Reader Bertrecords sent Bill the following question:
My fantasy team currently has the best hitter so far this season per the player raters (Mookie Betts) and the best pitcher (Justin Verlander). The team correspondingly is doing well. What are examples of MLB teams simultaneously with the best hitter and the best pitcher? Have any of these MLB teams not been upper tier?
Because I happened to be looking around for a quick article to write, I decided to tackle Bert’s question. What examples are there of major league teams having the best hitter and the best pitcher in the same season? How have those teams fared? Have any of them failed to win?
Tackling the last question first: every team that had the best pitcher and the best hitter in the league were pretty good. All of them were winning teams. Most of them were very winning teams.
But…they weren’t thatgreat. Fifteen teams in baseball history have been luck enough to have the best offensive player and the best pitcher in the league, and all of them had very winning records. But very few of them would be counted as great teams.
Fifteen teams had the best hitter and best pitcher…only six of those teams managed to come in first.
And, actually, that’s a little bit of a cheat. One of those teams were the 1981 Phillies. The 1981 Phillies had the best offensive player (Michael Jack Schmidt) and the best pitcher (Steve Carlton), and they finished the first half of the 1981 season in first place, locking in a playoff spot. But they weren’t nearly as successful in the second half, and they actually ended up with the third-best record in their division. They got credited with a first-place finish because baseball decided on a loopy decision in dealing with the strike, but the Phillies weren’t really the best team in the league.
So five-and-a-half of our teams can be credited as finishing in first.
Five of those teams managed to reach the World Series…all of them except the Phillies. Our lucky teams were five-for-fifteen in reaching the Series.
And those teams lost most of those Series. The teams with the best offensive player and the best hitter in the league lost four of the five World Series they played in.
Okay…we’re a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s take a step back and talk about criteria, and then introduce you to some teams.
* * *
To find the ‘best’ offensive players and pitchers, I used Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR. Using bWAR probably cost us a few eligible teams, a few teams that you'd think would end up on our list. The 1990 Pirates come to mind. T had Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek….Baseball-Reference’s WAR identifies Bonds as the best offensive player in 1990, but they pick Ed Whitson ahead of Cy Young winner Doug Drabek, by a pretty good margin. What are you gonna do?
Drabek and Bonds won their league’s respecctive awards for best player and best pitcher. This has happened 19 times since the Cy Young Award came into existence, with Miguel Cabrera and Max Scherzer of the 2013 Tigers being the most recent teammate duo to win the awards.
What’s remarkable is that, of those nineteen MVP/CY teammate combos, only one of them shows up on our list of teammate bWAR leaders. The 2013 Tigers aren't that team: Miguel Cabrera rated behind Mike Trout in bWAR in 2013, and Max Scherzer’s season, spectacular as it was, shows up behind Hisashi Iwakuma’s great year in Seattle. It'
So let’s start introducing our teams. We’ll go in chronological order.
1906 Pittsburg Pirates – Honus Wagner (9.3), Vic Wills (8.1)
Our first pair isn’t a cheat: Honus Wagner was one of the original players elected to the Hall-of-Fame, and while Vic Wills had to wait nearly a century to gain his plaque, both men were elite players. Wills, playing his first year in Pittsburg, managed to toss 322 innings without giving up a home run. Wagner has a typically Wagnerian campaign, pacing the NL in runs scored, batting average, doubles, and total bases.
But the great team in the league was four hundred miles west in Chicago, where the Cubs ran rampage over the rest of the league, en route to an 116-win season. The Pirates won a respectable 93 games, but that was good enough to have them 23.5 games back at season’s end.
1915 Philadelphia Phillies – Gavvy Cravath (7.0), Pete Alexander (10.9)
This was a team carried by their two best players. Gavvy Cravath had his third straight stellar season in 1915, pacing the NL in just about every category except batting average. Pete Alexander, not yet ‘Old’, threw 376 innings and posted a 1.22 ERA, having one of the very best seasons of his career.
Behind them, the supporting cast was thin. Fred Luderus, a player I’ve never heard of until writing this sentence, was the team’s second-best position player, and while Alexander had Eppa Rixey in the rotation with him, Eppa was a young pitcher who hadn’t developed into the star he’d become after the War. Erskine Mayer, a decent pitcher having his last full season in the majors, was the team’s #2 pitcher.
The Phillies won the pennant, mostly because someone had to win it, and they were the team best equipped to answer the call. They weren’t a good team…the Phillies were a losing team in 1914, and they’d slip back to losing by 1918…but Alexander and Cravath were good enough to get them to the promise land, where they got thumped by the Red Sox.
1934 New York Yankees – Lou Gehrig (10.4), Lefty Gomez (8.3)
I trust that enough of you will be familiar with these players to not require an in-depth description. Lou Gehrig won a Triple Crown, Lefty Gomez won the pitcher’s Triple Crown, and the Yankees, suffering through the last year of The Babe in pinstripes, got beat by Mickey Cochrane’s Tigers.
This is the only Yankees team that makes our list, a fact that surprised me at the start. The Yankees have often had the best offensive player in the league, and while their history of pitchers doesn’t quite compare to their batters, they’ve had a lot of big years from the likes of Ruffing and Ford and Guidry and Clemens and Mussina. But 1934 is the only year the stars aligned for the Bronx Bombers, and it was one of the rare years when the Yankees didn’t win a damned pennant.
That's interesting, I think.
One of my pet theories about baseball teams is that elite players cause a slackness in how a team plays. This theory cuts across all aspects, from the front office decisions to game-day management to player performance. If a team has a Mays or a Mantle or a Maddux or a Marichal on the roster (or a player of equal ability, but no ‘M’ in their surname), that team will have a tendency to worry less about the gaps on their team. The GM will count on a Mays or a Mantle to carry the offense, and tolerate the presence of a shortstop hitting .220. The manager will ask Maddux to give them a lead, and not put effort into finding a reliable arm to come in to finish things off when the ace is running on fumes. The lesser hitters on a team will give away at-bats, trying to get the game in the hands of Miggy or Manny or Machado.
I have often thought that the best teams are the teams where the center is dispersed; where responsibility for winning and losing is spread out across the roster. The Yankees, the winningest team in baseball history, have mostly been a team of diverse talents: for all the fame of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle, there have always been secondary players of exceptional talent able to rise to the challenge when the situation demands it. The Yankees success as a franchise isn’t built on the greatness of individual players: it has always rested on the aggressive assembling of a roster of competent performers. The Yankees are famous for their great players, but their great players have operated as an illusion to why the team has been so good for so long. They’ve won because their organizational ethos is to pursue excellence everywhere, and to not allow sentiment (or cost) keep them from that pursuit.
I said it surprised me that the Yankees didn’t show up more often. It did surprise me, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. The Yankees are too good a team to show up on this list.
1935 Pittsburg Pirates – Arky Vaughan (9.2), Cy Blanton (7.2)
This was another ‘carry’ team, where the best players (Vaughan, Blanton, The Waner Bros.) did the bulk of the heavy lifting. The Pirates, at this moment in their team history, were in a period of treading water: they were good enough to win more games than they lost, but not really good enough to pull it together and challenge the best teams for a crown. They finished 3rd in 1935.
1936 New York Giants – Mel Ott (7.8), Carl Hubbell (9.8)
This is another team where the bulk of the wins rested in a few players: Hubbell, Ott, and shortstop Dick Bartell. The Giants won the pennant and lost the World Series to the Yankees, and they’d win the pennant again in 1937 (and lose another World Series). These were the last clangs of the Ott/Hubbell/Terry Giants teams…the post- McGraw team that reached the World Series three times in five years. I don’t think this was a great team, but they were the best NL team of their era (1933-1938).
It’s interesting to note that there is a ‘clustering’ of teams around years. We’ve had three seasons in a row represented now, and we’re about to get another cluster.
1942 Boston Red Sox – Ted (10.6), Tex Hughson (6.4)
The last Red Sox team before Teddy went to war had the component parts for the team to give the Yankees a challenge. In addition to Williams and Hughson, this team had Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio, all young men eager to win baseball games. They’d have to wait a few years to do it, but win they would, netting a pennant in 1946 and almost snagging another one in 1949.
It’s speculation, but I think that World War II cost the Red Sox a couple championships. The Yankees 1942 roster certainly had a lot of young talent (DiMaggio, Gordon, Rizzuto, Keller, Henrich), but the span between 1942 and 1949 was the time when the Red Sox came the closest to having a little more talent. Unfortunately, the war interrupted three of those years, and then Enos Slaughter ran through the stop signal, and Ted Williams didn’t get a ring. By the time the Red Sox got around to winning, the Yankees had regrouped and the National League, helped by aggressive integration, had become the dominant league in the game. Boston missed their window, and they would see another one until 1967.
The 1942 squad finished second, nine games behind the Yankees.
1943 St. Louis Cardinals - Stan Musial (9.4), Mort Cooper (5.8)
1948 St. Louis Cardinals – Stan Musial (11.1), Harry Brecheen (8.9)
The 1943 Cardinals were a good team taking advantage of a league weakened by the draft: they won the pennant going away and then lost the World Series. The Cardinals had enough talent to win the Series again in 1944 and 1946, but by 1948 the team was nearing the end of their run as the best WWII-era NL team. St. Louis finished 2nd in both 1948 and 1949, before dropping all the way downto fifth place in 1950.
1949 Boston Red Sox – Ted (9.1), Mel Parnell (7.9)
This is the Red Sox team that lost the famous 1949 pennant race by losing the last two games of the season to the Yankees. If you haven’t read David Halberstam’s book on the subject, I’d encourage you to check it out. I can’t do any better, and I don’t feel compelled to try.
In many ways, the Cardinals and Red Sox had parallel team arcs: both clubs were built around the best player in the league (Musial, Williams). Both teams had good supporting players and were strong contenders for the bulk of the 1940’s, but neither one could quite find an answer for the Yankees, and then the circle turned.
1963 Minnesota Twins – Bob Allison (7.4), Camilo Pascual (6.1)
This was not a depthless team: Minnesota had a lot of talent surrounding Allison and Pascual on their roster. The Twins had good hitters in Killebrew and Earl Battey and Jimmie Hall, and they had Jim Kaat and Jim Perry backing Pascual in the rotation. Bill Dailey was their closer (21 saves, 1.99 ERA, 108 IP). It was a good, diverse team, and they probably would have won in a league that didn’t have the Yankees. They did win: 91 games, and they’d sneak a pennant in two years later when the Ford/Mantle/Berra Yankees finally got too old to get in the way.
1965 San Francisco Giants – Willie Mays (11.2), Juan Marichal (10.3)
The memories and measures of these men seem indistinct. Did they scale further heights, or was this the one season in which they blazed like twin meteors across the game’s horizon?
1980 Philadelphia Phillies – Mike Schmidt (8.9), Steve Carlton (10.2)
1981 Philadelphia Phillies – Mike Schmidt (7.7), Steve Carlton (5.6)
The 1980-81 Phillies were an old, lousy team that happened to have the best hitter and the best pitcher on the planet, and they rode those horse (and a great season by Tug McGraw) to a 1980 World Championship. They got old and then they got older, and they somehow managed to sneak another World Series appearance in 1983, mostly because no one else in the NL East could get things together enough to mount a challenge.
Take a look at the 1980 Phillies team page sometime and you’ll see what I mean. Mike Schmidt stands out, but who is the second best hitter on this team? It was almost certainly Bake McBride, having his last full year as a major league player. After that it’s Greg Luzinski, who hit .228 with 19 homers. After that it’s Manny Trillo or one of their bench players. Their offense was 70% Mike Schmidt.
Steve Carlton was Steve Carlton, but who was behind him in the rotation? Dick Ruthven went 17-10 with a 3.35 ERA, but he struck out only 86 batters in 223.1 innings, while walking 74. He Bob Walk had a 4.57 ERA. Randy Lerch lerched his way to a 5.16 mark. Nino Espinosa and Larry Christienson were at 3.77 and 4.03. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of any of those guys: they were all terrible major league pitchers.
And the bullpen, outside of Tug, wasn’t any kind of special. The ERA’s of Phillies relief pitchers, sorted by inning pitched, read as follows: 4.05, 3.85, 3.42, 3.15, 3.72, 4.15, 1.50.
The Phillies had perhaps the two best players in all of baseball performing at the height of their powers, and they surrounded them with aging ‘name players’ like Pete Rose and Sparky Lyle and Larry Bowa and (later) Joe Morgan and Gary Matthews and Garry Maddox and Tony Perez. They had no talent bubbling up to fill in the gaps because they traded half of their young players away to acquire old farts, and then let those old farts block the few kids remaining from every reaching their potential. And then they’d trade an old fart and a prospect for a mediocre player…hence the Cubs winding up with Bowa and Ryne Sandberg for Ivan DeJesus.
If you want the perfect demonstration of the theory that brilliance causes blindness, you couldn’t find a better case study than the Phillies of 1979-1983. But they won a championship: the 1980 Phillies are the only team on our list that managed to win the World Series.
And the 1980 Phillies were the only team on our list whose hitter/pitcher duo received the actual MVP and CY awards. It was a decisive vote: Schmidt was the unanimous MVP, while Carlton netted 23-of-24 first-place votes for the Cy Young Award.
1982 Montreal Expos – Gary Carter (8.6), Steve Rodgers (7.7)
Of all the teams on our list, the 1982 Expos are the most interesting to me.
They are interesting because they are the worst team on our list, tallying an unimpressive .531 winning percentage. And they are interesting because they had so much damned talent that it seems impossible they couldn’t win ninety-two games it would’ve taken to grab a division title.
Gary Carter was the best player in the National League, at least by bWAR. And Steve Rodgers was the best pitcher. But the Expos also had Andre Dawson, who hit .301 with 23 homers, 39 stolen bases, 107 runs scored, and a Gold Glove. Dawson rated as the second-best player in the NL in 1982…our friends at Baseball-Reference have the best players in the NL in 1982 as:
|
Rank
|
Player
|
Team
|
WAR
|
|
1
|
G. Carter
|
MON
|
8.6
|
|
2
|
Dawson
|
MON
|
7.9
|
|
3
|
Rodgers
|
MON
|
7.7
|
|
4
|
Soto
|
CIN
|
7.6
|
|
5
|
Schmidt
|
PHI
|
7.4
|
That’s something, isn’t it? The Expos had the three best players in the league in 1982. And we’re not talking about two corner outfielders and a DH. With Carter, Dawson, and Rodgers, Les Expos had the best players in the game covering them at catcher, centerfielder, and starting pitcher. That seems like a tremendous advantage.
And they won 86 games.
Well, the rest of the team was shallow, right?
No, it was not. Al Oliver hit .331 with 22 homers at first base. Tim Wallach hit 28 homers and drove in 97 at third base. Tim Raines, batting leadoff, posted a .353 on-base percentage and stole 78 bases in 94 attempts.
Well..the rotation was terrible, right?
No, it wasn’t. Behind Rogers, (152 ERA+), the Expos had Bill Gullickson (102 ERA+), Scott Sanderson (106), Charlie Lea (113), and David Palmer (115). Their starters behind Rogers weren’t spectacular, but they were, to a man, competent. They got the job done.
And they had Jeff Reardon in the bullpen. Reardon threw 109 innings and went 7-4 with 26 saves and an ERA of 2.06. Woodie Fryman, the best lefty in the pen, went 9-4 with 12 saves and a 3.75 ERA. They had Bryan Smith on their roster: he wasn’t great in 1982, but he’s become a good relief pitcher.
The team’s glaring hole was at second base: Montreal rotated a bunch of nobodies through the position, and they produced exactly as you’d expect, posting a .244/.289/.315 triple-slash line. (Trying to find a silver lining: Montreal second basemen went 31-for-37 on stolen base attempts, which is an 84% success rate).
But their real glaring hole was a lack of a bench. Or…more specifically…the glaring hole is that the Expos used their bench so badly. One metric that demonstrates this is that Montreal got abysmal production from their pinch hitters. Just looking at the four winning teams in the NL East in 1982:
|
Team
|
BA
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
OPS
|
|
STL
|
.275
|
.359
|
.358
|
.717
|
|
PHI
|
.221
|
.314
|
.284
|
.598
|
|
MON
|
.196
|
.250
|
.312
|
.562
|
|
PIT
|
.258
|
.345
|
.386
|
.731
|
The Cardinals and Pirates got solid production from their pinch hitters, because they had Whitey Herzog and Chuck Tanner managing the team, two men long in tooth at the job and experienced at understanding how to get production from your pinch hitters. The Expos had Jim Fanning, a first-year manager who never got another chance at the job.
Well, enough about the Expos. Last team.
1986 Boston Red Sox – Wade Boggs (8.3), Roger Clemens (9.4)
This was a good team, of course. In addition to Boggs, the Red Sox had Rice and Evans, still extremely capable major league hitters. They had Tony Armas, and when they realized that Tony Armas wasn’t up for the task, they acquired Don Baylor and Dave Henderson. They had Rich Gedman, a competent catcher who looked even better when the backup played. They had Hurst and Boyd in the rotation, Stanley and Schiraldi in the pen. I can’t remember who played first base for Boston…the name escapes me…but I’m sure he could turn a play if you hit it to him.
The Red Sox had talent, and they built a team around that talent. 1986 was Clemens’ breakout season, and by 1988 the team had brought up Mike Greenwell and Ellis Burks and Jody Reed and Brady Anderson and Sam Horn. They added Lee Smith and Mike Boddicker. By 1990 they had added Brunansky and Tony Pena and Jeff Reardon, and they had Phil Plantier and Tim Naehring and Scott Cooper waiting in the wings. They were a team that attempted to build around their great fortune, and while that building didn’t lead to a World Series appearance (mistakes were made: B-a-g-w-e-l-l), the Red Sox weren’t complacent about their fortune. They tried to build on it, in a way that set them apart from many of the other teams on this list. The organization identified problem areas and attacked them aggressively. It didn’t work out, and maybe they didn’t work out because the team was too aggressive at shuffling deck chairs, but they can’t be called complacent. The Red Sox tried to win with Boggs and Clemens, and they very nearly did. They’d get back to the playoffs in 1988 and 1990, getting swept by Oakland in the ALCS both times.
* * *
Here’s a table of all of the teams who could claim the best hitter and pitcher in a single season, along with their W-L records:
|
Year
|
Lg.
|
Team
|
Hitter
|
bWAR
|
Pitcher
|
bWAR
|
Team W-L
|
|
1906
|
NL
|
PIT
|
Honus Wagner
|
9.3
|
Vic Willis
|
8.1
|
93-60 (3rd)
|
|
1915
|
NL
|
PHI
|
Gavvy Cravath
|
7.0
|
Pete Alexander
|
10.9
|
90-62 (1st)
|
|
1934
|
AL
|
NYY
|
Lefty Gomez
|
8.3
|
Lou Gehrig
|
10.4
|
94-60 (2nd)
|
|
1935
|
NL
|
PIT
|
Arky Vaughan
|
9.2
|
Cy Blanton
|
7.2
|
86-67 (3rd)
|
|
1936
|
NL
|
NYG
|
Mel Ott
|
7.8
|
Carl Hubbell
|
9.8
|
92-62 (1st)
|
|
1942
|
AL
|
BOS
|
Tex Hughson
|
6.2
|
Ted Williams
|
10.6
|
93-59 (2nd)
|
|
1943
|
NL
|
STL
|
Stan Musial
|
9.4
|
Mort Cooper
|
5.8
|
105-49 (1st)
|
|
1948
|
NL
|
STL
|
Stan Musial
|
11.1
|
Harry Brecheen
|
8.9
|
85-69 (2nd)
|
|
1949
|
AL
|
BOS
|
Mel Parnell
|
7.9
|
Ted Williams
|
9.1
|
96-58 (2nd)
|
|
1963
|
AL
|
MIN
|
Camilo Pascual
|
6.1
|
Bob Allison
|
7.4
|
91-70 (3rd)
|
|
1965
|
NL
|
SFG
|
Willie Mays
|
11.2
|
Juan Marichal
|
12.3
|
95-67 (2nd)
|
|
1980
|
NL
|
PHI
|
Mike Schmidt
|
8.9
|
Steve Carlton
|
10.2
|
91-71 (1st)
|
|
1981
|
NL
|
PHI
|
Mike Schmidt
|
7.7
|
Steve Carlton
|
5.6
|
59-48 (1st*)
|
|
1982
|
NL
|
MON
|
Gary Carter
|
8.6
|
Steve Rogers
|
7.7
|
86-76 (3rd)
|
|
1986
|
AL
|
BOS
|
Roger Clemens
|
9.4
|
Wade Boggs
|
8.3
|
95-66 (1st)
|
I’m certainly not convinced that having great players blinds teams to their areas of weakness, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility, either. There are dimensions to what causes a team to win or lose that our best metrics haven’t delved into in any great depth, and one of those is the ways that the structures of a team can influence the performance of a team. Is it better to have three guys who are MVP candidates, or is it better to have six or seven guys who each produce runs fifteen percent better than the league average?
I will say that this all seems a tad anachronistic, a tad ‘old.’ Teams are smarter today than they’ve ever been, and it seems unlikely that a team blessed with a new version of Schmidt and Carlton will squander those years by signing a bunch of expensive free agents on the wrong side of thirty-five. We’ll someday see a team that is again blessed with the league’s best hitter and best pitcher, and I’d expect that team to raise the bar for this list.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.