This is a follow-up to the study that I published yesterday, in which I put all major league pitchers starting a game since 1921 into a common pool, and ranked them according to their won-lost success in head to head matchups.   At the end of the article, I wondered aloud what would happen "If you limited the study to games in which both pitchers made 200 major league starts, that would get you about 100,000 games, I think.   Come to think of it, that’s the answer; that’s what I should have done."

            I actually did not think of that alternative until I was writing that last paragraph, and then I felt so strongly that that was what I should have done that I decided to do it.   It is my sad duty to report that it doesn’t work, either; in fact, it fails worse than the original version of the study did—"Fails" in the sense of delivering a list of the greatest starting pitchers ever that no one would take seriously.  

            First, I pared back the data so that it included only games by starting pitchers on both teams who made at least 200 major league starts.   This gave me a list of 567 pitchers and 97,622 games to study, so my estimate there (100,000) was about right.  Also, the mechanics of the study, benefitting from (a) the fact that less than a third as many games were involved, and (b) learning from the mistakes I made the first time I ran the study. . .the mechanics of it were much, much, much easier in this study, as I thought they would be, and this allowed me to run through 20 "cycles" of the study in maybe 90 minutes or two hours of work.   All good.

            Except that it doesn’t work. 

            After the first cycle of comparisons based on head to head performance, with everyone starting out even, the top 10 pitchers in my study were 1. Lefty Grove, 2. Clayton Kershaw, 3. Lefty Gomez, 4. Chris Sale, 5. Sandy Koufax, 6. Orlando Hernandez, 7. Urban Shocker, 8. Chris Tillman, 9. Walter Johnson, and 10. Randy Johnson. 

            Most of those are really good pitchers, but. . .Chris Tillman?   Why is Chris Tillman listed ahead of Randy and Walter Johnson?  

            Chris Tillman, for those of you who have not been following the AL East carefully in recent years, was the Baltimore Orioles’ ace from 2012 to 2016, posting won-lost records of 9-3, 16-7, 13-6, 11-11 and 16-6 in those years.   Still, his major league won-lost record was only 74-60, hardly the kind of record you would associate with Sandy Koufax and Randy Johnson.   How did he wind up on the list?

            Tillman made 205 major league starts, which qualifies him for the study, but when we limit ourselves to games against other pitchers who ALSO made 200 or more starts, then we’re dealing with only 83 starts.  It happens, whether by coincidence or not, that in those 83 starts, Tillman’s personal won-lost record was 35-19, a .648 winning percentage, and the won-lost record of his teams was 54-29, a .651 winning percentage.   He was under .500 when matched against starting pitchers who made less than 200 major league starts (so far), but around .650 when matched against pitchers who DO have 200 or more starts. 

            Now, I think, personally, that that is an interesting fact to know, if we are discussing Chris Tillman.   But it is really NOT a persuasive argument to rank Chris Tillman as a greater pitcher than Walter Johnson.  

            So it turns out that, doing the study that way, I actually WOULD need to include "balance starts" to express skepticism about pitchers who do well in small sample sizes—that, or this approach just is not going to work, anyway.  

            The other question that I really wanted to get to was whether this approach would pick up the "bias of history"—that is, whether it would rank 21^st pitchers, in general, higher than older pitchers.   Boy, does it.  It ranks them SO MUCH higher than the older pitchers that, frankly, it makes the study pretty useless.   After 20 cycles through the data—not actually a large number—the top 20 pitchers on the list are all 21^st century pitchers except Lefty Grove, who has dropped to 19^th.  Sandy Koufax is still hanging around, in the #21 spot, but I am quite confident that, if I ran the data through another 20 cycles, both Grove and Koufax—and all other pitchers from before 1990—would drop entirely out of the top 100, and would still be dropping as we ran more cycles.  

            That is problematic, but not really unexpected.   While it MAY be true that baseball is better than ever and that players now deserve an advantage when compared to older players, that isn’t actually why this happens in this data.   The reason it happens is that the great majority of pitchers are better in the first halves of their careers than in the second halves; there are some exceptions.  But Robin Roberts was 179-120 over the first nine seasons of his career, and 107-125 over the second ten years.    CC Sabathia was 191-102 over the first 12 years of his career, 60-59 over the last seven years.  That’s more the rule than the exception.   Most pitchers have their best years when they are young healthy.  

            That means that, when a young Dwight Gooden pitches against an aging Tom Seaver or Steve Carlton, Dwight Gooden is usually going to win.  (I checked, after I wrote that.  Gooden was 2-0 against Carlton, and never started against Seaver.)    But Gooden was 1-3 against Orel Hershiser, and 1-5 against Doug Drabek.  They weren’t younger than he was, but they were at an earlier point in their careers.   You know what I mean; it’s a young man’s game. 

            That bias corrodes the network, and, over time, over repeated cycles, would probably make almost all 1980s pitchers look better than almost all 1960s pitchers.   So when the system shows us that all of the greatest pitchers ever are all 21^st century pitchers, no one really can be expected to believe that—and then there is the problem that it isn’t even always the RIGHT 21^st century stars.  This is the top 20 pitchers, after 20 cycles through the data:

            Even if I was willing to accept the premise that all of the greatest pitchers ever are 21^st century pitchers, which I am not, I would rather have Zack Greinke, Max Scherzer, Roy Halladay, Roger Clemens, CC Sabathia and Greg Maddux on the list, rather than Chris Tillman, Orlando Hernandez, Mark Mulder, Clay Buchholz, Jered Weaver and Jake Arrieta. 

            It’s got three problems: 

(1)   Inadequate samples,

(2)  Timeline bias, and

(3)  The inherent problems of relying solely on won-lost records. 

So I give up.  It doesn’t work.