Circle of Greats 1959 Results: Bloody Schilling Spree
In a tight election that was close all week, Curt Schilling edged out a victory by seven votes over Tim Raines to become our tenth inductee into the Circle of Greats. Of the final eight ballots cast this round, Schilling appeared on seven and Raines on one — a late burst that assured Curt’s victory. More on Schilling, and the 1959 voting results, after the jump.
(1) In 1889, baseball’s rules were changed to reduce from five to four the number of called balls required for a walk. Here are the top three career strikeout-to-walk ratios since that year, among pitchers with at least 750 career innings pitched in the major leagues (a group that includes over 1,400 pitchers):
1. Curt Schilling 4.38 Ks per BB
2. Pedro Martinez 4.15 Ks per BB
3. Mariano Rivera 4.04 Ks per BB
(2) There is no widely used uber-stat that does for post-season games the kind of thing that WAR or WAA does for regular season games, covering both quality and quantity of performance in calculating total value on a baseball field. But we can do a very primitive sort of post-season value total for starting pitchers by assuming that a starting pitcher’s reasonable goal in a post-season game is to keep his opponent under 3.54 earned runs per nine innings (which is, if I’ve calculated correctly, the approximate average number of earned runs scored per nine innings in all post-season games since 1903). Based on that very rough assumption, we can (crudely) figure who “saved” the most earned runs in his post-season starts by using the following formula: (post-season IP as a starter/9)*(3.54 minus ERA in post-season starts). Using that formula the career leaders in post-season runs “saved” above average by a starter would be:
1. Christy Mathewson 28.9
2. John Smoltz 20.6
3. Curt Schilling 19.4
4. Sandy Koufax 15.6
5. Waite Hoyt 15.4
6. Bob Gibson 14.9
7. Eddie Plank 14.2
8. George Earnshaw 13.55
9. Whitey Ford 13.46
10. Art Nehf 13.36
******************
Tim Raines fell short of induction this round, but receives two rounds of assured eligibility as a consolation prize, as does fellow newbie-on-the-ballot Ryne Sandberg. Holdovers Tony Gwynn and Barry Larkin also recieve two more rounds of eligibility to add to their accounts. All the other holdovers add one further round to their respective eligibility banks, including Edgar Martinez, who continues to survive the hard way, appearing on over 10% of the ballot, but not more than 20%, every round. The full record of the vote for the 1959 round is here: 1959 COG Vote Tally . If you would like to see a spreadsheet with an overview of the voting across all the rounds so far, that’s here (sheet 1 has the raw vote totals for each player in each round, sheet 2 has the percentages): COG Vote Summary
Schilling and Mike Mussina were each inducted after eight rounds on the COG ballot. Across eight rounds, Mussina was named on a total of 233 ballots and Schilling on 224, remarkably similar results.
In the Redemption Round voting, Kenny Lofton and Kevin Brown dominated the voting, appearing on 67% and 45% of the ballots respectively, with the next group way behind in a pack at between 14% and 22%: Palmeiro, Kent, McGriff, Cone, Puckett, Saberhagen, Trevor Hoffman.
The Circle of Greats membership thus far:
Jeff Bagwell
Barry Bonds
Roger Clemens
Randy Johnson
Greg Maddux
Mike Mussina
Mike Piazza
Cal Ripken, Jr.
Curt Schilling
Frank Thomas
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It may have been crude but that’s the first attempt I’ve ever seen at anyone attempting to give postseason pitchers a value-based number. Nice.
And the title of this article is my favorite so far!
I’ve corrected in the post the description of the formula I used to get the post-season “runs saved” number. The description now has the /9 it should have had when it was posted initially.
Sorry to nitpick, because I do appreciate your attempt at quantifying post-season pitching performance, but using the one constant figure of 3.54 ERA is going to overrate pitchers from pronounced low-scoring eras (esp. the ‘dead-ball’ era).
I don’t know quite how to define it because of the inevitable “small sample size”, but the baseline ERA for Koufax and Gibson should be less than 3.54, and MUCH less than 3.54 for Mathewson.
Conversely it will underrate pitchers from higher-scoring eras, esp. the 20s/30s and 1995-2009, since the baseline should be _higher_ than a 3.54 ERA.
I understand, and that’s one reason why I described the system as relatively crude. At the same time, though, I wouldn’t necessarily be so quick to assume that the same variation in run scoring environments as are applicable in the regular season necessarily apply the same way to the post-season. I think it’s been shown that the run-scoring environment in post-season games is somewhat unique, in part because top-of-the-line pitchers get a far higher percentage of the IP than they do during the regular season. My guess is that there is less run-environment error in using the 3.54 ERA assumption for post-seasons across historical periods than you might think.
But you are right that there is surely some level of such error. So adjust your perception of the numbers as you think appropriate. It’s hard to do much more precise adjusting than that, because if you try to be more fine-grained (by using, say, historical subsets of post-season games) you are going to run into small-sample-size problems with post-season numbers, which is why we don’t have WAR/WAA type numbers for them in the first place.
birtelcom,
Thanks for your response, and I do understand your quandry with trying to set a constant baseline for postseason ERA. A very positive sign of your list’s validity is the listing of a number of the pitchers rightly celebrated for their great post-season records, such as Mathewson, Schilling, Koufax, and Gibson.
Seaking of Matty – his 1905 perfomance against the A’s, of three shutouts in three starts, with 13 hits, one walk (and 2 ROE) against 18 K’s, has to be the single greaest post-season pitching performance ever. Pitchers have had better postseason games, but NO ONE has ever had a better series.
Most incredibly, he pitched his 3rd start on ONE day’s rest.
I suppose if I were ambitious, I coud create a year-by-year table of the ERA for each year’s postseason, and see how much variation there is from your composite 3.54 ERA. Calculating this for 1905 the WS, I get a 0.81 composite ERA. To use this as a baseline is of course massively unfair to Mathewson.
The ERA for the 1903 and 1906 WS is a more reasonable 2.81 and 2.35, compared to a regular-season 3.11 and 2.66 ERA.
Just to illustrate your point about context, the Athletics team that Mathewson faced in that 1905 Series had a team OPS of .648 during the regular season. That .648 OPS number led the AL in 1905, but in 2012 would have been worse than the .665 OPS put up by Seattle, which ranked 30th and last in the majors in team OPS last season.
I hope all the Schilling supporters transfer their love to Smoltz in the coming rounds.
This process has learned me a lot about Smoltz’ career(s), and I’m impressed.
Schilling’s sock was just auctioned off for $92,613.00. One door closes, and another opens.
That’s some expensive food coloring!
My gut feeling is that will be a good investment over time. Do the proceeds go to pay off his debt from the gaming company?
Supposedly they go to banks he owed money to. Rhode Island gets the honor of enabling him and paying off the guarantee, now apparently at $100 Million.
Thanks. The whole thing still amazes me. Yet I do think the bloody sock will be a good investment.
Glad that Schilling won, although Tim Raines does not get the credit he deserves in some circles; Like Voomo @2 I learned to appreciate John Smoltz more in the process of pondering my votes – that Post Season stat is great – might be able to do something similar for hitters based on , say, RC – 3.54*G .?
Six of our ten inductees have been elected on the first ballot.
One has gone in on the second (Bagwell).
One has gone in on the fourth (Thomas).
And TWO have gone in on the EIGHTH (Schilling, Mussina).
I find that both odd and very interesting.
I like it. Bagwell and Thomas are 2nd and 4th year just because their birth year was so stacked (which is why Moose took 8 as well, really – 8 years for being 4th best in your birth year isn’t so bad). But I like the idea of someone being good enough to get the support to hang on for years and years, finally getting a ‘break’ when new ballots come out with not-overwhelming favourites. I remember someone saying one of the first ballots that they didn’t understand strategic voting to keep people on the ballot, because ‘it’s not like Larry Walker will suddenly get voted in when we get to 1938′, or a very similar comment. But I think that is the sort of thing that precisely can happen. Seems like guys get a little bit of a novelty push their first year on and then, as long as good candidates keep coming in, they are just added to the list of pretty good guys all bunched together. The buildup of a player’s ‘case’ isn’t as predictable or inexorable as the HoF voting, but it seems like with both Mussina and Schilling, when the ballot came out there was a significant enough feeling of ‘finally, he has a chance’ to support election. The more interesting votes have been the ones with no obvious choice.
Of all the NL pitcher hate, I wonder if Schilling has the most post season PA’s by DH’s against him on that list. I’d wager he does.
Mussina probably deserves to get in, but I still think Schilling was the better pitcher.
Using that formula for a reliever, the Sandman has 141 IP at 0.70 giving him…. 44.5 POST SEASON RUNS SAVED!
Yes. It’s a litle unfair to apply the same ERA test to relief pitchers in comparison to starters (relief pitchers as a group tend to have lower ERAs than starters), and Mariano has gotten a huge number of opportunities playing for the Yankees in the six-division era. But even so, I think it is still fair to say that Mariano has been the most valuable post-season pitcher ever.
You gotta be in it to win it!
Although, seriously, though it does bother me whenever I hear a statistic about most _____, or best _______ in the postseason, when comparing the stats of players from the divisional, multi-round era to those who only played in one round, the World Series, equally.
Yes, that’s a concern, although I think it is somewhat less of one when you are using an “above-average” stat like this one as opposed to more of a pure counting stat. Note that most of the guys on the Top 10 list in the post are from the pre-playoff era, which is not what you will get with Top 10 lists for most post-season stats that are pure counting stats.
Well we’ve more than doubled the number of teams too so more than doubling the number of post season games seems to keep the same ratio. The ratio of regular season games to post season games has changed over the years (some series go longer than others) but I don’t think it’s terribly different. WS used to be best of 9 at one point…
We could possibly handle the RP/SP conundrum by applying the same role adjustment that B-Ref uses.
Or we could calculate the average ERA of all postseason starting pitching and the average ERA of all postseason relief pitching and we could just base the runs saved on those two numbers depending on the pitcher’s role.
We have to make some sort of adjustment for pitching one inning at a time if we’re going to include Mo.
Of the 527 batters Rivera has faced in the postseason, only Sandy Alomar and Jay Payton have homered off of him. Not really who you’d expect.
Jay Payton doesn’t surprise me. I got the impression growing up that he was a marginal player who tended to kill the Yankees, which caused me to really dislike him.
As it turns out, he was better than “marginal” — 13.4 WAR and 0.9 WAA. Whether or not you could call him a “Yankee killer” is a bit more disputable: he went 7 for 21 in the WS against the Yankees with that HR, but his .296/.330/.452 career split was only slightly better than his overall .279/.323/.425 and not nearly as good as the splits he put up against several other teams.
*.296/.330/.452 career regular season split against the Yankees
Also forgot to add the actual point of my comment, which is that it was probably that home run that made me think of Payton as a Yankee killer.
Ahh, I missed voting for this round. I figured Schilling would make it in eventually, so I can live with the selection, although I would have Raines ahead.
#26/birtelcom -
To further illustrate your point about context, the MLB _average_ ERA for the deadball era (1904-1919) would usually place in the Top-10 ERA for all of MLB the past twenty years (1993-2012). Often it would be Top-5, or sometimes even better than the league leaders.
Take the 1908 average ERA of 2.37 – in half (20 out of 40) of the last twenty years, that figure would be _better_ than the league leader.