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7,213 Pitchers
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Milt Gaston, who won 97 games and lost 164 from 1924 to 1934. His -67 plus-minus log is the worst in baseball history. He died in 1996 at the age of 100. P.S. Only two pitchers in the Hall of Fame finished their major leagues careers with more losses than wins. Those two are Rollie Fingers (114-118), who was a reliever, and Satchel Paige (28-31) who was elected mostly for his accomplishments in the Negro Leagues.
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I was looking at a Microsoft Access database that contains the statistics of all major league players from 1871 to 2000. In playing with the data, I established that: 1. There are 7,213 pitchers in the database. 2. Their total number of wins and total number of losses are the same, since there is one winner and one loser of each major league game. Actually, it's off by a few, mostly because records from the 1800s are not perfect, but it's close enough for government work. So, it stands to reason that there should be an equal number of pitchers with winning records and losing records. For every Cy Young or Roger Clemens who won more games than they lost, there should be someone who lost more games than they won, and there should be as many winning pitchers as losing ones. Right? Wrong. Bill James said in one of his books that there are there have been many more losing pitchers than winning ones in the history of baseball. I didn't believe it until I looked at the data for myself. Here's what I found: Total pitchers 7,213 More wins than losses 1,837 Break-even record 1,753 More losses than wins 3,623The 1,753 pitchers with break-even records include 1,311 guys who neither won nor lost a game. These pitchers with 0-0 records include people who pitched only one inning, or guys like Ted Williams and Stan Musial who pitched once just for a lark, or the infielders who pitch in 14-0 blowouts every now and then to save the bullpen. So, let's remove those 1,311 pitchers and restrict the data to people who won or lost at least one major league game. Total pitchers 5,902 100.0% MOre wins than losses 1,837 31.1% Break-even record 442 7.5% More losses than wins 3,623 61.4%So, more than two-thirds of all major league pitchers (with one or more decisions) failed to win more games than they lost. How can we explain this? James, in studying the same effect with managers (two-thirds of whom have losing records as well), offered an explanation that makes sense. Successful pitchers and managers, he says, keep their jobs. Unsuccessful ones get released or sent back to the minors. Let's look at the top 10 pitchers all-time in the plus-minus department: 1. Cy Young +196 2. Al Spalding +188 3. Christy Mathewson +185 4. Pete Alexander +165 5. Lefty Grove +159 6. Kid Nichols +153 7. John Clarkson +150 8. Walter Johnson +138 9. Roger Clemens +135 10. Eddie Plank +132Many of these pitchers played in the majors for 20 years or more. All of the top 10, and most of the pitchers with marks of +70 or better, are in the Hall of Fame except for guys like Clemens who are still active. Now, the bottom 10: 5,893. Jim Hughey -51 5,894. Bill Stearnes -52 5,895. Buster Brown -52 5,896. Jack Fisher -53 5,897. Bill Hart -54 5,898. Stump Weidmann -55 5,899. Jack Russell -56 5,900. John Healey -58 5,901. Si Johnson -64 5,902. Milt Gaston -67Hughey compiled one of the worst single-season won-lost marks, 4-30, for the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, generally regarded as the worst team of all time. Fisher gave up Ted Williams' last home run in 1960 and Roger Maris' record-tying 60th in 1961, and then got traded to the awful expansion Mets. Johnson and Gaston pitched for bad teams like the Browns and Phillies in the 1930s and 1940s, while most of the rest of the bottom ten are 19th century pitchers that even I have never heard of. However, these lists seem to support James' thesis. There have been 59 pitchers with career won-lost records of +68 or better, while no one in baseball history has a record of -68 or worse. No pitcher would be allowed to be that bad, because if they were, they wouldn't be pitching in the big leagues for very long. I decided to play with the numbers a little more. I figured that most pitchers probably fall into a very narrow range of mediocrity (from +10 to -10) and I was right. Pitchers with +11 or better 548 9.3% Pitchers between -10 and +10 4,693 79.8% Pitchers with -11 or worse 661 11.2%Nearly four out of every five pitchers end their careers with a plus-minus log between -10 and +10. Less than one pitcher in ten has a mark of +11 or better. These are the stars of the game. If a pitcher gets to +11 or above, he'll be more likely to have a long career; most of the starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame are at +40 or better. Even Babe Ruth, who pitched regularly for only the first six years of his career before he moved to the outfield, won 94 games and lost 46 for a +48 mark. On the other hand, the 661 guys at -11 or worse mostly had short careers. If a pitcher comes up and goes 2-9 one year and 3-7 the next, his team will get the idea that he's not very good. They'll let him go and try somebody else. Except for some decent pitchers on horrible expansion teams or perennial last-place clubs like the Phillies of the 1940s or the Browns of the 1930s, most of those 661 pitchers didn't last very long. Anyway, that's what I found. Really good pitchers are rarities, while it's always easy to locate mediocre ones. The challenge for a baseball scout or a general manager is in distinguishing the good ones from the mediocrities.
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