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June 30, 2009

You Could Look It Up

Lest We Forget

by Steven Goldman

In yesterday's Pinstriped Bible, I used BP's list of wins added by relievers (WXRL) as a way of demonstrating the uniqueness of Mariano Rivera's career, this on the occasion of his 500^th save. I picked an arbitrary cutoff, the top 200 seasons as ranked by that statistic, and counted how many times each pitcher appeared on the list, dropping those that only made it to the top 200 once or twice. Seventy-eight pitchers made the list just once, and another 24 got there twice. The list of the remaining 74:

3 Bruce Sutter
3 Eric Gagne
3 John Smoltz
3 Keith Foulke
3 Lee Smith
3 Lindy McDaniel
3 Randy Myers
3 Rollie Fingers
3 Stu Miller
4 Billy Wagner
4 Dan Quisenberry
4 Francisco Rodriguez
4 Joe Nathan
4 Trevor Hoffman
4 Troy Percival
4 Tug McGraw
5 Armando Benitez
5 Goose Gossage
9 Mariano Rivera

As you can see, Rivera appears almost twice as often as any other pitcher. In doing this bit of sorting, I became intrigued by some of the other seasons on the list. It's no surprise to see Gossage, Fingers, and Quisenberry on a list like this, but there are several others whose work doesn't see much chatter despite being of a kind and quality that is not often seen. Below, a quartet of the unremarked great relief seasons, if not always by great relievers.

John Hiller (1973: 9.6 WXRL, the best mark in MLB history)
According to WXRL, in 1973 Hiller had the greatest relief season of the last 55 years, which probably means it was also the greatest relief season of all time. No one ever talks about this season as the amazing thing it was. It was not only a great season, but also a spectacularly unlikely one, but not because Hiller wasn't a good pitcher—he was. Through 1972, his career ERA in 179 games was 2.89, good even for the period in which he compiled it, 1965 to 1972. Rather, his season was so unlikely because he had missed all of 1971 and almost half of 1972 recovering from the massive heart attack he suffered in January of '71. The Canadian was 27 at the time. That Hiller lived was a miracle; that he came back was extraordinary; that he had the season he did was, well, you can pick your own superlative. Thanks to manager Billy Martin, perhaps the only manager in history unlikely to coddle a pitcher after heart surgery, Hiller appeared in a league-leading 65 games. He was fine with the workload. "I rested long enough when I had the heart attack," he said. He won 10 of them and saved another 38—the latter a major league record—and his ERA was 1.44. Using his good fastball to set up his changeup, he struck out 124 batters in 125 1/3 innings.

The next season, under manager Ralph Houk, Hiller went 17-14 in 150 innings, saving only 13 games (Houk was never very good at using his best relievers with an eye towards the saves rule, which was a mixed blessing). Many of the pitchers on the WXRL leader list are like Hiller, 1970s and '80s relievers who thought nothing of working more than 100 innings in a season. In the decade of the 1960s there were 84 relief campaigns in which pen men threw over 100 IP, led by Eddie Fisher's 165 1/3 for the 1965 White Sox. Mike Marshall's record-setting (and permanent record) 208 1/3 innings of 1974 led the '70s, when 124 relievers did the trick. There were 137 of them in the 1980s, with Bob Stanley's 168 1/3 innings in 1982 taking the prize for most work in a single season (Ralph Houk was at work again in that particular case). Something changed in the late '80s or early '90s, perhaps due to Bruce Sutter's highly publicized arm problems after he pitched 122 2/3 innings for the 1984 Cardinals. The Braves signed him as a free agent and took a bath as he was mostly unable to pitch, and when he did, it wasn't with his former flair. Or maybe it was just that Ralph Houk retired after the 1984 season. In the 1990s there were only 30 relief seasons of 100 or more innings, with Duane Ward's 127 2/3 innings of 1990 checking in as the highest single-season workload.

One-hundred-inning relief seasons have all but become extinct in our current century. Only six relievers have done the deed in the Aughties, with the great Steve Sparks leading the pack at 107 innings in 2003. The last pitcher to break the C-barrier was Joe Torre darling Scott Proctor in 2006. Unsurprisingly, the reliever most likely to dethrone Proctor's place as the last C-achiever is current Torre pitcher Ramon Troncoso; the right-hander has pitched 50 innings through the Dodgers' 77^th game. The lack of 100-inning seasons by top relievers prevents most of today's relievers from touching the upper reaches of the list. Of the top ten WXRL seasons, five are by 100-inning pitchers, and 67 of the top 200 relief seasons were entered by such pitchers.