This is a very minor study of a methodological issue.
A friend objects that Josh Beckett is not included in the chart “300-Win Candidates” on page 465 of the 2008 Bill James Handbook. John Lackey is included, he complains. Lackey is a year older than Beckett and has only 2 more career wins. Beckett has more wins than Lackey in each of the last three seasons (15 to 14, 16 to 13, 20 to 19). How come Beckett isn’t a 300-win candidate if Lackey is?
Beckett now has 77 career wins. Even if the rest of his career turns out the way he dreams it might, it will still be more than ten years before he could win 300 games. My initial thought, when I set this up, was that anybody who was more than ten years away from 300 wins was too far away to worry about. I established a rule, just to enable us to focus on the relevant pitchers, that no one was a candidate for 300 career wins if his career wins plus his season’s innings pitched totaled less than 300. Lackey, with 79 wins and 224 innings, is just over the line. Beckett, with 77 wins and 201 innings, is below the line.
It doesn’t really bother me that Beckett is excluded; I still think he is too far away to worry about. What bothers me a little bit is the observation that, if Beckett were to do again next year exactly what he did this year, he would still be excluded, in that his wins plus his innings would then total 298.
This thus provokes me to take a little bit seriously this question: should Josh Beckett be regarded, even at this early stage of his career, as a 300-win candidate?
I looked for pitchers who were similar to Beckett in terms of
1) age,
2) career wins, and
3) season wins.
In the first cut, I looked for all pitchers who were 25-29 years in a given season (Beckett was 27), had 52-102 career wins and had 10 to 30 wins in the season. There were 969 such pitchers in baseball history up to 1992 (excluding pitchers post-1992, since some of those pitchers still might win 300 games, throwing off the data.)
Of those 969 pitchers, 27 went on to win 300 games in their careers. Not 27 different pitchers, of course. ..I don’t think there are 27 300-game winners in history. ..but, since the age range was 25-29, a pitcher could in theory be within the study range for five years. Anyway, that suggests that the chance of a pitcher in this range continuing on to 300 wins is in the neighborhood of 3%.
Next, I trimmed the study group to
1) Pitchers aged 26-28,
2) With 62-92 career wins,
3) And 13-27 wins in the season.
This left us with 290 pitchers. Of those 290, ten went on to win 300 games—again, 3%.
Finally I trimmed the study group to
1) 27 year old pitchers
2) With 72-82 career wins,
3) And 16-24 wins in the season.
This left us with 21 pitchers, none of whom went on to 300 career wins.
It’s an interesting group, and there are some considerable pitchers in there. The group include Whitey Ford (1956) and his teammate Bob Turley, who won the Cy Young Award two years later for going 21-7. It includes Frank Viola (1987) and the pitcher with whom he was paired in the classic article by Roger Angell (Ron Darling, 1988). It includes Dennis Martinez and Dennis Leonard, Mario Soto and Claude Osteen. It includes Lefty Williams (1920) and Burleigh Grimes (1921); I thought that was interesting because, at about the same time, major league baseball interceded to end one of those guy’s career immediately (Williams) and to extend the career of the other one (Burleigh Grimes) as long as possible.
But, whether smiled upon by the league or not, whether Hall of Famer or sudden flameout, none of them won 300 games. Josh Beckett is one of the best pitchers in baseball, he has a strong desire to excel, and he has outstanding work habits. These are great things. But at this point, it still seems to me that it is just too early to be thinking of him as a candidate for 300 wins. The rule isn’t perfect.. . .it’s questionable whether Lackey should be included, either. . .but I think I’ll keep it the way it is.