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

[rats60]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

By that measure you should take Don Larsen.
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.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by rats60

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.

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.

[rats60]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

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.

[darwinbulldog]

Originally Posted by rats60

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.

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.

[rats60]

Originally Posted by darwinbulldog

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 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.

[Peter_Spaeth]

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.

[Koufax32fan]

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

[darwinbulldog]

Originally Posted by rats60

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.

Some of that is correct.

[lug-nut]

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