Best lefty off all time? My vote is Koufax!

[BobC]

Originally Posted by G1911

A pitcher has great impact on his team's winning or losing if he pitches 5 innings. The problem, I think, is that like almost every other stat that is based on a short event or short sequence of events, the Win is based on a full 9 innings, and when a pitcher throws half that, while his impact is significant, he is being credited or debited for things he didn't control.

In single events and small samples, even on good teams, wins and losses don't balance out fairly. Bob Gibson in 1968 was much greater than his 22-9 record would suggest. Hugh Mulcahy went 13-22 on a bad team in 1940, but his ERA was 8% better than the league. There are many other examples. The discrepancies today are even larger, DeGrom's 10-9, 1.70 season for prime example.

Over the course of a career, luck will generally balance out for a pitcher on a good team. It won't so much for a pitcher on a bad team. Nobody who sucks gets to make 363 decisions. Nobody who wins 363 games is 'above average, at best', but sorting the stat fields by wins and using that to rank pitchers is, I think, not very effective. The further down that list you go, the less properly ordered it gets.

Winning and losing has far more variables than the pitchers performance, even in a complete game. A guy with a 1.00 ERA can lose all his games because his teams offense sucks, which he has no control over. A pitchers job is to give up as few runs as possible, to give his teams offense the best chance of creating a win by needing to score less runs to win. I think contextual ERA is the most significant single stat. I'd disagree with many and put IP right up there next to it; the balance of "how much better were they than the league at not giving up runs?" and "how much did they pitch to give their team that benefit?". Spahn ain't no slouch in these metrics either, or any reasonable metric.

There are many valid arguments to be made, for multiple pitchers. Kershaw, Johnson, Spahn all have reasoned cases that can be made. Personally, I am biased in favor of Johnson, not Grove, but we should let actual numbers guide us and not our emotional leanings. I think the argument for Grove using so many different statistics that are generally recognized as key by fans, historians, and statisticians (yes, guess who invented all the modern ones putting Grove at the top?) make Grove's case far stronger than anyone else's. I'd love to hear a rational argument for Koufax that isn't "I have fond memories of him", "context is irrelevant", "baseball sucked before Koufax debut and his exact contemporaries suck because they are from the old days" and "I am infallible", and use reasoned, logical, contextual arguments to support the claim.

G1911,

Great comments and don't really disagree with anything you're saying. Many valid points to questions we can never definitively answer. Still think we may be discounting the wins too much, but not sure there's any statistical way to reconcile that and possibly make a more comparable and meaningful measure of this for different pitchers across different eras.

By the way, don't you find it at least a little refreshing to be able to rationally, intelligently, and civily discuss topics like this once in a while on this forum, where the parties act responsibly and are respectful of each other and behave like adults? I know I do, and appreciate being able to do so with others like yourself. Too bad that isn't always the case with some though...............