Bob “Hoot” Gibson has been elected as the latest inductee to the Circle of Greats. Gibson was a consistent winner over a 17-year career with the Cardinals, with 20 wins in 5 of 6 seasons (1965-70), 15 wins in 10 of 11 seasons (1962-72) and 12+ wins with a winning record for 13 straight seasons (1961-73). Gibson’s 251 career wins are tops for his generation of pitchers with their entire careers between 1955 and 1980.
As impressive as his career accomplishments are, Gibson is probably most remembered for an iconic 1968 season, and for his dominating post-season performances in three memorable 7-game World Series. More on Bob Gibson after the jump.
Gibson becomes the 46th player inducted into the Circle of Greats. He and Al Kaline led the voting from start to finish, each mentioned on more than half of the ballots cast. Among players introduced to the ballot in this round, only Rocky Colavito and Bob Shaw received votes. That allowed a number of players in their last round of eligibility to attract sufficient support to survive to the next round of COG balloting.
The full spreadsheet showing this round’s vote tally is here: COG 1933 Vote Tally. The vote summary for recent Circle of Greats voting rounds is here: COG Vote Summary 2 . An archive with fuller details of the earlier, 1968 through 1939, rounds is here: COG 1968-1939 Vote Summary . In both of the Vote Summary workbooks, raw vote totals for each past round appear on Sheet 1 and the percentage totals for each past round appear on Sheet 2.
Gibson’s 13 straight winning seasons with 12+ wins, plus 10 seasons of 15 wins, are both tops among his contemporaries in the 1959-75 period. His five 20-win seasons were second only to Fergie Jenkins and Juan Marichal. Included was his 1968 season, possibly the most dominant single season since the 60 feet, 6 inch pitching distance was established in 1893. Consider:
- 1.12 ERA – 1st since 1920; 3rd since 1893 (since 1920, 2nd place is Dwight Gooden‘s 1.53 in 1985)
- 258 ERA+ – 4th since 1920; 6th since 1893. in 275+ IP seasons: 1st since 1920; 2nd since 1893
- 0.853 WHIP – 4th since 1920; 11th since 1893. in 275+ IP seasons: 1st since 1920; 9th since 1893
- 13 shutouts – 1st since 1920; 2nd since 1893
- 32 straight 8+ IP starts (one season) – 1st since 1916
Despite a 1.52 ERA to start the 1968 season, Gibson’s record at the end of May was only 3-5, and he had had to labor hard for each of those wins, all in complete games of 9, 11 and 12 innings. But, Gibby was just warming up. For June and July, Gibson made 12 starts, pitched 12 complete games and collected 12 wins. Oh, and he allowed a total of 6 runs, including just 3 over the final 11 of those games in which he posted a microscopic 0.27 ERA. Those 11 games are the longest searchable streak, by 3 games, of starting a game and allowing one run or none, never mind getting a CG and a W each time.
On June 4th, 1968 Don Drysdale pitched his record 6th consecutive shutout. Two days later, Gibson started his own shutout skein that almost matched Drysdale’s feat, running off 5 consecutive goose eggs from June 6th to June 26th. Gibson went for shutout number 6 on July 1st against the Dodgers and … Don Drysdale. Alas, the suspense didn’t last long as the Dodgers plated a first inning run (the only one they would get) on a wild pitch. The run of 12 straight CG wins was part of a stretch of 20 starts (May 28 to Sep 2) that included 19 complete games; in the other contest, Gibson pitched 11 innings before being relieved, and would have had a CG victory but for a 9th inning game-tying home run from the most unlikely of players … Al Spangler (on the COG 1934 ballot), who had last homered more than 3 years before, on May 29, 1965, also against the Cardinals.
Gibson’s World Series heroics include 3 game starts in each of 3 different World Series, also accomplished only by Christy Mathewson. Gibby is alone in World Series annals with three game 7 starts and two game 7 wins. Those starts included two in consecutive seasons (1967-68), matching the tandem of Lew Burdette and Don Larsen in 1957-58. Gibson’s 7 consecutive World Series wins (all complete games) and 8 consecutive complete games are the most ever. Among live-ball era pitchers, only Red Ruffing also has 8 complete games, and only Whitey Ford also has 7 complete game wins, consecutively or otherwise. Gibson’s 1.89 career World Series ERA is 7th best since 1920 (min. 50 IP).
Quiz time: Gibson and Juan Marichal both retired after the 1975 season, and both had career winning records (of course) with more complete games than wins. Since then, only one pitcher has done the same – without looking it up, who is he?
Doug:
Jim Fregosi just left us for the big diamond in the sky. Below, SS WAR from start of career through age 28:
1 Alex Rodriguez 71.1
2 Arky Vaughan 59.6
3 Robin Yount 50.4
4 Cal Ripken 50.0
5 Jim Fregosi 45.0
6 Ernie Banks 42.5
7 Joe Cronin 40.1
8 Lou Boudreau 40.0
9 Travis Jackson 38.8
10 Alan Trammell 37.5
11 Derek Jeter 36.8
Regarding the CG question, w/o looking it up, it’s got to be one of Jenkins, Blyleven, Ryan, or Phil Niekro.
None of those guys for the quiz answer.
Doug:
If I used the PI correctly, I don’t believe anyone is going to “guess” the correct answer to your CG/W quiz….great piece of trivia, there.
I’ll guess.
Someone who was strong and whose career ended early.
I’ll go with:
J.R. Richard
or The Bird.
‘Cause I know JR won over 100.
Probably not him.
Fidrych is more likely.
Bingbingbing! Fidrych with 29-19, 34 CGs.
It was the Bird.
Mark Fidrych’s career totals are a 29-19 record with 34 complete games. He was 19-9 with 24 CGs in his rookie season, and 10-10 with 10 CGs afterwards.
If I had to guess, it would be someone amongst the Billy Martin burnout crew. Langford, Keough, McCatty, Norris
Rick Langford did indeed have more CGs than wins, but he didn’t have a winning record. Langford’s career totals are a 73-106 record with 85 CGs.
Wouldn’t you love to give that Oakland foursome a second chance under the tutelage of a modern-day manager and pitching coach?
My guess is Fernando Valenzuela. He had a large amount of complete games early in his career, lead the league a couple of times (I´m probably wrong on that) and did not end up with 200 victories.
Good guess, but not Fernando. In fact, he had never had a season with more CGs than Wins, just one (1984) with equal totals.
Since Doug brought up Complete Games, I’d like to throw this out:
How long has it been since starting MLB pitchers completed most of their starts? … Or even more than half their starts?
This is NOT a quiz; it’s very easy to look up on B-R, but the answers may surprise you. For as long as I’ve been a baseball fan (c. ’68), Grouchy Old Men* have said “{Star Pitcher X}” is not a star, and not a REAL pitcher – in MY day, REAL PITCHERS completed most of the games they started”.
Well, it’s been a long long long time since, in all of MLB, more than _half_ of all starts were completed:
*********************************************
% of all MLB Starts that were Complete Games:
*********************************************
15% – 1988
20% – 1980
25% – 1978
30% – 1959
1/3rd – 1954
40% – 1950
50% – 1921
2/3rds – 1908
75% – 1906
80% – 1905
85% – 1904
90% – 1888
The trend since 1888 or so, 125 years now, is that CG have gradually and inexorably gone down, over 125 years. Even since relief aces became standard on all teams in the mid/late 80s, the % of CG has continued to decline dramatically:
1985 – 15%
1990 – 10%
2013 – 3%
A final observation: once the restrictions on overhand pitching were lifted in 1883, it was just INSANE that pitchers still completed more than 90% of their starts. Arms wren’t designed to take that abuse.
* the sort who would assert, as an obvious fact, that the best players of their generation were OF COURSE better than the best players of the current generation
To Lawrence’s point, 25 years have gone by without a pitcher completing half his starts (min. 10 starts). These are the most recent pitchers to do this.
Generated 2/14/2014.
Doug:
Look at that beautiful black ink – 293.2 293.2 295.2 288.1 IP!
Nowadays, if you get 300 innings from your 4 AND 5 starters, you’re doing great….
Last year only the Tigers and A’s had a combined 300 innings from their fourth and fifth starters (with a handful of others coming close). But this is mostly because the regular fifth starter is a relatively rare breed – injury or incompetence usually puts paid to having just one guy start 30 games at the back end of your rotation.
I was at one of Soto’s complete game losses in 1983. Chuck Rainey still had a no-hitter when Soto was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the 9th. Then Milner singled with two outs.
LA:
One of the phenomena that have killed complete game pitching is the obsession with pitch counts. When Jenkins or Gibson or even someone of the next half generation was pitching well in the later innings, no coach was counting the number of pitches thrown and saying, gee, we’d better warm someone up because we don’t want to wear down our ace. They were thinking, on the contrary, we want to win this game, and we’ve got no one in the pen who can do the job as well, as long as he keeps it up. Bill James is interesting in a related way in his comments on Jim Bunning. At times Bunning was so sharp and difficult to hit that it was a mistake to pull him, because the opposition would generally hammer the reliever whose stuff was nowhere near as good. Too bad that wasn’t true of Bunning’s performance in the U.S. Senate.
At any rate, what has happened is a shift in managerial philosophy—managerial in the larger sense—not a movement up or down in the capability of the players to perform, except, perhaps, to change the mindset of starters, so that they no longer think they can go safely beyond the prescribed pitch count. A negative mindset can reduce results far more dramatically than a positive one can improve them, in my experience.
But I’m one of those grouchy old guys, older than almost anyone who comments here but Richard Chester, so what do I know.
17/nsb,
I agree that pitch counts have quite a bit to do with the decrease in CG, but if you look at my chart in #12, this trend has been in motion for a very long time,wel before aone had hard the term “Pitch count”. Enforced pitch counts started when – in the mid/late 90s? This also coincided with the offensive exposion of 1994-2009.
If pitch counts were the main cause, then there would be a relatively flat plateau in CG% for a couple decades before that, then a fairly quick drop in CG% with pitch counts. Instead, there has been a gradual but fairly constant (not every year, but over 5/10 years) drop in CG% for over a 100 years.
It’s not just pitch counts / reducing pitcher abuse driving this.
It’s also a better understanding of the fact that the more times batters face the same pitcher in a game the better they hit him.
It’s harder to see the effect of 4th+ time thru the order in today’s game because the only pitchers who are allowed to pitch that deep into ballgames are the very good to great pitchers. And even then they’re only going that far on nights that they’re really on.
The 4th time thru the order penalty is very strong. Using the Split Finder and setting a minimum of 250 IP in these situations, there is only ONE starter in the split-searchable era who had a lower OPS allowed 4th+ time thru the order compared to overall. That pitcher is Rick Wise, who allowed a
.650 OPS 4th-time-thru-order vs. .703 overall.
Here’s starter tOPS+ for times thru order going back in time (tOPS+ greater than 100 means split OPS allowed is higher than overall OPS):
Year: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th+ time thru order
2013: 96, 104, 112, 104
2003: 94, 103, 111, 113
1993: 93, 102, 108, 108
1983: 95, 100, 110, 112
1973: 90, 101, 106, 109
1963: 85, 101, 109, 120
1953: 88, 103, 108, 111
This is one reason I think ERA+ is biased against pitchers of yesteryear. They WERE taken out of ballgames very early more often when they were getting shelled (compared to today’s game), but the number of those starts are dwarfed by the number of times they had to slog through the order a 4th or 5th time with a tired arm. That’s going to bring your ERA+ down.
bstar:
Except for the 1963 number, the 3rd-4rth variation here is minor, to say the least—that is, until you get to 2013 when the sampling is much smaller. The real leap early on is between 1st and 2nd, and later between 2nd and 3rd. Does that suggest that Stengel and Lopez were stupid not to have yanked their pitchers after the first time through the order, and Cox and Torre the second time? Blanket statistics have limited value in assessing what goes on in specific circumstances.
I’m pretty doggone old, myself, but I’ve never agreed with my fellow “grouchy old guys” on the pitch count and the use of relief specialists. Most everyone my age–ALL they remember are the Gibsons, Jenkins, Seavers, et. al. Even as a young Stubby, I was always fascinated with the young kids coming up. So perhaps that is why I am one of the few who remembers the boatloads of young kids whose arms lay in the gutter. Gibson, Jenkins, Marichal, Seaver…they’re freaks. They are not the norm. John Glass, for example, was better than Nolan Ryan. They were coming up together through the Mets system. Anybody would have told you Glass was the better prospect–had a BETTER fastball than the Ryan Express and certainly better control. But Ryan was a freak and Glass was human. So Glass’ arm broke down and he never made the show while Ryan…well, we all know what he did.
When you only had 16 teams and you weren’t paying anybody anything, it didn’t matter to an organization. In theory, there were enough arms and few enough slots, you could build an entire pitching staff of freaks. And the wreckage you left behind, well, they were S.E.P., right? With many more teams and much more money involved, you can’t make a philosophy like that work anymore.
I make it a point to read up on the former major league players that pass away. And what you find is that a lot of the pitchers who had a brief major league career, or even those who had long careers but were considered fair to middling, these were guys who were great pitchers once–with unhittable fastballs–whose arms gave out, who tried to pitch through the pain because there was no other choice at the time. They were great pitchers. They just weren’t freaks.
Now the counter argument always comes back, “Look at Strasburg and Harvey. They had pitch counts, they were protected, and yet they still broke down.” And they’ll argue that they broke down BECAUSE of the pitch counts. Its wrong thinking. Its downright perverted thinking. Yes, they broke down. There is no more unnatural thing you can ask a body to do than to throw a baseball at 90+ mph. If you’re not a freak, you’re going to break down, eventually. It’s likely that, if Strasburg and Harvey had come up in the “old days”, they would have been dust in the wind long before they reached the majors. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I loved watching Harvey pitch last year. He was amazing. I wouldn’t want to have missed that for anything. I, for one, would have loved to have seen what pitchers like David Clyde, Mark Fidrych, Mike Norris and Steve McCatty could have done if they hadn’t been over used. I, for one, would have loved to see what John Glass could have done in the majors.
Nice to see so many of us who are going deep into the count commenting. Pitcher longevity is probably multifactorial. Overuse must play a role, as does mechanics and even luck. Teams develop training and use programs to fit the average pitcher. But, to Stubby’s point, I would bet that genes are decisive on both ends of the barbell. The group I run with on Saturdays includes people from their early twenties to sixties, and while the old people can’t keep up with the greyhounds, they aren’t bringing up the rear either. There’s a natural selection process that goes on in anything athletic.
Lawrence Azrin:
Men of merit exist in every generation; however, mankind in general prefer the meritorious of their own generation…..That being said, as a Grouchy Old Fart myself, I think there is a tendency to think of “aces” like Gibson, Marichal, Perry, or Jenkins as being somewhat “indicative/typical” of all their contemporaries and peers when, in reality, they may have completed better than 40% of their starts and the remainder of the rotation was nowhere as good. HOWEVER, now that teams are investing so much in guys like Cliff Lee, Sabathia, Hamels, Cain, and Kershaw, we’ll never again see even the aces rack up double-digit CG totals. And that is pretty sad since as an old man and a MLB fan since 1964, I have a frame of reference that is pretty extensive for the sake of comparing players over generations, but for the sake of comparing starting pitchers it’s like apples versus oranges.
The same holds true of the steroid generation hitters. FCS, Sammy Sosa hit 60 homers in a season three times – and never led the league in those seasons!! Who do you compare that guy to? Money changed everything – the way the game is played, the way talent is acquired, the way talent is retained….I can’t say it’s inherently worse, but if they ever got back to 24 teams, baseball would be even better 🙁
@13/Paul E,
Very well expressed. Following MLB for 45 years, I find myself entering Grouchy Old Man territory myself.
Case in pint: I think the automatic “we have the lead in a save situation entering the ninth, therefor we MUST bring in our closer” policy is ridiculous. If a pitcher is pitching well in the 8th and leading, let him try to finish (but have a short hook).
I also think you have expressed something better than I did: when the Grouchy Old Men said “real pitchers complete most of their starts”, what they REALLY MEANT was that the top aces (used to) do that. As I tried to demonstrate in my chart, run-of-the-mill starters haven’t completed the majority of their starts in a long long time.
I tried to figure out the last 200+ game winner to have CG>W – I’m guessing it’s two greats who retired in 1975, Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal. But since Marichal is 244>243, and Gibson is 255>251, I’ll give it to Gibson.
For well over a 100 years, many fans (and most owners) have kvetched how money is “ruining the game”. This often coincided with new leagues being formed (or threatening to form), and driving up salaries. I see the increase in salaries as mostly a _positive_ thing, as it frees many players from working jobs during the off-season, and allows them to train year-round. The only negative for me personally is that it drives up ticket prices :(.
I think I’m safe in saying that MLB will NEVER go back to 24 teams – the trend in all four major sports has been more teams, for many years. When’s the last time one of the major sports (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) actually contracted? This is not a rhetorical question; I know MLB contracted after 1899, but what about the other sports? (I don’t mean rival leagues folded, like the ABA, WHL, or WFL, but teams in a league simply disappeared.)
Off the top of my head the original NFL Baltimore Colts disappeared after the 1950 season.
@18/RC;
The NBA repeatedly contracted in its first ten years:
1947-48: went from 11 to 8 teams
1950-51: went from 17 to 11 teams(!) I think that was after they’d absorbed most of a rival league.
1951-52: went from 11 to 10 teams
1953-54: went from 10 to 9 teams
1954-55: went from 9 to 8 teams
The NBA didn’t reach 17 teams again till the 1970-71 season. People forget how much the NBA struggled in their first couple decades.
The NHL’s Oakland Seals/Cleveland Barons franchise folded after twelve seasons (1967-78).
Much worse than “must bring closer in save situation” is the policy of *not* bringing in your closer for a high leverage situation that isn’t a save when the starter or whoever needs to come out. I mean, if you have two closer level relievers, then it may make sense to keep the standard situations for one guy and let the other guy be your fireman (such a couple years early in Rivera’s career when he actually pitched in higher leverage situations than their closer).
But when you only have one bullpen guy that you really trust as much or more than your top starters, pitching him every time you have a 2-3 run lead at the start of the ninth, but *never* in a tie game with a runner on, etc. is just incredibly foolish strategy.
I would agree to that with one caveat. There are pitchers who do not perform well outside of their role. I’ve seen too many pitchers who are aces coming in in a tight situation with people on base who will surrender 10 runs when they come in with the bases empty in the eighth and a 3 or 4 run lead. I’ve seen some who don’t pitch well in a tie, too.
But, strategically, that seventh inning jam may be where the game is won or lost and I want my best fireman putting out that fire. So long as you know your players and what best helps them be their best.
Yeah, agreed, if you’ve got a guy who’s very comfortable and in control coming into an empty inning, but not in classic fireman situations, then maybe the traditional closer is the right role, but it’s should depend on your staff, and I have to think that most pitchers who can thrive as a classic closer could also do quite well coming in to fight fires in the 7th and 8th, and probably should be used that way at times. If relief pitchers were judged by WAR/WPA and not ERA/SV/SV%, it wouldn’t potentially hurt their careers to be used correctly.