Mote deserving than Stieb..equal to Doc.. Both belong in the Hall. Both being Golden and Max

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Would have loved to have seen them play, but goddamnit, if Horlen and Tommy John and company could have won like four more games apiece over the span of three years, we could have went to two World Series!

They needed to be better than really good, and they weren't.

Doc = yes
Stieb = no.

Nolan Ryan is far from a great pitcher but a spectacular pitcher? What kind of fuzzy logic are you trying to use? A quick reference scan of the Baseball Reference .com shows that his Black Ink Score was a 84 while the average HOFer is a 40. His gray ink score was a 254 while the average HOFer was a 185. His JAWS score puts him at 30th of all time as a starting pitcher. I am not going any further but you get the point. The fact of the matter is that Nolan Ryan was a great pitcher who damn near had a .500 record for his career which is what you boldly challenged me to do.

You don't think run support affects a pitcher's won/loss record? That is spectacularly poor logic.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

if Nolan Ryan was so great, how did so many less than great pitchers win the games he was in?

What you're calling "run support" is really just runs. Runs allowed by the opposing pitcher(s). "Run support" is a useless construction, similar to "high rate of speed" or other jargon intended to make the user seem knowledgeable. What you're doing can be boiled down to saying, "the team that scores more usually wins." But you're saying it in a different way that doesn't seem so stupidly obvious. The fact is that Nolan Ryan gave up more runs than the opposing pitcher far too often for me to call him "great".

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

Your rationale would work if all teams were equally proficient in batting.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

I love Nolan like the next guy but he must have been incredibly unlucky in the offensive teammates department. I guess for each year you could compare his teams runs to the mean?

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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Except the difference between offenses within the space of a single game is negligible and largely due to the pitcher(s) the offenses are facing. That's how Steve Carlton can win 27 games pitching for a 55 win team.

Look at it this way. Not all NFL defenses are equal, right? Now imagine that a quarterback was only capable of playing every four games and teams had a rotation. Do you think the games that Brady played would likely be the ones the Patriots lost? And if he did lose, would you say he "lacked defense support" or would you say that Manning or Flacco outplayed him?

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

Where you play matters. Gary Peters wouldn't have had the same ERA he had pitching half his games in Comiskey if he had had to pitch those games in Fenway.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

If Brady played 4 games and the team averaged 30 pts a game yet they went 1-3 since the defense allowed 36 per game in his 4 games, I would definitely not hold that against Brady. What were the TD to interceptions? How good were the defenses that Brady played against? What is the quality of the skill position players on the Pats? Do the Giants and Ravens have a good running game? How many penalties did each team have? How many drops did each team have? Lots of variable to consider.

To simply look at the Win/Loss record doesn't tell the whole picture as to who is the better player.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

On Baseball Reference the 2015 Sox page claims the Sox scored 686 total runs. The pitchers gave up total 715 runs. I guess you can say any pitcher would likely have less likely run support from another team but so did Sale that year.

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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Right now for all starters with at least 80 IP, the range of run support is from a low of 2.79 to a high of 6.04. I am no statistics expert but I would bet that the win probability difference for a team scoring 3 runs versus 5 runs is significant.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

So now you're not looking at the offensive capability of the team, you're focusing on what they score in a particular guy's games all while ignoring the opposing pitchers. If you're not better than most pitchers you face, how good can you be?

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

2795 walks might have been a reason Ryan struggled at times

Of course.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

Do "great" pitchers lead the league in walks 10 times? Irrespective of run support, opposing pitchers and such? Seems to me the nuts and bolts of the argument is The man got himself into jams.

Saying he was not great but he was spectacular is a good summation.

LOL- Yes, I am looking at the runs a team scores while a pitcher is pitching. If the team doesn't score many run when the pitcher is on the mound then he has a much lower chance of winning. Hamels was going to get the loss on Sunday even though he pitched a great game. How does that loss accurately portrait his performance? So Hamels' game is viewed negatively since he happened to draw a matchup against one of the best pitchers in the game who performed flawlessly? Much better stats can be used to assess a pitcher's value than W/L.

I don't know if this is a bit from you or just an old school mentality that is entrenched with you but it is a terrible, illogical opinion. I'm off to more productive conversations.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

"Much better stats can be used to assess a pitcher's value than W/L."


That's fine and I agree with you. But there WAS that unfortunate example of Nolan Ryan.

This is a strange modern way of looking at the game, obviously driven by computerized stats. As if the game were played in separate parts that are unrelated.

The team is attempting score runs off another pitcher, one who in most cases isn't as good as the one you are telling me is great. One the collective of less than great pitchers that face the "great" pitcher in the games he pitches has a better record than he does, how great can he really be?

Game conditions matter. Both pitchers in a game have the same weather, wind, hitter's background, and plate umpire. Yes, they are facing different lineups. I've never argued that a shitty team has no effect on a starter's W/L record. But when you're telling me a guy who was 8-16 had a "great" year, that's just silly. Less than great guys pitched better than he did most of the time.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

Yes. If he gets to 250 he will be first ballot.

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I agree with you that it would be difficult for a truly great pitcher to have a win/loss record that is south of .500. However, wouldn't you agree that wins are a fairly blunt instrument for assessing the quality of a pitcher? If one pitcher has 16 wins and another has 20, could you say, with any degree of confidence, that the guy with 20 is 25% better than the guy with 16 without knowing more at each pitcher?

In my mind, I think you need to have at least a winning record to be considered for the hall of fame, after that, the value of the stat diminishes dramatically.

Sure, if we're talking about a season or a half season, but over the course of a career W/L record tells you a lot about a starting pitcher that other things don't. In fact, it tells you the most important thing- how he actually competed in the games he pitched.

Also, I don't want to hear about how a guy who lead the league in ERA and went 8-16 was some poor victim. That completely ignores the fact that opposing pitchers were competing under the same conditions he was and pitching better in most cases. And the guy in question didn't have some feeble offense either. They simply played half their games in a ballpark where scoring was difficult which is precisely the same factor that caused him to be able to lead the league in ERA while losing so many games.

8-16 is NEVER a good year for a starting pitcher regardless of any other numbers.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

If you're just comparing a pitcher to the standard of good or bad I think you can use win/loss to a limited extent (did he win more games than he lost). However, when you're comparing pitchers to one another, which is basically what you're doing when deciding whether or not someone is worthy of enshrinement in the Hall of Fame or building a team, I think you have to take the win/loss record with a grain of salt. Otherwise you're going to be taking Don Gullet (.6855 winning percentage) and Chien Ming Wang (.6667 winning percentage) over guys like Gregg Maddux (.6100) and Bob Feller (.6215).

Also, go look at the Baseballreference list for career leaders in winning percentage, as I did to prepare this post, and you'll see that 6 out of the top 10 leaders for career winning percentage played before World War II. That should tell you that we've either seen a bunch of pitchers who are weak competitors for the last 75 years, or someone's win/loss record is based on things that are completely out of his control, like how the came is managed.

Well, if you're looking at their actual W/L records you know that Gullett and Wang have nowhere near the bodies of work that Feller and Maddux do.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

Steve Carlton

several times

He's about .575 for his career pitching for many bad teams.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

But . . . does that go against your argument that he should be controlling what he can? I'm not really invested in arguing for or against that--I was just thinking out loud here about Carlton and some of his wacky seasons.

A few bad teams, definitely.

On the other hand, one of his big seasons--when he won 27--I think the Phillies won like 65 games total. So the curly haired left-handed weirdo flipped that script.

W/L is just like any other stat- you need enough of a sample for it to mean anything.

I guess a case could be made that John Paciorek is the greatest hitter in major league history, but I'm not gonna be the guy to make it.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

Good story about him in that book about ballplayers who played just one day in the majors. First-person narratives, too.

So if we're not going to look at a rate stat, and instead are going to look at the actual number of wins, then Feller (266) and Maddux (355) must be better pitchers than Pedro Martinez (219) Sandy Koufax (165), right? You can switch the perspective all you want, but the win stat isn't that descriptive of a pitcher's quality. All it means is that Maddux and Feller were able to stick around longer than Martinez and Koufax, it doesn't necessarily make them better. If we're talking about a pitcher's ability to compete against another pitcher, I'd take Martinez and Koufax in their prime over about 80% to 90% of all the other pitcher's in the Hall of Fame.