Lucky Bastards

              Today I am writing about the luckiest and unluckiest pitchers of all time, but before I get to that I have another argument that I need to make, an argument against the position of my friend Brian Kenny.

              The way that baseball statistics are interpreted by 99% of the people 99% of the time is not as numbers at all, but as language.    The long history and stable schedule of baseball has created a field of standards, such that "200 hits" does not convey an image which is in any way related to 200 automobiles, 200 cigarettes, or 200 bad hair days.    200 hits is a standard of excellence in a specific area of performance.   Forty home runs does not normally refer to 40 of anything; 40 home runs means power.    .300 does not refer to 300 of anything; .300 means consistency, as a hitter.    Fifty stolen bases does not mean "50"; it means speed.         

              The existence of those standards, those red-letter standards, creates an entire forest of standards.   As 40 home runs means great power, so too does 30 home runs mean real power.   39 homers has a meaning; 38 homers has a meaning which is a tiny bit different.  40 stolen bases has a meaning, not a meaning in numbers but a meaning in terms of speed.   180 strikeouts as opposed to 170 is a meaningful distinction.  

              Walking in a forest of numbers, we always know where we are because we know every tree.   An outsider seeing Stan Musial’s batting record and Bengie Molina’s would not understand the difference.    To a baseball fan, it is like the difference between Paris and a cow pasture.   We see the difference immediately; we process it instantly.   To an outsider, Stan Musial’s numbers would be numbers.   To a baseball fan, they are a symphony.   They are Paris.  

              It is a wonderful language, baseball statistics, a rich and nuanced language which recognizes and pinpoints the most subtle of distinctions.  Even people who pretend to hate the influence of statistics, even people who write diatribes about baseball statistics, will still site them every bit as often as I will site them.   They’re just there; they are part of the game.  They are the language in which we normally describe the players.  

              While it may be true that won-lost records are misleading as often as they are accurate, nonetheless they are a tremendously important part of that language.   They are how we think about starting pitchers.   They are a part of US, a part of Our Thing, Baseball.   You can’t get rid of them, and it would make the game poorer if you could.    You can say that the numbers are misleading, but the language is what it is.  

              OK, now to the business at hand.    The luckiest pitcher of all time, over the course of his career, was:   Lew Burdette.  

              Lew Burdette was in a sense Gaylord Perry before Gaylord was.   After a rumor started that Burdette would throw spitballs, which he did, he used to stand on the mound and spit into his hand, lick his fingers, and then wipe his fingers in front of his pants although you didn’t know whether he actually had actually wiped them or not.   He would put the baseball in front of his mouth and hold it there.   He would wipe the sweat off his forehead, grab the baseball, and then shake the moisture off his hand, after he had already touched the baseball.  

              The rule which (now) prevents pitchers from putting their hands to their mouth on the mound is the Lew Burdette rule.   Warren Giles, National League President, ordered Burdette to cut it out, and instructed the National League umpires of the time to eject Burdette from the game if he did that stuff.   This was later codified into the rules.  

              Burdette was also one of the most extreme control-type pitchers of all time.   In 1959 he walked 38 batters in 290 innings.   He led the National League in fewest walks per nine innings in 1958, 1960 and 1961, and was among the league leaders in 1954, 1956 and 1959.   He was the MVP of the World Series in 1957, pitching three complete-game victories over the Yankees, two of them shutouts. 

              A good pitcher in his good seasons, but on the whole, over a long career, Burdette was no better than the other guys.   He was a guy who didn’t walk anybody, pitching for great teams.   Although the Braves had a losing record in his rookie season, 1952, Burdette was in their rotation from 1953 to 1962, and the worst record the team had in any of those seasons was 83-71.   They had a fantastic offense, led by Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews, and Joe Adcock could hit cleanup for them.   

              In 1956, I believe that Lew Burdette had a deserved won-lost record of 17-12; in 1958, 17-14, and in 1954, 16-12.   Obviously you want that guy on your staff; you have to have those guys.   But over the course of his career, I believe that his deserved won-lost record was 172-178.   His actual won-lost record was 203-144.   He won 31 more games than he probably should have, was 32 and a half games better, and his winning percentage was 94 points better than he probably deserved.   He had a winning record in his career—by 59 games—although he was probably less than a .500 pitcher.   He had more than 200 career wins, probably should have had less than 200.  

              These ten men, in my opinion, were the luckiest pitchers of all time:

              I believe that all ten of those men pitched almost all of their careers for great teams.   Christy Mathewson and Whitey Ford are in the Hall of Fame and deserve to be there; they were great pitchers, and would have been great pitchers with a .500 team.   Bob Lemon. . .ehhn.   Not so sure that Lemon ought to be in Cooperstown, but we’ll get to that argument later in the series.  

              One more note about Lew Burdette.   The 17^th luckiest pitcher of all time, by this method, was Tony Cloninger.   Burdette and Cloninger are linked.   Burdette had a painfully slow withdrawal from the Braves’ starting rotation.   Starting rotations were not as well organized then as they are now.   For two or three years, the aging Lew Burdette was put into the rotation and yanked out, while younger pitchers were given a chance.   Burdette was outspoken in saying that he didn’t like this, but anyway, there were several younger pitchers who were given a shot, but the most prominent of them was Tony Cloninger.   Cloninger and Burdette shared a rotation spot, really, for two years or more.   The 11^th through 20^th luckiest pitchers of all time:   Jack Billingham, Bob Caruthers, Bob Welch, Ramon Martinez, Sam Leever, Andy Pettitte, Tony Cloninger, Jack Sanford, Herb Pennock and Mickey Welch.   Somebody will feel compelled to post a note saying that Bob Caruthers wasn’t lucky; he had a plus record because he was a great hitter.   I don’t know whether to inoculate you against this, or just let him say it.

The Not So Lucky Guys

              The unluckiest pitcher of all time, by far, was Bert Blyleven.   Nobody else was close. 

              Blyleven’s bad luck, of course, was documented by many others while the Bert-Blyleven-Hall-of-Fame dispute was in progress.   In retrospect, I wish that I had done this research then; it would have had more impact.    Blyleven won 283 games with stats that, park adjusted, should have led to 335 wins.   By my calculations, these were the ten unluckiest pitchers of all time:

              Ned Garvin, as I understand the story, was a really bad guy who was feared and hated by his teammates, which may not have been working in his favor.   Jose DeLeon, I’m sure that most of you remember, once went 2-19 although he was a near-average pitcher, should have been about 8-10.    He is sort of the Bob Weiland of the 1980s; he matured into a pitcher with better control, and had a couple of good years with the Cardinals, as Weiland did in the 1930s.   He finished 33 games under .500 although his career performance is about equal to Denny McLain, Vic Raschi or Charles Nagy.  

              Milt Gaston pitched for the Browns, Senators, White Sox and Red Sox in the American League in the years when the Yankees, Tigers, Indians and Athletics were the good teams in the league.  Eddie Smith was the subject of a well-known "bad luck" poem written by Warren Brown, part of which reads:

              Under a spreading luckless spell

              The White Sox Ed Smith works,

              The Smith, a loser now by rote,

              Knows all misfortunes quirks,

              He’s beaten by the best there is,

              He’s beaten by the jerks.

              A couple of years ago I published an article about Bob Friend here, and a reader argued that Friend was a tough-luck pitcher throughout his career.   At the time, I said that I didn’t know whether that was true or not.   Now we know; it was true.   Thornton Lee and Jack Russell were Milt Gaston’s teammates, or should have been.  

              The question of the hardest-luck pitchers in a season is trickier than the question of the hardest-luck pitchers in a season, because pitchers used to pitch 350, 400 innings in a season and more, and some of those old-time guys had substantial margins between expected and actual results.   But we’ll talk about it tomorrow.