A sense of justice?

Recently I wrote a giant post about Pedro Martinez. If you made it to the end of that one, you are a special breed. It was about how he was amazing in 99-2000, and, how did he lose 6 games in 2000?

As a part of that,  I went back and watched game 5 of the 1999 ALDS where an injured Pedro came in to pitch 6 innings of no hit relief to save the game for the Red Sox.

As I always tend to do, here is the thought process:
1. Pedro was amazing for the Red Sox for almost all of seven seasons.
2. The Indians were damn good in 1999 and that lineup especially was ridiculous.  This was Manny's 165 RBI season. And this was after Albert Belle had left the team.
3. One thing that sticks out about those 90's Indians teams is their complete lack of a great starting pitcher. They had some good ones, but basically they were a supreme lineup and pitching was an afterthought. The only season over a 5 fWAR was Charles Nagy in 1996 with 5.7 (he went 17-5).
4. What did the sox actually give up for Pedro? And why did the Indians NOT give that up for him?
5. In his prime Pedro 1999 plus 1000-run Indians lineup equals... 27-2 season? How good could it get?
6. I feel like I can list off a lot of the greatest ever pitching seasons. And I feel also like I sort of know who a lot of the dominant offensive teams were. But never that I can recall has there been a dominant pitcher at his peak, pitching for a dominant offense.
7. Has there ever been such a combination?
8. What did/would happen if there was?

Third Time's the Charm

This is the third time I have started writing this blog post, and it's starting to get annoying. I am in a car passing the time. I started writing twice on my phone and I guess don't know how to properly use the app yet so both of my drafts are gone. This attempt is on the iPad - hopefully it works. If you are reading this, it worked.

Okay. The title of this post should be and originally was: PedroBot2000.

This (of course) refers to the great Pedro Martinez, pitching what was his greatest season, in 2000. He went 18-6 with a 1.74 ERA. You could make the argument (and I'm not sure I would, but I also haven't looked closely enough) that this was the greatest pitching season there has ever been.

Quickly, I'll list some of the greatest single season pitching performances I can think of, in chronological order, not in the order I am thinking of them.

My 2014 HOF Ballot*

*I don't have an actual HOF vote.


The 2014 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot looks like this:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/awards/hof_2014.shtml

There are three managers that have already been voted in by some sort of Veteran's Committee: Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa, and Joe Torre. Good for them - it's pretty fuzzy trying to judge which managers deserve to be in the HOF, as far as I am concerned.

There are 17 players who
a) Received at least 5% of the vote last year
b) Received lower than the 75% they would need to get elected - nobody got elected last year
c) Have been on the ballot for less than 15 years

As such they remain on the ballot this year:

The headers are:
YoB = Years on ballot as of this year - for example, this is Fred McGriff's 5th year on the ballot.
%vote = percentage of votes received last time
HOFm = bbref's Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor score, where over 100 is a likely HOF
HOFs = bbref's Bill James Hall of Standards, where 50 is an average HOF
Yrs = years in the big leagues
WAR = career Wins Above Replacement
WAR7 = The total WAR of the best consecutive 7 year period of that player's career
JAWS = (WAR + WAR7) / 2 --> A HOF standards scale developed by Jay Jaffe which attempts to combine longevity and peak to compare a player to existing HOF standards at his position. If a player's JAWS is better than the existing mean standard, he probably belongs in the Hall.
Jpos = The average JAWS score for that player's main position (eg. first basemen = 54.0)

Okay.

There are also 19 new players on the ballot. They are nominated by some HOF committee and are players that have had at least good careers that have been retired or inactive for at least 5 years. There are players here that do not have a chance of being elected, but someone has decided that they deserve to have some sort of honour of being on the ballot. Good for them - to make this list, a player was probably a solid major leaguer for at least 10 seasons, which is not a small deal.

This year is a crazy good year for new entries. While Sean Casey and JT Snow have a serious uphill battle to get into the hall, I would be more surprised if one of the players at the top of the list is NOT selected.

Wx - Lx Records: Part 2

In this post, which in retrospect I will call Part 1, I introduced the idea of using RE24 and REW to get an idea of what pitchers' "true" win-loss records should be. This is an attempt to reduce or eliminate the effect of team offence on what is deserving of a win, a loss, or a no decision, without removing the start-to-start luck experienced by the pitcher.

If a pitcher gets lucky and has a great season despite allowing an alarming number of base runners and warning track fly balls, that pitcher is deserving of wins, as they currently stand, despite the fact that you may not want that pitcher to lead your staff next year. If that same pitcher ends up with a lot of losses and no decisions because his team's offence only averages 2 runs per game- those are the kind of W-L fluctuations I am trying to see past.

One of my sharp readers commented that in the hitters post, I was comparing Wx-Lx for hitters with W-L for pitchers. Good point.

In this post I want to put some big tables of Wx-Lx for pitchers, then:
a) see if it still makes sense
b) see whose W-L records may not be as great as they seem

a) and b) are related - part of the Wx-Lx making sense is who would benefit and who would not from this alternative scoring system.

W - L for Hitters (Part 2)

In Part 1, I introduced the concept of win-loss records for hitters that are within the same range as real pitchers' win-loss records. I built many tables of single season win-loss records.

Now I will look at a few selected players' career totals, in a few different categories: no-doubt hall of fame type players (Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Rickey Henderson, Barry Bonds); mid-level hall of fame types (Cal Ripken, Pete Rose, Robin Yount, Paul Molitor); borderline cases from the last few years (Craig Biggio, Jim Rice, Andre Dawson, Kirby Puckett); and current players who I think might be interesting (Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Vernon Wells, Adrian Beltre, Adam Dunn). I will then pick a couple of comparable pitchers based on their real win-loss records.

Let's start with the all time stat-masters.

W - L for Hitters

Baseball fans learn to understand win loss records pretty quickly. At least until they become the dreaded sabermetricians who doubt everything they ever knew about win loss records.

But, win-loss records are still a thing, and given a win loss record you probably have an 80% chance of understanding what kind of season that pitcher had. When I was a kid, Jack Morris came to play for the hometown blue jays and WON 20 GAMES. Well, he was worth 2.9 WAR that year, and his 4.04 ERA was not special. So that is a misleading example. I have already written about Cliff Lee and how much his 2012 6-9 record means.

Anyways, yesterday I decided to turn RE24, which can transform into REW, into an equivalent win loss record that depends a little less on how the pitcher's team does in individual games and a little more about how the pitcher actually, you know, pitches. I can't go into what RE24 means again, so please go read that one first.

The Win is Dead! Long Live the xWin!

I was reading Joe Posnanski's blog, as usual, when I went through this article and came across a comment by one of his Brilliant Readers, Stephanie. Which got me thinking that it's time for a blog post.

The article is about the building support which has been apparently formalized into killing the win as a statistic because it's dumb. But maybe we should still keep it, because everyone knows the win and its a very easy to understand statistic. 20-5 is a great season. 11-13 is a mediocre season. 3-12 is a bad season. Ok.

I've already been over this, but although wins and losses are certainly correlated with a good pitching season, they can be incredibly misleading. So I am proposing an alternative, a way to turn a very good and robust advanced metric into a win loss record. For now, let's call it xWins and xLosses, or Wx-Lx.

First, a look at old wins and losses.

To get a win, a starting pitcher must
- pitch at least 5 innings
- leave with his team in the lead
- his team never gives away the lead and wins the game

To get a loss, a starting pitcher must
- start the game
- leave the game with his team losing, and his team never comes back to even tie the game

Ok. That's a weird statistic, right? Relief pitcher wins are even worse. For example, you could pitch 1/3 of an inning, give up 5 runs so that your team is tied or losing, but finish the inning. Now have your team mount a comeback in the next half inning, get pulled out of the game, and pick up the WIN.