Search features for accessing the archive of HHS posts have been expanded. Click the Search link at the top of the HHS main page to try them out. More details are after the jump.
The Search facility includes:
- a free format text search of all posts and comments
- NEW: searching of posts based on classification category
An initial set of classification categories is shown on the Search page. Feel free to suggest other categories, or sub-categories within those shown.
At present, I’ve classified posts since 2016 and will continue with older posts going forward. Please note that some older posts used a tool to format data into tables. Since the site rebuild after the crash in late 2016, this tool is no longer supported and those tables are not displayed in the articles. As a longer term objective, I will endeavor to update those articles where I can identify and locate the original source data that was displayed in the tables.
Wonderful! The Research and Analysis section alone is a big addition — it makes HHS research accessible for browsing, so that we can use and revisit the data brought together in these entries. I’ve been having fun looking through some of the other categories too. I think this is a lot more useful than a simple keyword search function (which is still available). HHS active participants have been thinning, especially since the 2016 site crash, but I hope the work Doug has put in here can lay the basis for better discussions and an easier path for people who first come to the site to find out what we’re about.
This was a lot of work to do while managing the CoG process (including all those embedded quiz items, which must take up a tremendous amount of time and effort). Thank you, Doug!
This is really neat work – thank you, Doug. Naturally, I went straight to the CoG category, but it’s good to see the others too.
I’d like to illustrate the pleasures of Doug’s topical search index.
A few entries down on the “Research & Analysis” list is an article Doug posted called, Best ‘Bad’ Pitching Seasons, which didn’t receive the attention it deserved. Doug was identifying a list of good pitching seasons where the quality of the team deeply undermined the pitcher’s stats. His parameters were narrow, and the discussion actually all focused on two seasons excluded from Doug’s list: Nolan Ryan in 1987, which Richard brought up, and Turk Farrell in 1962, which nsb and I thought of. Then discussion stopped before we ever got to digging into the names and seasons that were on Doug’s list (one of the best of which actually related to our later CoG discussions: a fine 10-15/131 ERA+ season by Ted Lyons).
Poking around Doug’s new search index and seeing that thread, I went to explore Farrell’s 10-20 1962 season in more depth – it is, in fact, by far the greatest 30/+-decision sub-.400 pitching season ever compiled, both by WAR (7.0) and by ERA+ (124) – but what caught my eye while doing that was an even better season by a pitcher named Ned Garver, when I let the percentage rise above .400. It’s Garver I want to write about here (Garver also appeared on Doug’s list).
Garver’s great season came in 1950, when he went 13-18 (.419), while generating a league-leading 7.3 pWAR and a league-leading ERA+ of 146. His team, the Browns, went 58-96 (.377), while finishing seventh in an eight-team league. Garver would not have been surprised: the year before, he had a solid 114 ERA+, while going 12-17 (.414) for the .344 Brownies, and in 1948, his rookie year, he made Doug’s list with a 7-11 (.389) debut for a .386 team – you’d never guess he contributed a 133 ERA+. So after his first three years, Garver was 32-46 (.410), despite having an ERA+ of 131 and 16.0 WAR.
But in 1951, things changed. Garver won 20 games for a 52-102 (.338) last-place Browns team. Even though Garver’s 20-12 record looks far better than his earlier years, in fact it was not: his ERA+ was a solid 118, but well below his career average to that point, and he earned “only” 5.6 pWAR, 1.7 less than 1950 (but still a league-leading figure). What accounts for the twenty wins is pretty simple: Bill Veeck, who owned the Browns at the time, explains it in his book. The Browns were such a complete loss, that the only thing for the team to aim for was Garver’s 20 wins, the quest for which could draw fans and sell tickets. Therefore, under no circumstances would manager Zach Taylor remove Garver if he had a chance to win, and Garver would frequently pitch well past the point where he would normally have been relieved. Veeck notes this was not very hard to manage because Garver was also the best hitter on the Browns – he batted .305 with a 109 OPS+, ten points higher than any regular, and 27 points higher than the team’s non-pitcher OPS+. In fact, Garver added 1.2 batting WAR, for a total WAR of 6.8, second in the league, just 0.4 behind Ted Williams.
What I had never realized is that Garver almost earned the MVP for that 1951 year: he tied with Yogi and Allie Reynolds for first place votes, and placed second in total points, with a 47% share to Yogi’s winning 55%. I believe that if Garver had won that award, he’d be widely remembered for his exceptional career – terrific pitcher caught on execrable teams – instead of being largely forgotten today.
To add a further point, a year earlier, in 1950, Garver placed in a tie for 24th place in the MVP vote, almost ignored. But in that year, Garver not only led the league in pWAR with 7.3, he was also hitting well and his total WAR was 8.2, a full 1.5 higher than MVP winner Phil Rizzuto or anyone else (he was the MLB leader). In the pre-CYA era of MVP voting, a season like that would probably have made him a lock for the MVP if he’d been on a decent team, or even a mediocre one in a big-market city.
In fact, over his 14-year career, Garver was never on a first-division team. The seventh place 1952 Browns traded him to the eighth-place Tigers towards the end of the season, and just as the Tigers began to compete, in 1956, Garver was injured, out virtually the whole season, and woke up in 1957 a proud member of the great Kansas City Athletics (that’s how I remember him – a losing pitcher on a losing team, but with an odd 20-win season in his past). He stayed with the A’s through 1960, at which point they traded him to another losing team, the new expansion LA Angels, where he brought his career to a quick close in early June.
If we knock out Garver’s 1956 season (17 IP) and his last season, 1961 (29 IP), Garver’s teams registered a W-L percentage of .407, while he went .464, with 129 wins and a 113 OPS+ (which suggests his W-L pct. should have been about 100 points higher). That seems an unusual combination of long-suffering effectiveness, given the circumstances, and it seems to me that Garver deserves a little more recognition than he usually gets (at least from what I can see), especially for a nearly 300-decision pitcher from his era. After all, Garver was his league’s pWAR leader for consecutive seasons and led the Majors in total WAR as a 24 year-old in 1950, with a 13-18 pitching record.
So then, when I went back to look at Doug’s search index, the “Obituaries” section caught my eye – I’d noticed that Garver died last year at 91, and I wondered, “Did we do an obit for this guy? He certainly seems worth it.” As it turns out, Doug’s index reveals that we didn’t. I liked Garver as a kid (not that I was aware of any of this at the time: something about his ‘58 Topps card, I think, or that he was a Christmas baby – such is kidness), so I thought I’d catch us up with this belated Garver-memorial riff on Doug’s research piece.
I do remember there was a bit of controversy concerning the MVP vote in 1950, centered about Rizzuto and Garver. Many argued that because Garver pitched for a 7th place team he should not have been too seriously considered. Rizzuto was at the peak of his popularity that year and played for a pennant-winning team which also happened to be the Yankees. Offensively and defensively he was outstanding. IIRC he set a then record consecutive streak for errorless games for a SS that year. I might add that his popularity led to his being selected as the first mystery guest on the old TV quiz show “What’s My Line?” the following winter.
Richard, your memory is longer than mine by several years (I remember your recollection of hearing the outcome of the ’47 Series), but I wonder whether you might not be conflating ’50 and ’51. Garver seems to have received little notice in Rizzuto’s year (only advanced stats show how good he was), but with his 20 wins, Garver was in the thick of it in ’51, when Yogi prevailed as MVP.
More important, I’m wondering whether you watched Scooter on “What’s My Line?”
epm: You are right, the controversy was between Berra and Garver in 1951. No, I did not see the Scooter on that particular show, but of course there was no advance notice
Well, thanks to the modern miracle of YouTube, Rizzuto’s appearance on the debut of “What’s My Line” is available for us all to wonder at (skip to about 24:00). (It really is a hoot: Rizzuto was singlehandedly unmasked by a 1930s Governor of New Jersey — not the sort of panelist you’d expect later in the show’s history.)
Not having anything better to do at the moment I decided to have some fun and get a list of baseball related people who appeared as mystery guests on that show. Here it is.
Phil Rizzuto
Ted Williams
Joe DiMaggio
Roy Campanella
Dizzy Dean
Jackie Robinson
Sal Maglie
Chuck Dressen
Willie Mays
Branch Rickey
Ralph Houk
Casey Stengel
Russ Hodges (radio and TV announcer)
Duke Snider
Leo Durocher
Robin Roberts
Ford Frick
Bonnie Baker (female professional baseball player)
Durocher appeared on 5/31/53. His wife, actress Laraine Day, was one of the panelists who had to guess the mystery person. The panelists were blindfolded and Durocher answered questions with a disguised voice. Day was unable to guess him, but panelist Steve Allen did.
Ah, epm beat me to the Rizzuto link.
Well, here it is, cued up:
https://youtu.be/Nw5IwQ2mLX4?t=24m13s
As for Garver, he did have a couple of 100+ ops+ seasons, eight years apart.
The 7 years in between?
.177 / .245 / .215 / .459 / 27
And at about 27:20, the host asks Scooter what he does during the offseason.
He answers that he works in a clothing store in Newark.
Yogi Berra also worked there.
True enough, Voomo. But remember, Garver was a pitcher. That 27 OPS+ from 1952-58 still earned 0.8 oWAR. What makes Garver stand out is the 4.0 oWAR that he contributed in his five good hitting seasons, 3.2 in his initial four seasons, which is the period I was describing.
Garver’s lifetime 52 OPS+ may seem weak, but he actually ranks #29 among pitchers with 900+ PA (eliminating crossover players by screening for 90% of games as pitcher or pinch hitter/runner). True pitchers are really bad hitters at the MLB level. No pitcher able to sustain a career as long as Garver’s ever exceeded 100 OPS+ — George Mullin and Wes Ferrell lead with that figure exactly, and they are 12 ahead of the second-runner up, Schoolboy Rowe. You make the Top 100 if you have an OPS+ of 15.
Another related season would be Dick Donovan’s 1961 season with the expansion Washington Senators. Donovan led the league in ERA, ERA+ and WHIP (the only “good” black ink for a pitcher on an expansion team in its maiden season), one of 99 pitchers with that trifecta, but the only one to do so for a team with a sub-.400 record. Bennie Daniels (12-11) was the only pitcher on that Senators’ team with a winning record; ironically he holds the franchise record for lowest career W-L% (min. 50 decisions).
Ah, best seasons by WAR, just eyeballing the recent expansion teams:
7.0 … Turk Farrell (Colt .45s)
5.2 … Ken McBride (Angels)
4.2 … Dick Donovan
4.2 … Wally Bunker (K.C.)
4.1 … Rolando Arroyo (St. Pete)
4.0 … Bryan Harvey (Miami) (in relief)
3.9 … Don McMahon (Colt .45s)
3.1 … Armando Reynoso (Denver)
3.1 … Andy Benes (Phoenix)
3.0 … Moe Drabowsky (K.C.) (in relief)
3.0 … Roger Craig (Mets)
3.0 … Al Jackson (Mets)
2.3 … Joe Neikro (Sandy Eggo) (and he didn’t start the season with them)
0.5 … Jim Bouton (Pilots)
Yeah. Farrell’s season was what originally attracted my attention. As for Donovan, after that great/awful season in Washington, he was traded to Cleveland, where went 20-10 with a mediocre ERA (his ERA+ dropped from 163 to 107). I remember his being asked which was better, the ERA crown or 20 wins. He said there was no contest: Wins.
Interesting read about Turk Farrell. He was a polio victim as a child, resulting in stunted growth of his left leg and foot (his plant leg on his delivery). Received regular hospital treatments until age 18, and walked with a limp the rest of his life.