Jered Weaver has made six starts this year. The worst start he made was April 15th, against the White Sox. He went seven innings, allowing four hits, no walks, and two earned runs.
Jered is a pitching brother: he’s Jeff Weaver’s younger brother. Younger and better: Jeff Weaver has won more than one hundred major league games, but Jered’s career is on a dramatically better track. The younger Weaver’s closest comparable, at this point in his career, is Jim Bunning. His fourth closest comparable is Roy Halladay. He’s keeping good company.
This started as a paragraph for another article, and then spiraled out of control. Is it just me, or do younger brothers tend to do better than their older brothers?
The Brothers K
Let’s start with pitchers.
Pedro Martinez was better than Ramon…Pedro being the younger, Ramon being the elder. Ramon was a fine pitcher, but Pedro was Pedro.
Gaylord Perry is younger than Jim Perry…Jim Perry might’ve been a Hall-of-Famer had he not been sent to the bullpen for a chunk of his career, but Gaylord is in the Hall, so he gets the edge.
The supremely underrated Rick Reuschel is younger than his brother Paul. Younger and significantly better: Rick won 214 major league games and had a better career than at least a dozen pitchers in the Hall of Fame. Paul’s career record was 16-16.
Greg Maddux is younger than Mike Maddux. You know who wins that one, right? Bob Forsch had a better career than his older brother Ken, 168 wins to 114 wins. Livan Hernandez has had a better career than Orlando, but there are extenuating circumstances around that case.
On the other hand, Phil Niekro was older than Joe Niekro….older and better, though the margin isn’t quite as dramatic as it was with the Brothers Maddux. Dizzy was older than Paul Dean.
That’s eight pitching brothers sets, and I’m sure I’m missing someone. The younger siblings have the advantage, 6-2. If two brothers reach the major leagues as pitchers, the odds are good that the younger brother will have the better career.
So what about hitters?
The opposite seems to be true. Paul Waner was older and better than Lloyd. Bret Boone is older and better than Aaron Boone. Hank Aaron had a better career than his kid brother Tommy. Among the LaRoche clan, Adam is older (and better) than Andy. Cal Ripken had a better career than Billy. Tony Gwynn’s brother Chris play in the majors…Chris’s slugging percentage is about on par with Tony’s batting average.
Going back a ways…Dixie Walker was older than Harry Walker…and the better player. Ed Delahanty was the best of the four or five Delahanty brothers. Bill Dickey had a younger brother, George, who played in the majors.
Those Alou brothers illustrate it perfectly: Felipe was the eldest and the best. Matty was the second-oldest and second-best. Jesus was the youngest, and he wasn’t quite the ballplayer his brothers were.
The DiMaggio’s screw it up: Vince was the eldest, and the worst of the three. Leave him out, and Joe tops Dom. Nothing is perfect. Roberto Alomar is younger than Sandy Jr., and he was the better player.
I’m not sure which Canseco was born first, Ozzie or Jose…I tried to look it up and failed. I bet Jose is the older brother…he sure acts like the older brother. It’s a little early to judge the Upton brothers…Justin has time to pass B.J., but I wouldn’t say that he has passed his older brother.
Frank Robinson is older than Brooks Robinson: they both had fine careers, but Frank’s was a bit finer. Ted Williams is older than Billy Williams, who is older than Billy Dee Williams…but we might be losing track, here.
Twelve real brother sets, and in ten of those sets, the oldest brother is the best.
So we’ve reached a truth…maybe. If two brothers make the major leagues as pitchers, the younger brother will generally have the better career. But if the two brothers are hitters, if they don’t pitch, the eldest brother will typically have the best career.
One-on-One Baseball
This pattern raises an interesting question: why is this the case? How come it’s the younger pitching brother who dominates, but the older hitting brother?
I have a twin brother…we used to play a one-on-one version of baseball in our backyard. The yard was fenced and maybe one hundred feet long. The person batting stood in front of the house and the pitcher threw from forty feet away. We used old tennis balls so that we wouldn’t knock shingles from the house, but just about everything hit on a line would be a homerun. I don’t remember the exact percentage, but I’d bet that at least half of our hits were homeruns. We had no balls or called strikes: only swinging strikes. No walks: you couldn’t walk off the yard. There were three outs to a side, six innings to a game. We had the requisite number of bases and a tree that served as the leftfield foul pole. You can imagine the rest.
My brother and I are identical twins, but he beat the bejesus out of me during those games. We actually kept track of our wins and losses: I think his winning percentage was .700 or .730…something like that. He won most of the time. Usually, it wasn’t close.
This was frustrating for me….growing up, we were extremely competitive with each other, and we were similarly obsessed with baseball. So it was very annoying that he kicked my butt so easily.
I mention this because although I am actually the (slightly) older twin, my brother played our baseball games as if he was an older sibling. What is interesting, in light of the pitcher/hitter thing, was our separate reactions to these circumstances.
My brother, because he always won, eventually got bored playing the game. Once his pattern of dominance was established, he rarely suggested that we play…it just didn’t interest him. I had to pester him into playing.
This boredom showed in our actual games. My brother didn’t do anything new: he didn’t mess around with his batting stance or choke up on the bat or try to switch hit. When he pitched, he threw every single pitch as hard as he could. His favorite player was Nolan Ryan, and he pitched exactly like Ryan did: he threw hard and didn’t care much where it was going. He was utterly indifferent to fielding.
I don’t mean to suggest that he was lazy. It was just: why should he have bothered? He was winning most games handily…there wasn’t any particular reason to mix it up. He wasn’t lazy: he just didn’t have any motivation to get better. It wasn’t hard for him.
In contrast, I became obsessed with playing. The more I lost, the more I wanted to play. When I couldn’t convince him to play, I’d find ways to practice until he would. I hung a baseball on string in the garage and practiced hitting. I experimented with different batting stances, imitating the stances of hitters like Julio Franco and Dwight Evans and Jose Canseco. I practiced hitting left-handed. I swung a heavy pipe and squeezed a rubber ball.
We played this game for years…and in all the years we played, it, I never caught up on hitting. It seemed something that I was utterly incapable of passing my brother at. We tracked homeruns: I think that he must’ve out-homered me by a ratio of 4-1. It wasn’t close: it didn’t get close. He was out-hitting me at twelve, and he was out-hitting me at sixteen. I didn’t catch up.
At the start, I think that I practiced hitting and pitching about equally, at a 50-50 split. But, gradually, I started to ignore hitting, and focus on pitching. In time the majority of my efforts when into pitching. While my brother threw nothing but fastballs, I tried to change speeds, mixing slow pitches with fast. I practiced throwing sidearm, and then underhand. I tried to throw a curve, a screwball, a knuckleball. There were times when, exasperated, I’d throw one underhand and slow, like a rec-league softball player. We didn’t ever find those balls.
There is an obvious reason why I focused on pitching: there is more to do with pitching. Pitching requires a greater degree of thoughtthan hitting does. Hitting is primarily a reaction act…that’s not to suggest that hitting is easy, or that it doesn’t require some thinking. But…hitting is a response to pitching, one that occurs in milliseconds of time.
Pitching…you can think about a pitch as long as you want. Inside or outside. Up or down. Fast or slow. Overhand or sidearm. And there’s plenty of time to think about pitching when you’re rooting around in the woods trying to find the last tennis ball your brother hammered over the tree-line.
Jumping to Conclusions
It’s hard to be a good pitcher and a good hitter. Very few professional baseball players reach the major leagues with the ability to excel as hitters and pitchers. Rick Ankiel, Carlos Zambrano, Yovani Gallardo…those are the exceptions, not the norms.
Jesus Alou was a major-league hitter. But…he was never a better hitter than Felipe or Matty. He couldn’t catch up…at least not when he was ten or twelve or sixteen or twenty-one. Always, his brothers were better than him.
I imagine that it took a lot of passion or drive just for Jesus Alou to keep at it. Being the third-best brother, not just for the years he was in the major leagues but for all of the years before that…it’s amazing he didn’t try his hand at something else. Most people would’ve. I would’ve.
Jesus was playing against a stacked deck: as much as he hit, he wasn’t going to hit the ball harder than his brothers. There was nothing in that millisecond of time that he could do to bring to even the years and inches and muscles that his brothers had over him. That millisecond…there wasn’t enough time.
And there wasn’t anything that the older Alou’s could do about it, either. They could tell him what they knew about hitting, but Jesus’ line drives would always fall shorter than theirs.
Greg Maddux had the time. So did Pedro and Gaylord. So did Jered Weaver. Sure, their older brothers could throw harder…but they could be better. And: they could learn from their brothers. Mike Maddux could teach Greg the curveball. Jeff Weaver could teach Jered a change-up. There were avenues for the younger sibling to not only match the older, but surpass him.
Maybe I’m making generalities here, but I think there’s an intuitive logic behind the pattern of major league brothers. If there are two brothers who have the ability to hit in the major leagues, the older one will almost always be better than the younger one, because that’s what they’ve know. That’s how it’s always been. Because hitting in an instant act, there is no way for the younger brother to advance past the older one.
With pitchers, there’s room for the younger sibling to pass the older one. The older sibling might throw harder, but the younger one can even things out by learning a new pitch, or figuring out better mechanics. The younger one can follow the older one to practices and listen to the coaches and get the same information that the older brother is getting, only the kid brother is getting the information a year or two before the older one gets it. So he has an extra year or two to process it and figure it out.
(This is an aside: you all know that Greg Maddux was an excellent defensive player…doesn’t that fact suggest that there’s something valid in all of this? I mean, what is more ‘trying to upstage your brother’ than working on your defense…from the one position on the diamond where defense is mostly ignored?)
I don’t know…maybe I’m crazy.
Wrapping Things Up
A few final points: there are two brother sets that don’t fit the pattern, the Ferrells and the Bretts.
Rick was the older Ferrell brother, and the better hitter. Wes turned to pitching…he was an excellent hitter in his own right, but he took to the mound. It makes sense to me: if your brother is the hitting star, you might as well take up pitching. I wonder if Jesus ever thought about becoming a pitcher.
The Bretts did the opposite: they exceeded against what you’d expect. You’d expect Ken (the older brother) to be the hitter, and George to be the pitcher. At least I would. Think it through…who is George going to hit against the most? His brother, Ken. Can you imagine trying to learn how to hit a baseball against an older brother who was in the process of developing major-league talent? It’s no wonder Brett had no trouble hitting a Goose Gossage fastball: it must’ve looked slow compared to the pitches he’d have seen from Ken.
We’re dealing with two sets here, so we’re just noticing patterns…but both of the younger brothers did better than the older ones. George had a better career than Ken, by a wide margin. And while Rick is the Ferrell brother in the Hall of Fame, it’s a little puzzling to see why he’s the Ferrell with the plaque in Cooperstown. Rick was a catcher: he had a career batting line of .281/.378/.363, tallying an OPS+ of 95 and career WAR of 22.9. He had a long career: some similar and more recent players would be Tony Pena or Jason Kendall. Not bad, but not a clear Hall-of-Famer, either.
Wes was a terrific pitcher: he had six twenty-win seasons, and a career record of 193-128. He pitched in a high-offense era, and his career ERA is an unimpressive 4.04…but his adjusted ERA was 117. His cumulative WAR was 41.3, which is much higher than his brother.
So: if two brothers split…if one becomes a hitter and one becomes a pitcher, bet on the younger one.
Lastly…about my brother’s .730 winning percentage against me: we did figure it out.
I’m left-handed, and my brother is right-handed. But we both batright-handed. So my brother had the platoon edge: he was a right-handed hitter who was always facing a southpaw, while I was a righty stuck hitting a righty. Played out over twenty-five or thirty at-bats, over hundreds of games, that difference manifested into a .730 winning percentage.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.