O/T Best Starting pitcher of all time.

[Jcfowler6]

Three cool dudes.

[Writehooks]

If I had to give the ball to one guy, to win one game, I'd go off the board: Catfish Hunter.

[Kenny Cole]

I don't remember Guidry pitching 4 no-hitters, including a perfect game, winning the pitching triple crown three times, or winning 3 Cy Youngs when only one was awarded. Nor did he have a 0.95 ERA in the post season. Guidry was a very good pitcher, but he was a far cry from being anywhere close to as dominant as Koufax.

[bosoxfan]

Originally Posted by Writehooks

If I had to give the ball to one guy, to win one game, I'd go off the board: Catfish Hunter.

Catfish was a great pitcher, but...

If my life depended on winning one game? Without hesitation, Pedro Martinez. Look at the era he pitched in, compare him to the rest of the league. It's not even close....

On a side note...

No disrespect to Nolan Ryan, but as good as he was at times, he was a .500 pitcher on .500 ball clubs. Did he really make his team better when he pitched?

[prewarsports]

Career numbers do not lie.

Koufax and Guidry are almost the same guy. I wasn't talking about No-Hitters or the "the pitching triple crown" but you could get into the same arguments with Guidry as his best single season was better than Koufax's best single season and Guidry played in a much more hitter friendly League and Era than Koufax did.

Just going off the numbers Koufax gets a VERY slight edge in career stats but they are so very similar that if names were removed from the occasion and you just looked at numbers it is extremely close.

The point is that you can take 2 similar guys, one is the best ever in some people's eyes while the other gets not even a hint of a mention.

[Kenny Cole]

Nor do career statistics tell the entire truth. Koufax and Guidry had similar career won-loss numbers, true. Koufax dominated in every other important pitching category, without nearly the same type of run support Guidry was getting, going up against the Gibsons and Marichals of the league. Almost .5 ERA lower, 600 more strikeouts in 2 less years, 14 more shutouts in 2 less years, a substantially better WHIP, and a league leader in every important pitching category far more often than Guidry. In the 5 years before he retired, Koufax was always in the top 5, most often 1st or 2nd. It isn't even close. Guidry never had that type of run. Guidry was a real good pitcher, but the fact that he achieved some similar won/loss numbers in two more years doesn't make him the same pitcher as Koufax.

There's a lot more to it than the final numbers. If career statistics "do not lie," then I suppose Eppa Rixey is basically the same pitcher as Bob Feller because they won the same number of games, had similar ERAs, and had similar WHIPs. Don Sutton and Steve Carlton, who pitched pretty much at the same time, had similar won/loss records and ERAs. Does that make Sutton the same pitcher as Carlton? Intuitively, I know that's not right.

[Hankphenom]

Here's something I've always wondered about, but have never been enough of a stat guy to look into: Walter Johnson, for example, pitched most of his career with a very weak hitting team behind him, so for 1/7th of the games during that time, he never got to pitch against those relative weaklings in his league. Conversely, he never got a pass on some of the strongest hitters in his league by having them on his team. I'm sure there are other examples of this disparity among the other pitchers, some going the other way. For his time especially, when teams played each other 22 times a season, i would think this could have a serious impact on a pitcher's numbers, and maybe hitters, too. Think of this: Walter Johnson faced Ty Cobb 365 times in his career. In other words, Cobb had almost 2/3 of a season just against Johnson! If Cobb had been on Johnson's team, he never would have had to hit against him. And think of Lefty Grove: he never had to face three of the best hitters in his league during his prime: Foxx, Simmons, and Cochrane. And they never had to bat against him. Just wondering if any of the SABR type adjustments take this into account.
Hank Thomas

[perezfan]

I voted for The Big Train...

But I was distressed to see no mention of Carl Hubbell at all. In three pages of posts, I would have thought his name would appear just once. Not that I read every word of every post...

But regardless of whether I missed it, seems like King Carl is one of the most overlooked/under-rated Pitchers of all-time...