Cy Seymour was arguably one of the best pitchers turned hitters that baseball has seen, yet he remains almost forgotten. Before he was a centerfielder, the 1905 NL batting champ started his career as pitcher in 1896. Seymour pitched 3 full seasons and had the league leading strikeout rate in all three. Even though Seymour’s career strikeout rate does not look impressive, when strikeouts are normalized, his rate is the best baseball has ever seen (1871-2011 min. 1000 IP). (For a biography and analysis of Seymour’s career, see this wonderful piece by Bill Kirwin.)

Andy’s recent posts on normalizing strikeouts piqued my interest and I thought that it might be interesting to normalize the strikeouts for every pitcher in major league history. This was done by using the Lahman Database and applying the following method:

• For each league in each season I calculated the league rate of SO/IP.
• Each player in that league was assigned an expected number of strikeouts based on his IP  that season.
• Each player’s season-by-season expected strikeouts were added up for his career and compared it to his actual career totals.

Using this method provides us with the following leaders in ratio of SO:Expected SO (min. 1000 IP)  since 1871. Continue reading →

Sky Kalkman has just released an announcement of a new eBook called the The Hall of Very Good. The project is hosted by Kickstarter and if they reach their pledge level the book will be produced by July. Please follow the link, check it out, and if you’re interested, pledge your support.

This sort of e-publishing is a great way to support the writing community.

I am thinking of doing such a publication myself–one that gets pledged beforehand to ensure that there’s enough interest. Any folks out there think this is a particularly good or bad idea? I’ll need people who can help me with artwork, e-publishing, etc–feel free to let me know if you’re interested.

I found a straightforward way to redo the normalized strikeout rate study. Check out my previous post on the subject for the rationale.

For those who care, here is the updated method:

• Instead of taking a single league-average K/9 rate, I took 5 numbers for each player’s career–the league average from his first season, his final season, as well as the points 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 through his career. I then averaged those numbers and used that as the league average for that given player. This is of course not entirely precise, but is really a very good approximation.
• I made a lookup table in Excel, which made this exercise a lot easier. I then just listed one set of numbers for the league-average K/9 rate in each season, and then for each player did 5 lookups to get his 5 numbers.
• By using this method, it was easy to put the top 200 pitchers (by innings pitched) into the table. I could easily do more, as well.

Click through for the results. Continue reading →

UPDATE: I finally found a good workaround that has restored email service. I still don’t understand exactly what went wrong, but it was probably related to the extra spam filter I installed yesterday. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Folks, I am having some major problems with the site, specifically with comment email notification. I am not receiving them anymore but cannot figure out why.

Those of you who subscribe to comments on specific posts–are you still receiving those email notifications? (I am guessing not.)

I also don’t know how to fix this problem–I have done a lot of research on it but have not been able to solve things. I am not going to be writing any more if/until I can get this fixed. If you are a WordPress/PHP whiz and think you can help, comment on this thread and I’ll email you.

Tom Glavine feeling the pain / Icon SMI

As strikeouts have become so much more frequent than they used to be, it’s useful to gain a little perspective on how the K rates of some of the best pitchers compare to the typical rates of their own era.

We know that guys like Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux were not strikeout artists, instead using fantastic control to position pitches precisely and (more often than not) induce weak ground or fly balls.

But how do these guys compare to others?

Click through to find out.

Continue reading →

Readers of his blog and its predecessor, the Baseball-Reference.com blog, will be very saddened to read the following note posted recently on another thread:

Frank Clingenpeel, Junior says:

February 20, 2012 at 8:15 pm

I am using this blog to present some other news — at least, for the folks here. Forgive me if this is inappropriate for this, but if you remember Frank Clingenpeel, Senior, I am his son. Dad also died last week from heart failure at the age of 84.

Again, forgive me if this is inappropriate, but I thought you would like to know.

Frank contributed so many wonderful stories on these pages–I wouldn’t even know where to begin. One that always sticks in my mind, though, is the fact that Frank’s father attended Johnny Vander Meer’s second no-hitter.

I’m sure I echo everyone’s sentiments in expressing my appreciation for what Frank brought to all of us and my condolences to all of his family.

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.

Continue reading →

Icon SMI

Here’s a very trim-looking C.C. Sabathia working with newly-acquired Michael Pineda during spring training.

Dennis Martinez / Icon SMI

On this holiday, I always think of Dennis Martinez, because he’s the obvious player to consider when thinking of baseball “presidents”.

It has been well-documented that Martinez struggled with alcohol in the early part of his career and apparently it significantly affected his performance. For the first half of his career (1976-1986), he had a 92 ERA+ over 1873 innings. From when he joined the Expos onward (1987-1998) he had a 122 ERA+ over 2126 innings.

Think how good he would have been if he’d been better during his prime years.

Here’s on quick way of showing how marked his career age split is. Continue reading →

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:

• Continue reading →