I was reading this thread, where people are trying to identify who the greatest pitchers of all time are and where Greg Maddux ranks among them. Great names of yesteryear and before-yesteryear such as Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Pete Alexander and the like are tossed about.
However, I wonder if it is really meaningful to compare pitchers across eras. The game, as it is played today, is a different game than it was in Koufax’s era, which is different than it was in Feller’s era, which is different than it was in Alexander’s era, which is different than it was in Young’s era, which is different than it was in Spalding’s era. Strategies have changed and adpated over the years, as has the way the game is played.
It’s well known that some pitching records, absent a radical change in the way the game is played, will stand forever. Barring the above-mentioned change, no one is going to get 511 wins again. No one is going to win 30 games in a season (let alone 40 – heck no one even makes 40 stars anymore) again. It’s highly doubtfult that anyone will approach an ERA of 0.96 in a season or a career ERA of 1.82. The conditions under which the game is played have radically changed and I’m not sure that you can make a meaningful comparison between Young and Maddux. Heck, I’m not certain that you can make a meaningful comparison between Koufax and Maddux - but at least there is far more in common there. But comparing any modern pitcher to a pitcher from an earlier era is an excersize in futility – and the further back in time you go, the greater the futility is.
Thoughts? Agree? Think I’m nuts?
(Note: I think the same thing applies to hitters as well, although it’s possible that it does so to a lesser degree.)
Actually, one could easily make an argument that for pitchers the mid-to-late 1990s had much more in common with the 1920s than they did the 1960s.
There are no “eras” in baseball or anyhing else. “Eras” are an organizational tool we use to help our thinking; but they sometimes backfire, as when we try to put ballplayers neatly in this or that “era.” If a player’s career ran 1910-1930, was he part of the “dead ball era?”
If we can’t compare people 50 years apart, what makes you think we can compare people 20 years apart? When, exactly does the “modern” era begin wherein comparisons are apt?
It’s different water every second of every hour of every day … and yet it is also the same river every year. [/poetry]
More to the point – the statistical things you point to is an answer to why such comparisons are difficult at times, but smart people can take generational differences into account (i.e. heavier workloads, different leaguewide ERAs, etc).
The original thread took off during my work session, so I missed the fireworks.
I’ve consistently taken the position of evaluating how much talent a pitcher displayed on the field, while others are more pragmatically concerned with the value they contributed to their teams. If you focus on the latter, well most of the 60’s-70’s pitchers will look much better in comparison to their counterparts from the 1990’s-00’s, solely due to the former throwing 260-320 inning seasons in their primes, instead of the 230-270 we get now. I don’t dock Mike Mussina brownie points just because he had the misfortune of pitching when offense was so high that you (practically) couldn’t go out there and throw 300 innings. But it is a complex issue and I acknowledge that the other viewpoint has a certain amount of merit.
ERA+ was tossed around in that thread too, and I think there’s a problem with that. When you compare the peaks of Koufax and Pedro Martinez using ERA+, the latter is going to look much better, due mainly to the average base ERA being so high vs. Koufax’s. In other words you can only drive that ERA down so far, because of the limits of how far down you can push the elements of the ERA (hits/walks/home runs allowed and so on)-the things which contribute to scoring runs (or preventing them).
Pedro threw that 1.74 year in 2000 in a league which averaged 5.3 runs/game, and I doubt he would be significantly below that in 1964 (when Koufax also had a 1.74 ERA, in a league w/ 4.0 rpg), just because you can’t get much better than 128 hits, 32 walks, and 284 strikeouts in 217 innings. If these elements scaled up in a more defensively oriented time period in strict accordance with the run levels, he would NOT have 24 walks, 376 K’s, and 94 hits (1.31 ERA maybe). You just can’t get any better than perfection. This bedevils any analysis which is based strictly on comparing relative ERA’s. I do think Martinez was better than Koufax, but not strictly by the magnitude of their ERA+'s (291 to 187).
I think it is better to compare within eras. It would be a fun argument to determine where the lines should be drawn, but Cy Youngs 511 is impossible to attain. That does not make him the best pitcher of all time. Just the winningest. I think dead ball era should be judged by itself.
Then Ruth came along and the game was all different. The HR changed everything. Power slowly took over. Pitchers won a little less and HRs climbed.
Then night games, relief pitching and steroids made the game into something new again.
I forgot to mention when they changed the height of the mound. Then expansion came in and for a time everything was different. McCain won 31 and he and Gibson had era below 2.
No, you also are evaluating by value. If you were evaluating strictly by talent, you’d be talking about how fast someone’s fastball was versus how much bend there was in someone else’s curveball. The minute you start bringing statistics of any kind at all into it, you’re on the value (or production) side of things.
But you’re absolutely right about the need to adjust standards according to era; Which is why, to address the OP, the way to compare players across eras is by holding each of them in comparison to their peers. We can describe, mathematically, how much better Maddux was than his contemporaries; we can describe how much better Koufax was than his contemporaries. From that, you just subtract.
I’m wondering, however, if this is truly a valid method either.
I believe it was Bill James (although I could be wrong on who it was) who explained the fact that there are no more .400 hitters or pitchers who have ERAs of 1 anymore because the gap between the best and worst players has narrowed considerably over the years. As such, can you credit Cy Young for being, say 50%* over his peers while Greg Maddux is only 20% over his peers?
Zev Steinhardt
I just pulled the numbers 50 and 20 out of a hat. It’s just for example purposes.