Poll question

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Posted By: T206Collector

(1) The raw rankings are easily available on Baseball-Reference.com. If you have knowledge of a website that ranks career ERA based on adjustments for League/Park differentials, please let me know and show us how Young does when compared to Mathewson, Johnson and Willis. I doubt there will be any significant variance that would make Young pull away from Willis. Rather, I suspect that you will have an influx of AL pitchers from more recent years (the Pedros, Johnsons, Ryans and Clemenses) flooding in between Young and Johnson, thus making the gap even larger.

(2) Raw numbers are just that -- they are raw numbers. When you compare Matty to Johnson to Young to Willis, less of an adjustment needs to be made than when you are comparing Young to Ryan, for example, who faced the DH when he pitched for the Angels and Rangers. I do not think it is "shameful" to point out that at a very basic level, Young does not stack up. I think it more "shameful" to defend Young on the basis of adjusted numbers without offering any support for how or even why those adjustments would favor Young against Matty, Johnson and Willis.

(3) Finally, with respect to Park Factor, I think it is relevant to point out that someone who played in an era where home runs were scarce -- and, by the way, Young still managed to rank in the Top 10 in his League in home runs allowed in 7 of his Major League seasons -- may not be comparable to someone like Clemens who faced the McGwires, Sosas and Bonds of the World, without some adjustment for the parks that Clemens pitched in versus the parks that Young pitched in. Certainly, you could find batters' relative performances in all Major League parks in a given year, and then apply a formula to determine whether parks were hitter friendly -- although you would need to factor out the quality of the rotations in those parks as well -- I think that it is hard to argue that Park Factor does not include the distance to the wall. I understand that Bill James' definition of "Park Factor" only includes Runs, Opponent Runs, At Bats and Opponents At Bats, in its defintion. I am not sure whether this gives you anything useful over time because it does not look at the relevant ERA's and park dimensions, which I think are entirely appropriate for this kind of inquiry. Indeed, how about the fact that they adjusted the mound upwards in Sandy Koufax' time? You do not need to look at a formula to understand why that helped Koufax immeasurably, although I suppose that the formula Bill James' provided would give you some assistance in this regard.

Post-script. Tuns out BBRef has "Adjusted ERA+" which bears out what I said, to some degree, but supports the theory that Young was better than the raw ERA numbers tells you. Again, assuming you buy into the adjustments made here, Pedro, Randy, and Clemens all show up now as I predicted they would, ahead of Cy Young. And so does, by the way, Quisenberry and Jim Devlin. But now Mathewson and Willis have dropped below them all.

1. Pedro Martinez (33) 166 R
2. Lefty Grove+* 148 L
3. Walter Johnson+ 146 R
Dan Quisenberry 146 R
Hoyt Wilhelm+ 146 R
Joe Wood 146 R
7. Ed Walsh+ 145 R
8. Roger Clemens (42) 143 R
Jim Devlin 143 R
10. Randy Johnson* (41) 142 L
Addie Joss+ 142 R
Al Spalding+ 142 R
13. Kid Nichols+ 139 R
14. Mordecai Brown+ 138 R
Greg Maddux (39) 138 R
Cy Young+ 138 R