So David Justice is a hall of famer right? After all his teams were 933-675 in games he played in. 895-643 in games he started.
Is he a pitcher? Of course not.
So only pitchers are instrumental in team wins? Man some guys are really overpaid then.
Well, there’s no W in the statistics for batters, is there?!
Joe Posnanski did a very similar exercise last week, showing Schilling’s numbers were almost exactly the same as those of… Kevin Brown.
His point being that, while almost everyone thinks Schilling is a Hall of Famer, practically NOBODY thinks Brown is.
Which pitcher played better or more in the postseason? What about in the World Series? Those factors are important too.
Likewise, how many All-Star game appearances did they make? Also, how many Cy Young Awards did they win and what was their year-to-year rank in the CYA and MVP balloting? How many seasons did they lead the league or rank near the top in some important pitching statistic?
I don’t think that number of wins is all that useful a statistic for pitchers. If you take two identical pitchers, and put one on a team with a bunch of great players, and put the other on a team of a bunch of glorified minor leaguers, then the one on the great team is obviously going to get more wins, but that doesn’t mean he was the better pitcher. On the other hand, percentage of strikeouts, say, does say something about how good a pitcher is. Since Pitcher A in the OP seems to lead only in wins, while B leads in all of the pitcher-specific categories, I would say that, absent any other information, I would conclude that B was the better pitcher.
If you take two pitchers with identical % of strikeouts and one starts an average of 30 games a year, while the other starts only 20, due to injury, the stat shows them being of equal quality, when they clearly are not.
Wins is a “useful” statistic because it incorporates a variety of important aspects of a pitcher’s value that may not be obvious with other statistics. Durability, the ability to pitch every 5th day for an entire season, over your entire career. The ability to pitch deep into games where it’s more likely you will earn a win/loss. The ability to manage a game, to save your energy when you are ahead, pitch deep into the game, and get the win, even if it means giving up an extra run or two that don’t matter. Because, ultimately, the job of the pitcher isn’t to “get batters out” or “prevent runs”, it’s to make sure his team wins the game.
I don’t want to scroll down in the thread before answering because I’m sure the two pitchers have been named.
Looking at this the first thing I’m going to do is completely discount Wins, Losses, W/L% as they are meaningless in evaluating pitching talent.
ERA+ is a push, and ERA is in and of itself sometimes a tad tricky for me. (I don’t think ERA is really a very good metric of pitching ability, it is certainly better than Wins/Losses, though.)
A struck out a few hundred less than B.
A walked a few more than B.
A averaged a few more innings than B (I’m guessing these are per-season or per-162 game averages.)
A’s WHIP is a decent bit higher than B (higher being worse.)
Just looking at these stats my gut tells me B is a better pitcher but both are good, probably worthy of Hall consideration. The fact that A had 270 wins, 2800 strikeouts, means he is definitely going to have his supporters. The 300 win metric probably won’t be that big in future Hall classes, and while I just said wins aren’t a good measure of pitching ability I do recognize they are very important to the Hall voters (which is unfortunate.)
The fact that B had 3,000 strikeouts bodes very well for his getting into the HoF, everyone who has mad that benchmark has gotten in except for Bert Blyleven (which opens a can of worms to even mention by name.) Roger Clemens will probably be another exception as I do not see him getting in after the massive hit his reputation has taken.
These career stats would put these guys in the top 10-15 of their generation but probably not the top 20 all time, so ultimately I’m not sure either will get into the Hall. I have my suspicions I know who both pitchers are, but discounting that things that I think will dramatically affect A and B’s chances:
- Cy Young awards (if they won any)
- World Series performance–and did they ever win a World Series
- Team they played for (better known team = better chance.)
Irrelevant. Chronos’ example was clearly of “all things being equal”. Now you’re introducing “but the one with more wins was more durable” into the equation - which is not “all things being equal”. Are you incapable of comparing two different numbers at the same time (K/BB and IP)?
Meh. It also incorporates a great deal of other aspects of the game that have nothing whatsoever to do with a pitcher’s value. Defense, the bullpen, the ballpark, etc. Take a pitcher, clone him, and clone his offense - but for pitcher A you give him a high quality bullpen, and for pitcher B you give him a crappy bullpen. A is going to win a hell of a lot more games and zero of your above reasoning applies any more. You can compare wins between pitchers on the same team - but once you look at even a slightly larger context, it becomes much less valuable.
I don’t think Moose & Schill (no reason to keep up the pretense) are merely the “top 10-15 of this generation” (yes, they clearly fall behind the Top 5 of Pedro, Maddux, Unit, Clemens, & Glavine, but are in a comfortable group with Smoltz and yes Kevin Brown right behind). Nor do they need to be “top 20 all time” to qualify for the Hall (a very stringent standard IMHO).
I was primarily focusing on the idea that strikeout percentage tells you something. It doesn’t. A guy can have a good K/BB and be on the disabled list all the time, or get completely shelled, or be Sandy Koufax in his prime. Of course, Schilling had 6 seasons with a better K/BB than Koufax at his best. Not sure what that’s supposed to be telling me.
No, but it’s not like these two stats (or any other two raw stats) tell you who is and isn’t a good pitcher. You need GS, IP, IP/GS, K/9, BB/9, K/BB, WHIP, ERA+, HR/9, etc. etc. etc. and none of those individually tell you who is and isn’t good, you’d need a complex formula weighting each stat for overall value in “Pitcher Rating”. Then, we’d be able to state for certain that Schilling has a 105 PR, Mussina a 102, and we can argue about whether the weights are correct or whether a 3 PR difference is significant*.
Wins is a shorthand conglomerated Pitcher Rating type of stat. Guys with high wins totals always have something going for them, and guys with low wins totals always have something dragging them down. It doesn’t tell the whole story, but it tells a story, and it usually means something.
*Of course, we have QB Rating in football, and Chad Pennington is 8th all time, way better than schlubs like Marino and Elway.
Yeah, it usually does. It usually means they’re on a very good team. You make it sound like it’s hard to win games when you’re on the '27 Yankees, what with having to pace yourself and all when you’re up by 10 runs in the 4th.
Well clearly Pennington is just as good as Marino, since neither have Super Bowl rings. 
These statistical arguments can be interesting, but they usually lose me after a while. I think it’s important to step back and remember that it’s called the “Hall of Fame” and not the “Hall of Stats.”
Ballots have boxes which voters check or don’t, and they’re not asked to explain their choices. Granted, sometimes there’s a slam-dunk no-brainer first-ballot pick based solely on spectacular numbers. But there’s no mathematical formula that serves as a statistical cutoff, nor should there be. When you get down to the more borderline guys, lots of intangibles start coming into play. Was he a positive clubhouse presence? A fan favorite? A good ambassador of the Game? And so on. No rule say’s you have to take that stuff into account, and no rule says you can’t.
While the practice of sportswriters choosing inductees is definitely imperfect, in my book it beats any mechanical numbers-only alternatives.
Having said that, I do think both Maddux and Martinez deserve to – and will – get in.
I just looked up the '27 yankees. Interestingly enough, they had only 1 20 game winner even though their pitching staff had an average ERA+ of 120, and none of their pitchers (even the 2 HOFers) went on to have as many wins as Mussina.
And? Is your point that they had a difficult time winning, as evidenced by only 1 20 game winner on staff? They certainly had a difficult time losing, since none of them lost more than 8 games and the worst full time starter had a .684 winning percentage.
Couldn’t that just mean that they had a very deep bullpen, with many good pitchers, so they all ended up sharing the limelight?
In 1927 there was barely the concept of a Bullpen. The Yanks were close to being unique at the time for having a great pitcher that was mostly a reliever.
Wilcy Moore went 19-7 that year with a 2.28 ERA and appeared in 50 games but only 12 starts. By all accounts he was one of the greatest recipients of the Yankee’s Five O’clock Lightning where Murderer’s Row would rally big after the 7th inning.
Yeah - that’s a really weird line to see on the team page - he’s listed as their closer, but managed 213 IP that season (he did start 12 games, 6 of which were complete).
I have to admit my ignorance of pitching at the time. The numbers for that rotation are so foreign to today’s numbers (or any other recent time). Not a single pitcher on that team threw 100 Ks, two of the starters had more BBs than Ks, and only one starter averaged more than 4 Ks per 9 IP. It’s just so…different.