Survey: Most overated pitcher (pre-1930)

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Posted By: Cy

This is a great thread. Even though much has been re-hashed. It is always fun to speculate on the best and worst of all-time. I have three pitchers I want to comment on. Two are similar in a way. Koufax is under-rated, whereas Whitey Ford is over-rated. And here is why.

I am not going to get into the debate that Koufax only had a few great years. It is a valid argument but not for this post. During those five years Koufax was the best ever. I truly believe it. I saw him pitch on TV many times and he was unhittable. But he was even better than that if you take another factor into account. Koufax played on a terrible team.

The hitting support that he had was abysmal. If he wasn't on that team, they would have been lucky to make the first division. Instead, they won World Series. Take the following into account. Koufax had nil run support for the entire five years and secondly, he would have won even more games if he could have pitched against this abysmal team rather than for it.

On the other hand, Whitey Ford pitched for one of the premier powerhouse teams of all-time. He gained two huge advantages by this. He had terrific run support all of the time. If you check his stats, his E.R.A. wasn't that terrific. And he never had to pitch against this powerhouse like the non-Yankee pitchers did. Had he been on another club during this era, his record would have been drastically reduced.

One final note on Nolan Ryan. I think he is greatly over-rated. I am not going to look up the stats again, but I did it on the other chat board if someone is able to find them. Nolan Ryan was barely better than the teams he played for. I know many of the teams were poor. But his winning percentage is only marginally better than the teams' winning percentages. This is unlike true stars like Walter Johnson, Cy Young and Steve Carleton. These three played on many poor teams but their record was always markedly better than the overall winning percentage of their teams. This is not the case for Ryan.

One final note. There are reasons to say that Koufax wasn't as good as people claim because of his short career. But if you watched him play, you would never even consider it. Stats or no stats, over those five years, he is easily the best pitcher of the past 45 years. I won't go any further back because I didn't watch games before then. But I would wager that with a time machine to view all pitchers, no one, not even the Big Train (my hero) was as good as Koufax in his prime.

Cy