The Toughest and Easiest Competition

These ten pitchers had the largest numbers of matchups against a #1 Starter:

Of course, those guys all had long careers, so that doesn’t tell you that much without the percentages.  Tom Zachary is the percentage leader:

         I remember when one of the Babe Ruth movies came out, my friend Jim Payne said "Did you notice that every time they showed the pitcher, it seemed like it was always Tom Zachary?"  Jim was a Ballpark manager, so he would know who Tom Zachary was.  This sort of goes along with that. 

         But really, these numbers don’t mean that much, either. We’re missing a lot of data for Zachary, but also, when you establish 250 starts as the qualifying standard, you tend to get a list of pitchers who have just over 250 starts.  If you make the standard 332, you would get a bunch of "leaders’’ who were between 332 and 360.  It doesn’t mean that much. The list below, which means a little bit more, is the pitchers who faced the toughest opposition starting pitchers, on average:

You can generalize that most of those guys probably lost about 7 wins over their careers by facing tougher-than-average competition.  Take the 20-game estimate for Gibson vs. Randy Johnson, and divide it by two, assuming that Gibson was ten games on one side of the "average" line and Johnson was ten games on the other side.  Then reduce the 10 to 7 because most of these pitchers didn’t make as many starts as Johnson or Gibson, and you’re at about 7 wins that they lost by facing tougher starters.

"QOOS" is "Quality of Opposition Starters", and the easiest opposition pitchers, on average: