The adage that appears (belatedly) as the title to this series has been repeated almost as long as there’s been baseball: Young Pitchers’ll Break Your Heart. And as many a friend has wondered about his heart-broken pal, "So why’d you go out with her in the first place? You couldn’t see this heartbreak coming? A blind man on a galloping horse coulda seen she was going to chew you up and spit you out. Geez."
Well, we all know why men date heartbreakers, right? If there’s even a chance that it might work out, we’re eager to see if this one might be that rare dangerous woman who’s perfect for us in the long run, and we’re willing to take that chance over and over and over again. High risk, high reward.
With young pitching (you weren’t hoping I’d expand on my advice to the lovelorn, were you?), it’s easy to understand why it breaks our hearts: because their arms break down. So much pressure is placed on the single act of throwing that if anything at all goes wrong, or sometimes even if nothing much goes wrong, a pitcher’s arm and his career will explode like a pack of matches in your hand: a few seconds of brilliance, followed by a handful of burnt-out nothing, plus some scorched skin. Position players, dependent on so many different body parts, can better adjust to injuries, to overuse, to declining strength or flexibility, and eke out some kind of career-saving evolution more easily than pitchers can. A right-fielder’s cannon arm blows out, he can move to first-base. A base-stealing leadoff man’s knee breaks down, he can bat lower in the order. A left-fielder puts on 40 pounds, he can still DH. But when pitchers lose the one ability they have, often their one best pitch, they’re lucky to hang on to a roster spot, much less a starring role, for very long.
I present four tables below, again of the players (57 of them) all under the age of 25 with at least 1 WAR, this time from 1986, thirty years ago. I thank you for your indulgence as I figure out how best to present these tables. (I used eight tables for 1996, when I should have combined the Single-season and Career WAR into one chart, as I do below. If I do another season, I think I’ll get it down to two long charts, pitchers and hitters, since there’s really no compelling reason to break it down by leagues as I’ve been doing. Just my recommendation, if anyone wants to do 1976 instead of me, or any other season. Also I think I’ll ask you guys to take my word in the future for these players’ ages instead of devoting a column to listing each one—the important thing is that these players are all under 25, and not so much which one is 22 and which one is 23.) The pattern I suggested in Part One, on 1996, seems to be holding up quite well for 1986. Bottom line:
In 1986, the 30 batters totaled 72.1 WAR, averaging 2.4 WAR, and over the course of their careers totaled 815.8 WAR, averaging 27.2 apiece.
In 1986, the 27 pitchers totaled 60.3 WAR, averaging 2.2 apiece, and over their careers, 514.4 WAR, averaging 19.1.
In other words, the pitchers and the batters in 1986 closely mirrored each other’s performances again, while the career WAR totals were nearly 50% higher for batters than for pitchers.
Most of these players, batters and pitchers, mind you, were pretty disappointing, all in all: it’s more common for a good young player to fizzle out than it is for him shine brightly. (Again, by the eyeball method, you can easily see longer, more successful careers for batters on the tables below.) It just seems to be more common for pitchers to fizzle out, which shouldn’t be news to anyone, I suppose. But I think I’m showing that it’s not JUST axiomatic that young pitchers will break your heart—it’s actually true. That heartbreak appears (so far) to be measurably and substantially higher with pitchers than with batters.
Which might explain why the strategy I suggested in my last column makes sense: seek to keep your young position-playing talent and seek to deal off your young pitching talent. You will (I promise you) get killed from time to time, no way to avoid inadvertently dealing off a young Nolan Ryan for an aging Jim Fregosi now and then following this principle, but over the long haul you’re going to gather far more talent than you will deal off.
Of course you’ll still need to play young pitchers and young batters, sometimes in crucial roles—no way to prevent this, nor am I suggesting you should. In fact, I’d think that if you have a starting rotation that consists of three or four highly paid veteran rotation starters, acquired through Free Agency or otherwise, your back end would give a promising young pitcher a chance to show what he can do. Probably he won’t do well, but if he does, then you regard him, not as the anchor of your pitching staff’s future, but as live bait to some team that believes in the virtues of young pitching more than you do.
On the other hand, if you have a promising young position player, when you’ve got (or when you’ve made) a spot in your lineup for him in which he does well, you might look NOT to trade him off. Sure, if some other team offers you the sky for your young position-playing star, or if some team offers you nothing more than a bag of batting-practice balls in exchange for your hot young pitcher, you make an exception. What I am suggesting, though, is that you adopt this extreme axiom as your guiding principle: keep good young position-players, trade good young pitchers. Simple as that (with rare exceptions noted). Young pitching will break your heart. Videlicet (and vidablue):
This time around, the nostalgia was even stronger than it was in 1996. I was a big Mets fan in ’86 (my oldest daughter, born on October 29, 1986, was very nearly named "Mookie" rather than "Elizabeth") and these young players’ names brought a certain fondness and vividness to mind. It was probably Bill’s influence, but I remembered making (and using) silly nicknames for many of these young players, some of which turned out to be sadly prescient ("Oh-to-be McDowell," "Steve Buchele-of-his-former-self," Bobby "Ron McKernan" Thigpen, "Produce-aisle Wegman," "Ed Correa-ending-injury," Bob "Ice-Station" Sebra, Scott "Or-Else" Garrelts, Floyd "To-Err-Is" Youmans, and of course Jim "the Pelvis" Presley.) As to Jay "They Call Me Mister" Tibbs, I remember the Mets’ losing him (twice actually) when he was a promising young pitcher in their system, and being rather upset that they’d unloaded this rising star. And I mourned the loss of Floyd Youmans, who was rumored to be a sort of Doc Gooden clone, when all we got in return was a crummy old Gary Carter.
Speaking of Doc (whom I called "Gooden Bad, I spoke those words as if a wedding vow," though not until he actually was pretty Gooden bad), it might seem like a terrible misstep to deal him (or Roger Clemens) off after their first promising years, and maybe this is just the cost you’d pay for adhering to my principle here, dealing off a genuinely stellar young pitcher every so often. But in Gooden’s case, I remember thinking soon after he put together a few more superficially good years, sometime in the very late 1980s and early 90s, that his reputation (and his W-L record) was much better than his actual pitching, and I remember wondering if I’d lost my mind or if it made a little sense to consider trading Doc while his reputation and his W/L record was still great. Of course, hindsight shows us clearly that getting almost anything at all in exchange for the trainwreck that Doc was headed for would have been a smooth move, but I’m not asking for any credit for foreseeing that trainwreck on the horizon. (I was just a nervous Bill James reader, wondering what Doc’s rising ERA and declining K rate signified in light of his still-stellar W/L record.) But if you followed my principle here, even with a pitcher as dominating as the young Doc Gooden, and you dealt him off after his rookie year or even his Cy Young season at age 20, wouldn’t you have gotten real value in exchange for him? Value that might have lasted much longer than Doc’s stardom did? Do you think you could have gotten Barry Larkin to shore up the Mets’ below-average shortstop in exchange for Doc Gooden in 1985? Or Ozzie Smith? Or Eric Davis to fix your left field weakness? Or Vince Coleman? Hell, you probably could have gotten Larkin AND Davis, or Smith AND Coleman. And gotten some pitching thrown in—my point being that Gooden, in addition being a great young pitcher, was also a valuable commodity. (The best deal in hindsight would have been with the Pirates, for their young left-fielder.) My point is that I’m not just recommending dumping young pitching—I’m talking about how young pitching can tempt other teams, and how most teams tend to overlook the young pitching’s fragility and to disregard its often-false promise. Of course, if the Mets actually had traded Gooden off after the 1985 season, they probably would have missed the World’s Championship, depending on whom they’d gotten back, but who’s to say they wouldn’t have gotten back a World’s Championship (or three or four) on the other end, after Doc had lost his grip on the ball and on his life.
This is just wool-gathering, of course, and I’m not sniffing my nose at an actual World’s Championship, which was one of the more satisfying moments of my life: I’m just citing Doc’s example of a rare star pitcher that would seem to argue vehemently against this principle but which actually supports it. Even Dwight Gooden, who won almost 200 big league games, was worth much more in trade at age 20 or 21 or 22 than he would ever be again in his career. He had earned 22 of his lifetime 48.2 WAR by 1986, at the age of 21. And he’s my counter-example, a pitcher who went on to win a lot of games in a fairly long and mostly successful career.
The vast majority of these 27 promising young pitchers in 1986, of course, never had a star career or anything resembling one beyond this one season. Some had career WAR totals that were scarcely higher than their 1986 WAR, and a few (Johnson, Sebra, Correa) actually had lower career WAR than they accrued in 1986, due to negative value of later years. (BTW, a few guys actually had negative lifetime WAR which I entered as 0.0, mainly because they weren’t very much below 0 and I had no idea whether entering a negative number would mess up the way Excel tabulated my column totals. It doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, as Theo’s grand-dad wrote.) Most of these guys did very little for the remainder of their careers, and quite a few of them were out of MLB after a few more seasons.
After the 1986 season, however, all of them had a little trade value, and some had quite a lot. If you’re assembling a team and you (like every team) would love to have a good young arm or two, It takes a lot of discipline to offer your young pitchers in deals to any club that has a good position player to swap, but in the long haul, such discipline, I posit, could pay off, if my thesis here is true. I’m not quite ready to assert flat-out that it is true, but what I’ve seen so far doesn’t convince me that it’s false, either.