27 wins is nice; I’ll go with the guy who won 60.
Right now Kershaw is responsible for 10/35 for the Dodgers so its pretty close and just to make it funny he’s on pace for 27 wins. If he gets 27 and the 330 Ks he’s on pace for he’ll get his second MVP guaranteed. Of course there is virtually no chance of that happening.
That never actually happened - at least not in a single season. Old Hoss Radbourn won 59, and several others won 40 or 50+ games but all except for one pitched before 1900. Jack Chesbro, who pitched for the Yankees, won 41 and lost 12 in 1904, and had a 3-1 K to BB ratio. That win total is the most since the start of the World Series era. Christy Matthewson and Ed Walsh’s 37 wins are the most in a single season after that.
In the live ball era, Denny McClain’s 31 wins are the most impressive. He won 31 out of 37 decisions, which is pretty freakish in its own right. And 1968 was also the year that Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA.
Ichiro!
Radbourn was originally credited with 60 but statisticians later took one away and turned it into a save.
Looking at Carlton’s game log for 1972 it would appear the Phillies played better when he was pitching than they usually did; they scored more than half a run a game more in Carlton starts than they did in their other games. Had they really been THAT bad when Carlton was pitching he couldn’t have won 27 games.
What is remarkable is Carlton was 5-6 on June 1.
Incidentally, Clayton Kershaw, the lame ass loser, walked someone again in his last start. That’s even walks now this year! He’s walked two guys just in JUNE!
Kershaw only struck out eleven men, so his K-W ratio has plunged to 19-1. Loser.
Seriously, Kershaw is rated by Baseball Reference as having a WAR of 4.3. Were he to continue pitching this well he would end the season at about 10.0 WAR, by far the most valuable player in the NL. That is however quite a bit lower than many other great seasons. The aforementioned Steve Carlton is given a 12.1 for his 1972 season. Dwight Gooden had a 12.2 in 1985, which Baseball Reference considers the best season of the lively ball era. Pedro posted an 11.7 in 2000, Wilbur Wood matched that in 1971, Roger broke 10…
Kershaw is about as effective a pitcher as has ever lived, so why can’t be match those guys? It’s simple;
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He doesn’t pitch enough innings. In the days of four-man rotations Carlton, Gaylord Perry, and other guys could pitch 300+ innings in 40+ starts. Clayton Kershaw will start 34-35 games and pitch maybe 250 innings if he’s really great (he has never gone 250 before.) You can’t be as valuable in 250 innings as you can be in 310.
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Pitchers can be awarded more WAR in higher offense periods - hence the huge WARs the system awards to the league’s best starting pitchers in the Steroid Era. Just look at the leaders when offense suddenly bulged:
1995: Greg Maddux, 9.7
1996: Pat Hentgen, 8.5
1997: Roger Clemens, 11.7
1998: Kevin Brown, 8.6
1999: Pedro, 9.7
2000: Pedro, 11.7
2001: Randy Johnson, 10.0
2002: Randy, 10.9
As drug testing begins and runs scored start to slide a little, the numbers become more reasonable. I am very struck by the 8.5 awarded to Pat Hentgen in 1996. Hentgen pitched really well and he won the Cy Young Award and deserved to, but it is rather hard for me to believe that he had a better year than any year Clayton Kershaw has ever had up to this year.
So I guess the question is, how do you compare Kershaw to pitchers in different eras?
, which I think might be a bug in the system.
Number 1 makes complete sense. If 5 guys are now doing the work that four guys used to do, it makes sense that the overall contribution of each individual is going to be lower.
I’m still trying to get my head around Number 2, though. There must be something i’m missing here, because it seems to me that, whether teams are averaging 6 runs per game or 3 runs per game, there are still the same number of wins and losses in any given baseball season, and that all players (both hitters and pitchers) are still contributing in the same measure to those wins and losses.
The overall number of WAR allocated to all players should be about the same from year to year, no matter the offensive environment, shouldn’t it? Did higher pitcher WARs in the late 1990s come at the expense of lower hitter WARs? Or was it simply that the top pitchers claimed more WAR for themselves, leaving the journeyman pitchers with very little?
Of course, the whole concept of WAR rests on a rather imprecise assessment of exactly what a replacement-level player is, in the first place.
As for comparisons over time, what about comparing runs conceded to the typical number of runs scored? I know that ERA is an imperfect instrument, but lets start with that anyway.
In 1996, Pat Hentgen had an ERA of 3.22, playing in a league (the AL) where teams averaged 5.39 runs per game. So, over each nine innings that he pitched, he gave up 59.7% of the runs typically scored by a team in his league.
This year, Kershaw has an ERA of 1.58, in a league where average scoring is 4.21 runs per game. This puts Kershaw at 37.5% of expected runs.
What about WHIP? Hentgen pitched to a WHIP of 1.250 in a league that had a rate of 1.505. That’s 83.1%. Kershaw has a WHIP of 0.657 in a league that averages 1.299. That 50.1%.
They’re both pitching about as many innings per game, with Hentgen at 7.57 innings per start, and Kershaw at 7.71. Basically, about seven and two-thirds for each of them.
What about comparing each pitcher to the other pitchers around him? Kershaw’s WHIP is just over two-thirds as high as the starting pitcher in second place (in all of MLB, not just the NL). His ERA is almost 30 points better than the guy in second. Hentgen doesn’t stand out anywhere near as much. He was 10th in ERA, just among qualifying starters, and 18th in WHIP.
Not only that, but in 1996 there were (as you would expect) a whole bunch of relief pitchers (mainly closers) with better WHIP figures than Hentgen. This year, basically the only regular pitcher with a better WHIP than Kershaw is closer Zach Britton of Baltimore, who is at 0.61 in 28 IP. The Yankees’ Andrew Miller is equal with Kershaw on 0.66. Of the 10 pitchers ahead of Kershaw and Britton in WHIP, none has pitched more than 4 innings. It’s pretty unusual for a starting pitcher to be ahead of even the closers in WHIP.
It’s kind of like ERA+. It’s all relative to the average, or your replacement. In 200, Pedro’s ERA+ was 291. Best ever since Tim Keefe’s 293 in 1880.
Kershaw is going to have a rough outing today. Hot and humid really screws up his game, and LA this evening will be both. Let’s not mention that he’s facing the Nats and Strasburg.
In the meantime, the Giants are riding the gravy train and heading for more easy pickings in Pittsburgh. Tanj.
Shows what I know. Strasburg is out with a back strain and the Giants lost.
Kershaw didn’t have much of a rough outing either. Dropped his ERA to 1.57 and got back above 20-1 k to bb
Part of the deal with that Hentgen season is that he pitched a ton of innings - people actually did pitch slightly more innings in the 90s than they do today, probably because they don’t skip aces ahead in the rotation any more. I looked it up and the last guy to pitch more than 265.2 innings was Halladay in 2003; since 2010 only a couple guys have even hit 250 (Halladay again and Verlander).
The Cubs, after sweeping the Pirates, have lost 2 straight to the Cardinals. In Wrigley. Sure, the Cubs are still up by 10.5 games, but we’re not even at the halfway point yet. There’s still plenty of time for that old acronym to be used again (Completely Useless By September).
They’re talking about some big-time trades. I’ve seen a rumor where they’d like both Chapman and Andrew Miller from the Yankees, although the cost of that trade scares the shit out of me.
Given that this is the Cubs we’re talking about, and 1984, 1989, 2003, 2007, 2008, and last year still hurt in a very personal way, I’m not counting St Louis out of it until they’re mathematically eliminated. I don’t know what it is with that organization. They could field a team of 8 Darwin Barneys, and they’d put up numbers like the softball team Mr. Burns thought he was getting.
Astros dig their way back to .500; looks like this will be another year when 86-88 wins gets a wildcard so they could easily get back into that. Texas looks very difficult to catch for the division, especially since the Astros can’t seem to beat them head to head.
I think they’d be giving up prospects, though. Not part of the team’s core so far this year. That’s not so scary to me, since the Cubs seem to be well-stocked and a trade shouldn’t deplete the farm system too badly or mortgage the future. The fact that the Cubs have so many young starters, who should be a part of this team for more than a couple of years, bodes well I think. Worth some prospects or situational players to get some bullpen help.
I heard Kyle Schwarber’s name as part of a possible deal with the NYY. Not sure how likely that is given his injury. Clearly the Cubs can win without him and he’d be a great fit for an AL team where he can DH.
Especially as a lefty with that notorious short porch in Yankee Stadium’s right field. But they could just as easily give up Dan Vogelbach, who’s a left-handed power hitting first baseman, but blocked by Anthony Rizzo.
FREE SCHWARBER! (even if it means he goes to the Yankees). And the Astros win again to go above .500 for the first time since they were 1-0 after game 1.
The Red Sox roughed up Jose Quintana and still couldn’t pull off a W. Hard times lately.