This one gets trotted out every year, so why not now? On September 27, 1963, the Houston Colt .45’s started an all-rookie lineup, all age 21 or under. Here’s their box score, with age (years.days), year in MLB, career game number, and a few notes: Continue reading
If asked to name a team with a young starting lineup, you might think of last year’s Royals (with 2 first-year players, and no regulars over age 27); or one of the famous “fire-sale” remnants like the 1999 Marlins or 1917 Athletics (neither had a single PA by a nonpitcher who had seen his 30th birthday); or the 1950 Phillies‘ “Whiz Kids”; or maybe the ’78 Tigers, breaking in Alan Trammell (20), Lou Whitaker (21) and Lance Parrish (22) alongside veterans Jason Thompson and Steve Kemp (both 23).
If a pitcher never gets more than 17 wins in a season and retires at age 34, what are his chances of winning 200?
Since 1945, eleven pitchers have reached 200 wins by their age-33 season. Ten of them had a 20-win season by the time they won #200, and nine did it more than once, totaling forty-four 20-win seasons. The 11th guy just plugged away: Continue reading
Note: I’ve added a 4th graph at the end of the post, covering only the years 1982-2011.
A couple of graphs relating bWAR/age, and OPS+/age. I’ll leave the observations to you folks.
(1) As a general followup to the graphs in my Ryan Zimmerman post, here’s a graph showing the number of seasons of four different WAR levels, for all position players, for the years 1901-2011:
ESPN reports that the Nationals and Ryan Zimmerman have agreed to a 6-year, $100-million contract extension, with a full no-trade clause. The deal is for the years 2014-19, when he’ll be age 29-34.
That’s right: Zimmerman was already signed through next year for a total of $26 million.
If you’e reading this, you know what a star pitcher CC Sabathia is today. In each of the last 6 years, Sabathia has qualified for the ERA title with an ERA+ of at least 136. He’s the only pitcher since 1901 with a qualifying ERA+ of at least 130 in each of his 6th through 11th years. (For the rest of this post, I’ll use the term “star season” to mean a year qualified for the ERA title with ERA+ of at least 130.)
But before he became a star, Sabathia was a rotation fixture for 5 middling years, averaging a 107 ERA+ in 195 innings. His best season ERA+ was 122; the other 4 years fell in the range of 100-106. Those first 5 years were remarkably similar all-around: starts ranged from 30 to 33, IP from 180 to 210, strikeouts from 139 to 171, HRs from 17 to 20.
During his early years, many folks in Cleveland and throughout baseball thought it was only a matter of time before he became an elite pitcher. However, the studies I’ve just done studies that suggest that, after 5 years without significant improvement, it was historically quite unlikely that Sabathia would become a star.
Tim Wakefield announced his retirement last week, joining Chuck Finley and George Uhle as pitchers who finished with exactly 200 wins, and Dennis Martinez & Milt Pappas as those who got there without ever winning more than 17 in a season. Wakefield also wound up 6 wins shy of the Red Sox franchise record, shared by a couple of no-names, Cy Young and Roger Clemens.
At the end of 2011, Wakefield was MLB’s active leader in nine pitching categories:
In 2011, a player in the NL East had a two-piece statistical combination that had only been done twice before in MLB history.
Who did what?
(Note: The mystery has been solved — congrats to jsg — click “Read the rest…” for the answer.)
From Tim Kurkjian’s appreciation of Gary Carter:
“People ask me who is the best catcher I ever threw to, and the answer is always Gary Carter,” said Ed Lynch, who pitched for the Mets when Carter was with the team. “I don’t say that because he was a great caller of games, or that he blocked every ball in the dirt, or that he caught every game. I say that because every game I pitched, he hit a three-run homer.”
Now, that’s obvious hyperbole; he doesn’t mean that Carter hit a 3-run HR literally every game that Lynch pitched. But I had to chuckle on discovering that Carter never hit a 3-run HR or grand slam in a game that Lynch pitched.
Since 1919, what single-game result was achieved only by Kevin Appier, Bob Sebra and Ken Johnson?
(I can never keep you folks down for long. Congratulations to CursedClevelander. For the answer, click “Read the rest of this entry.”)