Bob: Pitching wins and team wins are, of course, two different things by definition, and while we all know that, it is easy to refer to the one as the other in casual discussion. Most of the time the attribution over the course of a season isn’t far off in terms of how the two align, but sometimes the truth is more subtle. In 1967 Mike McCormick went 20-10 in his starts, getting 2 relief Ws as well, on his way to one of those Cy Young Award anomalies. This isn’t to say that he didn’t have a good year.… Read more »

You may well be right concerning McCormack vs. Perry, nsb, and there was a lot of sentiment for McCormack in the Cy vote too, since it was a come-back year for him. But let’s look at it from the point of view of advanced stats. (I’m just going to do this for the two Giants.) From pWAR’s standpoint, the difference seems to have involved uniform small advantages for Perry. Here are comparisons of key pWAR measures, with McCormack first and Perry second: ………………M…….P RA9………3.02…3.01 RA9opp…3.81…3.88 RA9def….0.12…0.11 PPFp……….99…101 RA9avg…3.69…3.84 So Perry allowed a smidgen fewer runs per nine, he faced teams… Read more »

McCormick “performed consistently from May to September . . .” I don’t see this, nsb. McCormick’s record in May was 2-1 in games started (he picked up a relief win on one IP) with a 3.47 ERA. His record in September was 3-2 (plus a 1 IP relief loss) with a 4.15 ERA. (Bear in mind the NL ERA in ’67 was 3.38.) McCormick’s April was a disaster: only two starts and 8.1 IP with a 9.72 ERA, and his so-so May record didn’t see him get past 7.1 IP in any game — in his six starts he averaged… Read more »

Oddly, I was thinking of John just yesterday when noting the multiple 40-hit games played on Friday. My thought was, “What a great day for John to write his daily Game Notes!” He was a real treasure on this site, but I think — and hope — that going cold turkey on us gave him more time for his family. He’d gone so over the top that I pictured his family planning an intervention. I saw him post on Fangraphs after he disappeared from HHS and I worried he was getting back in the game, but then he disappeared from… Read more »

My last word, nsb, is that this has been a stimulating back-and-forth for me, as it always is when you are involved. I look forward to your full-time return here, although I can’t really say I look forward to November.

It is a major defect of James’s Win Shares (the book) that it includes no index for its 700+ pages. However, The New Bill James Historical Abstract does have an index, and nowhere in that 900+ page book does James make such a statement. (Of course, James wrote a huge amount outside those two books, but nothing else is on my shelf.) But on pages 941 and 943 of the “Historical Abstract” there are charts of pitcher win shares by year for the 1980’s and ’90s, and for Clemens, 1996 is clearly a turning point. From 1985 to 1992, James… Read more »

I don’t want to relitigate PEDs, Paul, but Caminiti and Canseco are the last players whose word I’d want to rely on (tied with many others for last place). What do you think Dazzy Vance was “using?” His story isn’t mysterious: a minor non-baseball arm injury led to an operation that uncovered and addressed a previous injury that had semi-disabled him. There are parts of pWAR I do not recall or perhaps understand, but the main components for starting pitchers are not abstruse. These are: Runs Allowed per 9IP normed against three primary factors: batting strength of specific opposing teams;… Read more »

Ah. The original “Historical Abstract.” I don’t have that one. I was referring to the indexless Win Shares and citing figures, like you, from the “New” Historical Abstract, which we both possess. (Don’t bother searching the index for that statement; I already have.) When James made that 2002 statement about Clemens as possibly the greatest of all time he would not have been aware of the PED use from 1998 on that has been documented in the “Mitchell Report” and elsewhere (and always denied by Clemens). That’s precisely the problem I see as most important about PEDs: the distortion of… Read more »

BTW, James lists the greatest individual seasons by pitchers within each decade since the 1870’s through 1999. I believe 10 or 11 of his 13 Win Shares ‘champions’ are also pWAR bests for each decade.