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August 6, 2007

Prospectus Today

Learning from Experience

by Joe Sheehan

I might owe someone an apology.

Remains the Atlanta starter most likely to “go Mulholland.” Fair or not, much of Glavine’s success has come from exploiting umpires who call pitches six inches outside “strikes.” The day that pitch becomes a ball again, Glavine loses a big chunk of his value. Not only will he then have to get hitters out in a conventional fashion, but he’ll have to unlearn on the fly a way of pitching he’s grown accustomed to.

That’s the Tom Glavine player comment from Baseball Prospectus 1998, and it’s my handiwork. For those of you who don’t remember the other left-hander, to “go Mulholland” means to blow up suddenly and inexplicably, with career-altering results, as Mulholland did in 1994.

Suffice to say that Glavine avoided this fate. In the season after this was written, the Braves left-hander posted the lowest ERA of his career and picked up his second NL Cy Young Award. Rather than going Terry Mulholland, Glavine has gone Don Sutton, remaning healthy and effective for a decade past his peak, putting up above-average ERAs for good teams, and virtually never missing a start. Glavine’s durability is his calling card; he’s third among active pitchers with 659 career starts, and that has been the key to his reaching 300 wins on Sunday night in Chicago.

Glavine has been credited with 147 wins since I wrote the comment above. His post-1997 performance, what he’s done since I wrote him off, would be worth $150 million or more to a pitcher who had never experienced the first half of Glavine’s career:

                        W   L     ERA     IP       WARP3 
Pre-silly comment     153  99    3.60   2076.1      67.2
Post-silly comment    147  98    3.39   2217.1      65.6