of all time, Maddux has the best combination of career length and performance.

yeah but dead ball era pitchers had huge parks, a ball that was spit on, brown, misshapen at times, faced a lower quality hitter , didn't throw at full strength most of the time and didn't have the slider, splitter or cutter to put more pressure on their elbow and shoulder. and all sorts of other things too.

The thing is, you can't blame pitchers for their era. The deadball guys got the era they got, as did the guys in the 80's, as did everybody else. The modern era is one of specialization, such is the way of things, but punishing people and ignoring evidence because of some sort of "yeah but " thing is intellectually dishonest. Remember, the numbers are park and league adjusted.

I feel each player needs to be judged in context of the environment and the norms for the day. The "steroid" players should have a mark next to their name. It's one thing for the Babe to eat a hot dog during a game but it's another thing to inject artificial hormones. (at least to me) There will probably never be another pitcher to have even 100 less wins than Cy, let alone as many or more.

That is great! I almost fell out of my chair.

What if the pigs etc that Babe was eating for his hotdogs were injected with hormones, would he be a cheater then!? [emoji33]

War
 

Point well taken Nick with reference to the large ballparks and "mushed" dark baseballs. I totally agree it is virtually impossible to judge a statistic like ERA "post-WW2" VS. the dead-ball era. I also agree that NO sabermetric including WAR can adjust accordingly, that is with 100% certainty. It's almost as if pre-1920 pitchers need to be placed in a separate bucket and only measured against their peers from that same era. On another note, the other HUGE advantage post 80s/90s pitchers have versus their pre-80's peers are the incredible conditioning programs (+ PEDs) that were established which is why pitchers no longer show a rapid decline in performance as they approach their mid-30s. Imagine pitchers like Gibson, Palmer, etc staying physically fit to 40 or longer??? Pre-1980, lifting weights was considered extremely harmful for pitchers, yet in reality, the mindset changed to realize it was essential for continued and enhanced performance. That concept has created a significant durability for post-90's pitchers with many star hurlers maintaining their skill sets to 40 and over.

I think keeping the name Cy Young Award is a given at this point, as your question seems to recognize. A "Cy Young" pitcher is a thing unto itself. The award inflates his legacy a bit, but he obviously was truly great so no real harm done in my view.
Naming the batting titles after players is just unnecessary and dumb, I think. However, I guess it doesn't really matter since no one will ever, ever, ever refer to them that way except for the occasional references that will always be tongue in cheek ... because pretty much everyone thinks that naming the batting titles after players is patently dumb.

I agree, you kinda have to look at the player vs other's of their era. and I don't know about an "asterisk" but I have no problem with the way the voters have decided to keep many of the obvious offenders out of the HOF.


Pitcher wins aren't really worth much as far as judging pitcher ability due to the variables out of their control (mainly offense) , so it really doesn't matter much if anyone gets close to Cy Young or not. Heck, he played in the 3 man rotation days back when relievers were only there for when things got ugly Now, most teams runa starter out for 6 and then bring in the specialists.

WAR isn't perfect, it's just the best we have to compare across generations.

There is something to be said for conditioning of course, there is also something interesting to be said for the tendency towards max effort pitching over less innings seemingly leading to MORE injury then back when guys threw 90% and tossed 300 innings a year. It's beginning to appear that it's effort over innings rather than just innings alone as far as the cause of so many elbow blowouts (which is hampered more by so many high school and college coaches overpitching their best arms)


actually, OVERALL, peak performance periods have gotten younger since the roid era ended. it appears that the best thing steroids did was slow decline (and in some bring a 2nd peak) we used to think player peaks were 28-31 now it's 26-28

+1 or even the Ted award

War
 

Nick, I am a professional pitching coach and I can promise you that the increase in Tommy John surgery's is due to young arms throwing too hard too fast, that is at too young of an age. Dr James Andrews (the best at what he does), insists that someone throwing 85+ at the age of 16/17 or younger has a 75% risk of eventually blowing their elbow. So many young kids throw 90+ in high school now because of super conditioning programs and...yes...PEDs! Why? Because there is simply too much money at stake in this era via college scholarships or the draft. That is EXACTLY what is gong on right now and it's only going to get worse. Many young elbows were not built to throw that hard that quickly, and if not at the high school level, it eventually catches up to pitchers in their early to mid 20s.

well, that's kinda what I said (just in less detail) or are you not arguing? (it kinda read like you were arguing).

The evidence isn't clear on EXACTLY the cause, there are many variables, but max effort pitching and year round pitching for young players seems to be the leading candidate right now. (I suspect it will turn out to be a bit of both) Have you read that new book Fastball yet? It's supposed to have a ton of stuff about the rise of TJ surgery.

The IOC and WADA would say yes.

Of course they didn't have that stuff when he played so we can be pretty sure he wasn't using that.

Steve B

is whisky a PED????? :eek:


:p

War
 

Haven't read "Fastball" yet, but you are one of several people that have told me to check it out. I have to pick it up soon...thx for the info!

For me and my elbow problems (put Ben Gay on after every inning) it was throwing 80% curves before I was out of my teens. Younger pitchers shouldn't throw that many curves, imo.