Moose

              Hi, Bill.   You wrote about Jim Kaat that if you rearranged a few of his seasons just by a win or two, he’d have the same career won-lost record, but with, say, four 20-win seasons.   Would you put Mike Mussina in that same category?  Six seasons of 17-19 wins, only one 20 game season (his last).   Like Kaat, if you shift a couple of those wins, his Hall of Fame career becomes much easier.  

              DBurba (Not Dave)

              Well, actually, Jim Kaat DID win 20 games three times, so it doesn’t take a lot of re-structuring to get him to four.    For Mussina, we should start with the observation that he won 16 games in 1994, when the strike cut off the season at 112 games, and then won 19 games in 1995, when the strike limited the season to 144 games.   Also, whereas Jim Kaat started 38 or more times in a season six times including three seasons of 41 or 42 starts, Mussina never started more than 36 times in a season.   This makes it somewhat more difficult for Mussina (realistically) to get big seasons.  But anyway, for Mike Mussina, here is what I did.  

              First, I created a game log for Mussina, consisting of all his actual starts; we’re not creating or destroying starts for Mussina, just moving them around.   The career totals are the same, but the totals in each season are different.  I assigned a random number to each start, but then started adjusting the numbers gradually, through cycle after cycle of recalculation and re-ordering, so that the more of the stronger starts would be concentrated in the center, and more of the weaker starts at the beginning and end of his career.   Also, I took one start away from each of the first three years of his career and each of the last four years of his career, and added one start per season to the years 1997 to 2003.   Eventually I arrived at this record—stressing that this is merely one sample, and that you could create billions of alternative career records given the same underlying data.  

              Pretty sure that that’s a Hall of Famer.  

Grandpa

            David Ross has retired now, and it would be difficult to imagine how anyone could leave the majors in a better way.   He played 15 years in the major leagues, but played only 883 games, and played 100 games in a season only once, that total being 112 in 2007.    He had a long major league career, but played an average of just 59 games a season—yet I don’t think anyone would say that he wasn’t a good player.   We certainly thought of him as a good player in Boston, not an every-day guy, but a guy who was just as good as the every-day guy while he was in there.  

            So I had a couple of questions:

            1)  I got to wondering how close it was to a record, playing 15 years but only 883 games, and

            2)  I was wondering what his teams’ won-lost records were with/without him in the lineup.  

            On the second issue. . . .you may know from the World Series that the Cubs had a fantastic record with Ross as the starting catcher in 2016.    They were 39-11.   It is hard to process how good that is.   The Cubs, 103-58 on the season, were 28 games over .500 in the 50 games that Ross started—but only 17 games over .500 in the 111 games that other catchers started.   If you extrapolate from that data point without other facts, you can convince yourself that David Ross was the NL MVP in 2016.

            A key reason for the odd number, of course, was that Ross was Jon Lester’s personal catcher, catching all 32 of Lester’s starts.    The Cubs went 25-7 (.782) with Lester on the mound—but also went 14-4 (.778) with Ross catching and Lester NOT on the mound.   So I got to wondering about Ross’s CAREER record in this regard, whether his teams have always done well with him as the starting catcher.

            Not so much. 

            Actually, from the start of Ross’s career through 2010, Ross’s teams had a terrible record with Ross catching, compared to how they did without him.     Ross’s teams had a worse record with Ross as the starting catcher than with other catchers at every single stop from 2002 through 2010, except that with Pittsburgh in 2005 the team was 14-17 (.452) with Ross catching, whereas they had a .443 winning percentage when he wasn’t catching.   Otherwise. . .always worse.

            The most remarkable "bad number" here is with the Reds in 2007.   That was the only year that Ross started half of his team’s games, starting 98 of the 162.   The team was 38-60 with Ross as the starting catcher—whereas they were over .500 with the backups.   That’s a bad number.  

            From 2001 to 2010, Ross’s teams were 34 games worse with Ross in the starting lineup than without him.   It’s a lot.   This started to turn around for him in 2011 with Atlanta.   In 2011 Ross was the backup to Brian McCann.   The Braves were in their Prague Spring era; they had young guys like Freddie Freeman, Jason Hayward, Brian McCann and Martin Prado, and it appeared that they were going places.   Ross had a pretty good year with the bat, hitting .263 with 6 homers in 152 at bats. 

            Ross started that season as the personal catcher for Jair Jurrjens and sometimes Brandon Beachy.   On May 4 he caught Tim Hudson for the first time—the first time he had caught anyone except Jurrjens or Beachy—and Hudson pitched a 1-hit shutout.    He didn’t catch Hudson again until June 10, but Hudson pitched well then, and then he caught him on June 20, and Hudson pitched 8 innings of two-hit shutout baseball.   He caught him again his next start; Hudson pitched six shutout innings.   In his first four starts with Tim Hudson, Hudson gave up only 2 runs in 29 innings, a 0.62 ERA.  

            He caught Derek Lowe for the first time on May 17; Lowe—who pitched well the first half of that season—had one of his best games.   Gradually Ross transitioned from being the personal catcher for the Braves YOUNG starters (Beachy and Jurrjens) to being the personal catcher for their two old sinker-ball pitchers, Hudson and Lowe.   He caught Tommy Hanson for the first time on June 7; Hanson pitched six innings of two-hit shutout ball.  

            By the end of the season the Braves starting rotation was in chaos, with Beachy and Jurrjens hurting and Lowe’s career headed for the barn; the Braves were starting guys like Mike Minor, Randall Delgado and Julio Teheran, and Ross caught some of the starts of each of them.   In the end, Ross’s catching assignments were pretty much the same as the rest of the team, almost a random catch.  But the team had a 28-14 record with Ross starting, whereas they were only two games over .500 (61-59) when Ross was not starting.   That’s +6.7 games with Ross starting, which was the best year of his career in this regard until his epochal departure tour.

            He was a little under water in 2012-13, a little over in 2014-15.   For his career, Ross’s teams were 15.8 games better when Ross wasn’t catching than when he was. 

            On the other issue. . .Ross had a long major league career but played only 59 games per season.   Is this some sort of record, or close?

            After floundering around, I finally realized that the way to measure this is to multiply the years by 90 and subtract the games played, so that if a player plays 90 games a year or more he doesn’t show up in this category, but if he has a long career playing LESS than 90 games a year, he will register.   90 games, 100, 80, 110. . .it doesn’t matter; the same guy is going to show up as the leader in this category no matter how you figure it, because he is way ahead of everybody else.  

            The guy who is going to win this no matter how you figure it is Tom Prince.   Tom Prince played 17 seasons in the majors, but only 519 games.     He played fewer games than anyone else who played 16 seasons (except pitchers), or 15, or 14.     He is the absolute king of this category, the Prince and the King.    There was a player in the late 1990s named Mike Frank, which gives us a name string:  Mike Frank Thomas Prince Fielder Jones.

            Anyway, what I learned that is interesting here is that this category is completely and totally dominated by catchers; I expected to find a lot of backup catchers on the list, but mixed with backup infielders and glove wizard shortstops who hit .175.    It’s all catchers.     The top two are Tom Prince and Corky Miller, a recent catcher that many of you will remember.  

            The third guy is Lou Klimchock.   Klimchock, an infielder, was an interesting player, and I wrote about him at some length somewhere on this site within the last year or so.   I always knew there was something unique about him, and this method puts the button on it; there’s no other infielder like him who had a 12-year career and played only 318 major league games.  

            But after Klimchock, the next twenty guys (not counting pitchers and a couple of position players who converted to pitching in mid-career). . .the next twenty guys are all catchers.    I figured what I called the "David Ross Score", although obviously now we would have to change it to the Tom Prince Score.  This is the list:

          &nbs​p;   Of those 23 players, at least ten are great human interest stories, but anyway, the other thing that struck me about the list is:  This does not change over time.    Everything in baseball changes over time, right?   Rosters are different, playing styles are different. . .everything changes.   When you make a list like this, it is almost always dominated by the players from one era, because some era always has a relevant edge.

              But not here.    The role of a backup catcher is EXACTLY the same now that it was in 1900 and before, basically.    On the chart above every year from 1900 to the present is covered except 1946 and the years 1958-1974, and that’s just a little anomaly; there are catchers exactly like this from the years 1958 to 1974, too.  (Hawk Taylor, Tim Hosley, Jimmie Coker, Don Pavletich, Duffy Dyer, Bill Plummer, Hank Foilies.   They’re just on the second page of the list.)  

          &nbs​p;   Isn’t that interesting, that somehow this little niche in the game has stayed there, while everything around it has changed?   In 1900 catchers always batted eighth; pitchers always batted ninth, catchers eighth.   In 1900 catchers didn’t have shin guards or chest protectors, and teams stole 250 bases a year.    In the 1950s and 1960s, teams liked to have big old left-handed home run hitters as backup catchers, like Carl Sawatski and Johnny Blanchard and Aaron Robinson and Ed Kirkpatrick and Duke Sims, Ed Bailey the last five years of his career.   But somehow, THIS has not changed. 

           ​;   Ross is not in the top 100, by the way.  By the formula I settled on to evaluate this, he ranks about 175^th.