January 9, 2007

The Class of 2007

The Pitchers

by Jay Jaffe

After the double-wide load of hitters on the 2007 Hall of Fame ballot, we wrap up this year's JAWS series with the pitchers. Though this year's crop is relatively sparse, it's not without a couple of candidates who deserve better than the treatment they've gotten thus far from the voters. The good news is that the tide may have finally turned.

We'll dispense with the introductory formalities (you can read last year's pieces here and here) and cut to the chase. As with the hitters, we'll consider career WARP and peak WARP--the adjusted for all time flavor, WARP3--with the latter defined as a pitcher's best seven years. Just as we eliminated the worst elected Hall of Famer at each position in determining the JAWS standards, we'll exclude a similar percentage of pitchers--four out of the 60, in this case. In examining these pitchers, we'll also use Pitching Runs Above Average (PRAA) because it forms a reasonable secondary measure for "peak" in conjunction with PRAR's "career" proxy. A pitcher with many PRAA but fewer PRAR likely had a high peak and a short career, while one with the same number of PRAA but more PRAR likely had a longer career. Although durability should not be confused with excellence, league average has value, as anybody who's ever suffered through a fifth starter's pummeling knows.

This year's pitching segment has one more wrinkle. On the advice of WARP creator Clay Davenport, the pitching portion of this year's edition of JAWS includes a downward adjustment for pitchers in the AL after 1973 to counteract the negative hitting contributions of their non-DH brethren. This prevents the system from overly favoring recent AL pitchers, but the consequence is that the career and peak JAWS scores won't match what you can pull from the DT pages on our site. I'd prefer the transparency, but in terms of evaluating the cases on the current ballot, the need for this "tax" wins out.

Starters

             W    L     IP    ERA    ERA+  AS CY  3C   HOFS   HOFM    BAL   2006%
Blyleven    287  250   4970   3.31   118   2   0   0   50.0   120.5     9    53.3
Hershiser   204  150   3130   3.48   112   3   1   1   34.0    90.5     1    11.2
John        288  231   4710   3.34   111   4   0   0   44.0   111.0    12    29.6
Morris      254  186   3824   3.90   105   5   0   3   39.0   122.5     7    41.2
Saberhagen  167  117   2563   3.34   126   3   2   0   32.0    70.5
Witt        142  157   2465   4.83    90   0   0   0   11.0     7.0

Last       PRAA   PRAR   WARP3   PEAK   JAWS
Blyleven    296   1492   131.0   63.0   97.0
Hershiser   126    850    85.5   55.4   70.5
John         96   1104   103.4   45.8   74.6
Morris        7    932    78.5   48.4   63.5
Saberhagen  251    866    85.6   57.8   71.7
Witt       -111    535    43.5   31.6   37.6
AVG HOF SP  244   1041    99.0   62.7   80.9

First to the ballot's newcomers. Since I started doing this four ballots ago, one central tenet of the JAWS project is due process. Even when the numbers are enough to dismiss a candidate outright, every dog has his day, a few sentences to sum up his career and a moment to reckon with his legacy. But seriously, Bobby Witt? According to Hall of Fame rules, any player such as Witt who met the requirement of playing 10 major league seasons also had to be nominated by two members of a six-member Screening Committee of BBWAA writers. This isn't an automatic; looking at the Hall web page's list of players eligible for future elections, Witt got a nomination this year, where Jeff Brantley, Derek Bell, Darryl Hamilton, Pete Harnisch, Charlie Hayes, Glenallen Hill, Ken Hill, Stan Javier, Ramon Martinez (Pedro's brother), Gregg Olson, Jeff Shaw, and Kevin Tapani did not. Considering only the pitchers for a moment, none of the slighted finished with a PRAA below zero, let alone more than 100 runs below average, and none finished with a peak score as low as Witt's. This ballot should have been Wittless, yet it's clearly more witless than that.

If we must... Witt was the kind of pitcher who drives managers to drink, a promising flamethrower--good enough to be picked third in the 1985 draft--whose wildness was legendary. Arriving in the majors after just 35 minor-league innings, Witt cast the die pretty quickly; in just his second major league start he tossed five hitless innings...while walking eight and striking out 10. He finished the 1986 season with 157.2 innings pitched, 175 strikeouts, and 143 walks. Same story the next year. He walked over 100 hitters for five straight years, but put things together in 1990, striking out 221 and walking "only" 110 in 222 innings, good for a 17-10, 3.36 ERA season worth 6.4 WARP. He never again pitched so well. Traded to Oakland in the Jose Canseco deal, he settled into a journeyman career, eating innings, walking hitters---he led the AL three times, and is 22nd all-time--and running up ERAs in the neighborhood of 5.00. In the words of George Stallings and my late grandfather, "Oh, those bases on balls!"

Bret Saberhagen was a more successful prodigy; he was a week shy of his 20th birthday when he debuted for the 1984 Royals. The timing couldn't have been better for the franchise, which had missed the playoffs twice in a row after winning the division (or in the case of the '81 strike, a share of it) in five of the previous six years. Along with Saberhagen, the Royals also came up with two other rookie hurlers, Danny Jackson and Mark Gubicza, and while none was instrumental in the team's return to the top of the AL West that year, they all played a major role in helping the Royals to their first World Championship the following season. Saberhagen led the way, winning the AL Cy Young award on the strength of a 20-6, 2.87 ERA season (10.2 WARP) and the World Series MVP thanks to complete game victories in Games Three and Seven, the latter a shutout.

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