Notes and Essays, Week Ending 1/31

1/25 N1: Maybe in the Negro Leagues, an official nickname meant you had arrived. In 1925, the top first half-dozen Negro League pitchers by number of strikeouts were Rats Henderson, Claude Grier, Bullet Rogan, Steel Arm Tyler, Nip Winters, and Square Moore. By contrast, the next 10 in strikeouts show almost complete conformity with a Robert, a Willie, a Nelson, a Fred, a Webster, a Luther, a Bill, a Logan, a Juan, and a Harry. Hey, Willie Nelson…..

1/25 N2: Jacob deGrom has quite an extended parabola going with strikeout rates per inning: an increase every year from 2016 to 2021, then a fall every year since. Since he averaged just 53 innings from 2020-2024, and there are very small sample sizes in those years, surely a lot random had to come together for it to happen. But the much more precise velocity readings for him famously show the same thing, except that deGrom was up a tick in his first season with the Rangers in 2023. Post Tommy John, whether through physical loss and age or strategy, he has lost velocity. A lot of times pitchers don’t, but when something like a Tommy John comes in, trying to make sense of the numbers just with the other numbers deserves the accusation of “out of touch.”

1/26 N1: Not until he was in his 40s did Nolan Ryan have both the elite strikeout rate and the under-control walk rate he needed to give him, for the eram excellent SO/BB ratios. When he led the NL in 1987 (and MLB also), it was the first time he’d place better than 5th in a league. Today, Ryan’s 3.10 1987 ratio would have him just mid-pack, as Freddy Peralta had a 3.09 ratio last year and was 25th of the 52 pitchers with 162 innings. If Ryan had pitched in 2025 and posted his 2.04-1 career mark, that would have placed him only between the 47th and 48th guys on the list.

1/26 N2: I’m repeating myself a bit here, but I’m assuming that is ok., as friends and relatives often tell me stories with the understanding that I have surely heard the story in question before but have forgotten it. My understanding growing up was that if I were to ever meet Ralph Kiner, it would be best not to show him the record book and let him know that Ewell Blackwell was not in fact the transcendant pitcher Kiner made him out to be. Why break the old guy’s heart, I thought. Kiner was an intrepid Mets announcer, so I spent a lot of time with him. It might be odd to be so protective of the hero worship of a hero, but I appreciate love of baseball wherever I can find it. Anyway, I just had validation of Blackwell in seeing that, in 1947 (Kiner’s breakout 51-home run year), he led the National League in wins and strikeouts, and only Warren Spahn’s 2.33 E.R.A. cost Blackwell the National League triple crown. Blackwell also led the league in FIP that year, as he had in 1946, and as he would in 1950.

That got me asking myself if Blackwell’s home runs-allowed rates were exceptional, and if maybe they serve as evidence that backs up Kiner’s exalted opinion. It can be hard to get context because home run rates were low in general, with Kiner able to lead the NL with just 23 in 1946, but Blackwell’s mere 1 home run allowed that year in 194.1 innings certainly give food for thought in this direction.

Blackwell’s career was really just 1946-1952, with only 12 games outside those years, and the 36 innings he pitched for the Yankees also seem like they can be safely ignored. So I looked at National League pitchers who threw 1000 innings over 1946-1952 for my reference group.

Blackwell himself was at 1278.1 innings, one of just 17 pitchers who passed the 1000-inning bar. Like him, 11 other pitchers were in the 1000-1500 inning range. A larger group would have been ideal to establish placing and excellence, but on the flip side, every single pitcher one of these pitchers had an ERA+ over 100, from Joe Hatten (101) to Harry “The Cat” Brecheen (131). So the 1000 innings itself served as something of a screen, lending exclusivity.

Blackwell allowed 0.45 HR-per-9, and this was the best rate, followed by Bob Rush (0.50) and Johnny Schmitz (0.51). To make those numbers mean something, Blackwell had a margin of about 6 home runs; in other words, he could have given up that many more in his 1278 innings, and still have had a better rate than Rush. 0.45 comes out to exactly 10 HR per 200 innings; the NL rate from 1946-1952 was 16.2 HR/200, or 0.73/9.

Blackwell also had the best FIP over the period (3.29), although this time only beating Rush (3.30) by an eyelash. He had that reputation as a dynamic and not a control pitcher, and Blackwell also arguably “won” strikeouts more decisively (5.76) than he won home runs, with Ralph Branca second (5.17). He kept his walks in a reasonable range, but placed just 14th there.

Bob Rush? A six-foot-four Chicago Cub for a decade and 292 starts, beginning in 1948. He had just a 56-74 record in the ‘48-’52 period. One of his two All-Star appearances came when 13-20 in 1950, and that seemed to be a reference for the high opinion his contemporaries had of him, but he was actually 9-8 at the break that year, so the vote didn’t necessarily except his record. In addition to being second in home runs in the group, Rush was fourth in strikeouts (per inning of course) and middle of the pack in walks.

The one home run Blackwell gave up in 1946 was hit by a rookie Dick Sisler. Sisler was on to the Phillies and eventual 1950 glory not long after, but I believe he continued living in St. Louis, as he was neighbors with my mother’s family around 1950.

1/26 N3: I got a kick of seeing that Luis Tiant’s dad (also Luis Tiant, but not a senior) went 9-0 and led the 1947 Negro National League in FIP while pitching for the New York Cubans. Tiant turned 41 during that season. Left-handed, unlike his son.

1/27 N1: I don’t think “pitching is 75% of the game” is going to make a comeback, but the teams with the 11 worst E.R.A.s last year were all under .500. But then the Blue Jays had the 12th-worst E.R.A., and the Dodgers the 14th worst. The division title and eventual pennant that each won would make you think they had hell of good offenses, if you had nothing else to go by but that juxtaposition.

The E.R.A.s of the Rockies (5.97) and Nationals (5.35) were so bad last year that the composite E.R.A. was driven quite a bit up, and the Dodgers actually shaded the overall E.R.A. by 0.20, despite ranking just inside the bottom half in E.R.A.s.

So the Rockies just missed a 6.00 E.R.A. In 2025, quite ridiculous. I missed that drama. They would have been the first 6.00+ team since their own squad in 1999. In fact, since the Negro Leagues dissolved, they would have been only the third 6.00+ team in any season, the 1996 Tigers (6.38, while 53-109) in a league of their own. MLB-wise, to find a 6.00 E.R.A. team before the Tigers, you have to go back to the St. Louis Briwns, who “did it” in ‘39, ‘37, and ‘36, right when those Yankee teams were reaching home run heights on an annual basis never seen before. The Yankees’ highest home run total (182, 1936) was quite a bit higher than the Browns’ most given up, though (143, 1937).

What happened when the Yankees played the Browns, as they did 22 times a year? Well, on the one hand, I absolutely would have expected the Yankees to have done better than their 64-24, .727 record, since they were a .670 team overall, the Browns a .328 team. Their 126 home runs over 90 games (two apparent ties) is also perhaps disappointing. But they did hit .316 with a .402 OBP against the Browns.

DiMaggio did what he could. Who would have thought he was such a vulture who got up for a little team like the Browns? As a rookie, he was absolutely astonishing versus them. His first two games were in the “rivalry” and he went 6 for 11 with a triple. Amazingly, he just about increased the pace, ending the year 52 for 99 against the Browns with 10 home runs and 100 total bases. He actually had a bit of development left, and when he wasn’t facing the Browns, he hit .286 with a .496 SLG in ‘36. So his batting average against the Browns was better than his slugging average against everybody else.

Over the whole 1936-1939 championship year period, DiMaggio hit .431 against the Browns with 34 2B, 7 3B, and 31 HR in 360 AB. An .822 slugging average.

Despite essentially missing 1939 and feeling Father Time and/or disease in 1938, Gehrig absolutely was a match for DiMaggio. But against the Browns, Gehrig wasn’t the Yankees second best hitter, Bill Dickey was. Dickey hit .365 with a .458 OBP in the games. His 84 RBI in 74 games wasn’t far behind DiMaggio’s 104 in 85. Gehrig only had 55 RBI against the Browns. Taking away the Browns, Dickey only had a 6 RBI lead on Gehrig over the four years.

Dickey was really sensational over the four years in general, though. I defer to Bill James in the finding that he wasn’t as good as Berra, an organizing approach James took in his original HIstorical Abstract, but ironically, we now never talk about how good Dickey was. James did his job too well.

1/27 N2: I thought Hall of Fame pitcher Red Ruffing’s 17 walks at the plate in 1938 were a quirk, but looking, statistic after statistic and year after year, there was little about his hitting that said “pitcher.” He pinch-hit 234 times and entered three games as a “defensive replacement” (as it were) in the outfield, but never started a game at a regular position. But he hit .269 in just under 2000 at-bats. He had a streak of 16 straight years with a home run.

Those 17 walks in 1938 from 125 plate appearances came in a period where he apparently took a patient approach, as he had never walked more than 7 times before 1936, but then rattled off 41 walks in three years. He hit only .202 in 1937 and .224 in 1938, so this may have not been without costs.

I never know if I can say correctly that a player is credited with a certain number of wins over replacement, as replacement-level could be theoretically said not to involve any wins in the first place, but Ruffing had 13.2 bWAR on offense. It certainly wasn’t as crucial an element as defense is to position players, but hitting for pitchers was perhaps what baserunning is to them in terms of maximizing “complete player” value.

1/27 N3: Can’t we all just get along? Counting alone probably could have gotten us to 21614 runs last year. Everyone agrees on that. But how many runs were earned? Baseball Reference in its “standard” page, presumably parroting the official record, says 19867. But then you go to the “league splits” page, and it’s 19907. FanGraphs, meanwhile, has 19903.

While head scratching, it doesn’t sound like much of a difference, and the 3 extra earned runs for the Rockies only get them to a 5.99 E.R.A. But it is affecting the league E.R.A. by a point, Fangraphs versus Baseball Reference.

It’s higher in FanGraphs, and in fact every team in FanGraphs data either gave up more earned runs as on Baseball Reference or the same number. So this doesn’t seem to be a discrepancy we are seeing so much as a difference in policy. It seems like a grounded dispute (why still going on in 2026, though, you got me).

I suspected the issue of the Ghost Runner, since those runs are by default unearned. And that is why I went to “league splits,” to see if I could pin down the 36 earned run difference just to relief pitching (I got the corresponding relief earned run number for FanGraphs). This is when I saw the third earned run estimate, 19907, meaing that splits wouldn’t be helpful for breaking down the 19867 as I had hoped.

It was enough to drive a man crazy. Too late to worry about that, though.

1/29 N1: You know it’s the offseason when I just mixed up J.T. Ginn and JP Sears. In my defense, Ginn came up on a list of most home runs given up, and Sears hit the 30 mark last year in just 135.2 innings. Per 9 innings, though, Ginn (17 allowed in 90.1 innings) wasn’t far behind Sears. The difference is that Ginn is a ground ball pitcher (1.71 GB/FB in 2025) and Sears a rare fly ball pitcher (0.58 GB/FB), so there’ seems to be more hope for Ginn. Ginn’s 21.5% HR/FB last year topped MLB of pitchers who threw 50 innings. An interesting level is fly balls per inning, where Sears had 1.57, Ginn 0.87.

One way you can prevent fly balls is by striking out batters. The Yankees just added the young reliever Angel Chivilli from Colorado, and his 1.58 GB/FB ratio in 2025 does paint his 2.0 HR/9 as a fluke. But his case would be even stronger if his strikeout rate exceeded were better than the 15.6% it was.

Perhaps the damage has been done, but Sears and Ginn are no longer teammates, removing one source of confusion. Sears came along with Mason Miller when the Padres plied the A’s with top prospects before the trade deadline.

1/29 N2: As I will post about hopefully before too long, Baseball Reference’s sensible handling of Negro League data is lagging behind the influx of the data. On the “standard pitching” summary page, the 1926 Cleveland Elites of the Negro National League are showing with an average pitcher age of 17.6. They went 6-38 with a 7.18 E.R.A., so I thought, hmmm, maybe, We might be able to round up some 18-year-olds to go 6-38, right? But you look at the actual team data, and no one with a documented age was younger than 20. Five of the team’s 18 pitchers have their age missing, and if you divide total pitcher age by 13 instead of 18, you get 18.7. This is very much on the right track, and I would take it that 17.6 is a weighted age of the 18 pitchers, counting the missing as being zero years old, instead of weighting the 18 all equally, and counting the pitchers with missing ages as 0s.

Really getting your imagination going. the New York Lincoln Giants show as having a 15.6 average age that year. At face value, they would have fit right in with Joe Nuxhall (although Nuxhall wasn’t actually born until two years after this, in 1928).

1/29 N3: It was open tryouts on the pitching mound for the 1932 White Sox — they used 26 pitchers. The Red Sox were second with 18. The other six teams in the league had between 10-14.

That’s what we call an outlier, folks.

While still under manager Lew Fonseca, they were down to 15 pitchers the next year, although that was still 2nd in MLB. The White Sox wouldn’t exceed 15 pitchers again until they had 16 in 1948. Twenty-six pitchers stood as a team record stood until it was tied in 1995 (impressive in a shortened schedule, although the 1996 AL average would be the same 21 it was in ‘95), and then finally broken in 2016.

So the 1932 White Sox will serve as a worthy case study for a very high number of pitchers, although I might just as plausibly have showcased the 1915 or 1955 A’s, who both used 27 pitchers (if with different cities as home), or even the 1912 Reds (24 pitchers), 1919 A’s (23 pitchers), or my new favorite Indians of the early 1920s (23 pitchers in 1922, and 22 in 1924).

Since the Black Sox scandal, thanks largely to the Red Sox, the White Sox were able to avoid last-place finishes in all years except 1924 and 1931, but they still lost a franchise record 102 in 1932. It was the team’s fourth straight year losing at least 90 games, after that fate had only befallen them prevously in the 20th century in 1921, the first year after their players were banned. Considering the 1932 White Sox set a near record for pitchers used, they actually pitched o.k. overall: a 4.82 E.R.A. vs. a 4.48 league mark. What stands out more is that they allowed 174 unearned runs, 22 more even than the 43-111 Red Sox.

Charlie Comiskey had died the previous autumn; they were under the tutelage of his son, J. Louis. Such things must always be considered when a team’s actions give the impression the team is being operated through frustration and with a short attention span, but the White Sox did lose only 83 games the following year, the younger Comiskey having bought Simmons, Dykes, and Haas from the A’s, according to BREF Bullpen Info. So that context suggests Louis was trying, however odd using 26 pitchers was.

The team’s manager was Lew Fonseca. Just in 1929, he had been AL batting champ and idiosyncratically league MVP, but was essentially done as a player by this time, appearing in just 18 games. He had come over from Cleveland in 1931 for Willie Kamm and had a 98 OPS+ in 121 games for the White Sox that year, He came up playing a lot of second base, won MVP at first base, and played mostly outfield in 1931. A utility man before utility men. He would only last as Chicago manager through early 1934 and never managed another club.

The White Sox were perhaps a tale of two pitching staffs, with one the group that got them to 26 pitchers total. But they had quality as well as quantity, although much of this quality had been extinguished. By number of starts, their staff was led by Sad Sam Jones (39 years old), Ted Lyons (31), and Milt Gaston (36). Forty-three-year-old Red Faber is listed as their closer and finished a team high 28 games. By BREF’s pitching age, the White Sox were the oldest team in the league by over a year.

At 5.2 bWAR, future Hall of Famer Lyons was far and away their ace; no one else on the staff was worth as many as two wins. But Jones, Lyons and Faber would all ultimately win between 229 and 260 games, with loses between 213 and 230. Their composite winning percentage was .530.

I loved becoming acquainted with some of the statistics of Faber. With a 3.74 E.R.A., he was effective this season, and would pitch one more at 3.44. He was a rather early Hall of Famer, elected in 1964. His bWAR for his career was 67.4, and he led the A.L. in E.R.A. in 1921 and 1922. He saw a lot of White Sox history and must have been able to tell a story or two, only playing for the White Sox, and having a 20-year career. He won three games in the 1917 World Series and started 20 games for the 1919 White Sox. All the way back In 1915, he won 24 games and struck out 182 batters, placing him second in the AL behind only Walter Johnson.

If you chart the innings for any staff or chart any equivalent indication of use, I suppose you will always get something of an extended tail, with quite a few pitchers clustered with low totals. Thinking about it logically, that there were some big names on this staff probably is unrelated to how skewed this distribution was likely to be, but I noted that there were only eight pitchers on the team who threw 50 innings. Having made that observation, my task then became to account for the phenomenon of the other 18.

Forming a stark contrast with the headliners, this second pitching staff was a young group. Ages ranged from 18 to 33 (Fonseca, in a cameo) but the median and averages ages were 25. This is why I say it was “tryouts on the pitcher’s mound.” Six of the guys were big leaguers in 1932 and only iny 1932. Most staggering, an additonal nine had experience before 1932, but did not pitch in 1933 (although a few did pitch both before 1932 and after 1933).

So there were only three pitchers on the staff who threw fewer than 50 innings and made it to 1933. Tommy Thomas and Bump Hadley began the year as already accomplished pitchers but were traded or sold early in the season. Then Chad Kimsey, just 26 but already with experience of over 100 relief games under his belt, came over from the Browns in September and remained with the White Sox in 1933, although he paid few dividends, posting a -0.3 bWAR in 96 innings.

Because the pitching overall wasn’t awful, it can’t be said that they were desperate for pitchers, but clearly they were using guys no one else would and no wanted going forward. I certainly found some individual cases of markedly bad pitching:

Charlie Biggs: 12 BB, 1 SO, 24.2 IP (tied for 8th-worst career BB/SO ratio ever for pitchers with a SO)

Bill Chamberlain: 25 BB, 11 SO

Grant Bowler: 6.1 IP, 15 H, 12 R

But considering there is obviously selection effect here, where being part of the sample means in the first place you were more likely than average to have been fired, I might have expected them to have done even worse as a group than they did. They were a good ways over the league average in hits, walks, and home runs, although competitive (2.9-per-9 vs. 3.3 for the league) in strikeouts. Their E.R.A. was an unsightly 6.28. Some starts (24 specifically) were doled out to the group, among 92 total games.

In this case, that you were very young did not mean you probably had a very bright future. The White Sox had an 18-year-old (Clarence Fieber), a 19-year-old (Archie Wise), and a 20-year-old (Art Evans) pitcher, and they were three of the six “one and dones.” Compared to the end of the spectrum represented by Charles “Victory” Faust, they can’t be explained as circus acts, as all pitched multiple games. But while granting that major league preparation was different then, they did have some dubious resumes.

Fieber is intriguing because he was a six-foot-four lefty and allowed just 1 run in his 5.1 innings of opportunity. He was San Francisco-born and pitched for the Pacific Coast League Oaks over 1932 and 1933. The league’s average age was over 28, so he was legitimately precocious to be therte. But 8-11 in 1932 and 5-9 in 1933, he would seem not to have been ready. He hung around in the minors through 1937.

Wise came from Class C and D baseball, where he’d walked 144 men in 230 innings. If we are to believe the public record, 1932 was his only year of professional baseball.

Outside of his White Sox gig, the only professional stats published for Evans are Class B pitching in 1938 and 1939, the 1938 season actually going surprisingly well (a 3.05 E.R.A. in 180 innings).

The White Sox other “one and dones” were 23-year-old Chamberlain, the fifth-youngest of their 18 tryout pitchers, and Fonseca himself, who is a special case, but technically qualifies.

The two came together, as Fonseca relieved Chamberlain dor his one-and-only MLB outing. I have never heard of a position-player outing like this. The outing didn’t come in the last game of the year, and it didn’t span the 9th inning or even the 8th. It was game 149 of 152. The White Sox were trailing the Indians 8-6 going into the bottom of the 6th. What happened was that Chamberlain, literally, could not get anybody out. The first seven batters in the 6th reached against him, an inside-the-park Joe Vosmik home run part of the damage. Fonseca then came in and successively got a pop out, a fly ball, and a ground out. Showing up his own charges, it would seem.

1/30 N1: I’m not sure what the basis for qualification is, but sorting by winning percentage on the Baseball Reference 2025 “cumulative pitching” page, reveals sixteen pitchers with winning percentages of .600 or better: Clayton Kershaw, Max Fried, Walker Buehler, Shohei Ohtani, Shane Bieber, Brandon Woodruff, Max Scherzer, Brent Suter, Justin Verlander, Freddy Peralta, Corbin Burnes, Chris Sale, Cristian Javier, Framber Valdez, Chris Stratton and Zack Wheeler. Only Stratton has an ERA+ under 110, and the average ERA+ is 128, which is a very high number (I believe ERA+s tend to have a bit of a lower standard deviation than OPS+es). The average ERA+ by winning percentage rank interval:

1-10: 132

11-20: 126

21-30: 114

Although with the passage of time, I think it is helpful, or at least convenient, I don’t know that, in the moment, we ever need pitcher won-loss record, that is true. But if there is an inconsistency between winning percentage and run prevention, say if a team has just signed a mediocre winning percentage guy to a big contract, one should at least pause and ask why there is the difference.

I also think won-loss record does better if one takes it in that form. I think it makes a worse showing when the losses are dropped, and pitchers are just ranked in a single season by wins. Then you can make it out to be a weak statistic.

1/30 N2: No one in MLB stole 50 bases last year, but my hunch is that Luisangel Acuna will do it this year. He’s an aggressive base stealer, and I think he’ll take over for the White Sox where Luis Robert left off. He did steal at only a 75% clip in Venezuela thsi winter, though.

It’s interesting that “Marcels Projections” have him being quite viable offensively in 2026, including slugging .382. He’s only a career .400 slugger in the minor leagues, and .341 in the majors.

1/30 N3: A very quick browse of this year’s Venezuelan League statistics acquaints me with the Blue Jays #11 BA prospect Yohendrick Pinango. Despite being rather short on minor league production, Baseball America gives him a 55 hit grade. His power grade is just 50, but he is supposed to have “plus-plus raw power” that has not resulted in commensurate home runs because of his swing plane (he doesn’t hit the ball in the air). The great news is that he missed more games than he played for Cardenelas de Lara this winter, but was as good as anyone in the league when out there, hitting .363 and slugging .714 in 91 at-bats.

We have seen these assessments be uninformed, but Pinango is apparently a designated hitter in the making although he plays outfield. He’s a prospect, so his 20 DH starts in the minor leagues last year were his first.

1/30 N4: Rougned Odor, two years from the major leagues, was Venezuela’s only “10-10” guy this winter, meaning 10 home runs and 10 steals. He was top five in the league in both categories. I don’t remember steals from him and, indeed, per 162 games, he stole only 10 bases with 7 caught stealing. So had a bad ratio in addition to the low number. A hustler (if I remember), he did used to get down to first in under 4.2 seconds (every year from 2016 through 2018) but had just 26.8 sprint speed in 2023. He doesn’t seem to have any major league nibbles, and his Venezuelan batting average was 10 points under the league average.

1/30 N5: Improbably, Clayton Kershaw’s career 4.28 SO/BB ratio isn’t even the best among pitchers with his initials: he is beaten out by Corey Kluber at 4.69. Among pitchers with 200 starts since 1901, looking only at the starting role, Kluber’s ratio is the third best of all time, with Sale #1 and deGrom #2. The rest of the top 10: Curt Schilling, Gerrit Cole, Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Pedro Martinez, Kershaw, and Aaron Nola.

A particular brand of excellence I like.

1/30 N6: If the Negro Leaguer George “Tubby” Scales wasn’t Hall of Fame caliber, it looks like he was just a half step below. He particularly excelled in seven seasons with the New York Lincoln Giants of the Eastern Colored League and then the American Negro League, posting a 168 OPS+ off a .355/.452/.575 slash. I noticed him actually because, at 39, he, Bill Hoskins, and pitcher Emery Adams (12-5 in 55 g schedule; 3.17 E.R.A. vs. league 5.18) would seem to have carried the second-place Baltimore Elite Giants of the National League in 1940. Scales hit .352 with a .483 OBP and had 15 2B in 142 AB.

He was farther along than an 18-year-old Roy Campanella, who homered in 5% of his AB and over three times as often as the average player, but still landed south of a 100 OPS+ because of an OBP 52 points off the league mark.

I noted before on Henry Kimbo as one of the eight players 1900+ with as many walks as games in a season with 50+ games played. Kimbo was Campanella’s teammate on Baltimore, and their OBPs and SAs could hardly have been more different: .302/.471 for Campanella; .400/.342 for Kimbo. They came to more or less the same place. Kimbo would blossom later and finish his career with a known .828 OPS and .434 SA.

Returning to Scales, he finished with a Rfield of +1, and had ten years when he was a primary third baseman, four when he was a primary first baseman (at the end of his career), four when he was a primary second baseman, and two when he was a primary shortstop.

Even with those 20 years of service time, he has a hole in his official record for his age 29-33 seasons, 1930-1934. From his SABR Bio, I gather he was playing then, though, and managing — for the New York Black Yankees. I suppose they weren’t a regular member of a league at that time and so aren’t part of the official record? But in any event, considering this, it does seem that his bWAR, etc., must be considered accordingly in rating him.

Please pardon my ignorance on these subjects; this is rather a journal of my learning, and like the parking lot attendant in Seinfeld, I ask that you please bear with me.

1/31 N1: John Franco got much better results than his FIP numbers would indicate both with the Reds and Mets.

Reds: 3.26 FIP, 2.49 E.R.A.

Mets: 3.60 FIP, 3.10 E.R.A.

I looked at GDP for him. He did have a better-than-average rate, but I don’t think this explains much of the disrepancy. Per 575 AB in his career, he got 14.2 GDP per 575 AB. A National League reliever composite from 1984-2005 shows 12.8 GDP per 575 AB.

What about superior pitching in the clutch? With a .339 slug with runners on vs. .346 with no one on, Franco’s numbers are in the right direction, but not to the extent that would explain the discrepancy. His overall .343 “slug against” is an impressive number, although we would think FIP would be on top of that, since it in part measures home run rate.

The most surprising thing in my mind, given Franco’s FIP/E.R.A. discrepancy, is that the BAbip against him was healthy — .297, vs. a .293 baseline for his career.

1/31 N2: Dennis Eckersley was about as squarely in the starting pitcher camp as you can be for his first 12 years. Over nine straight years, he didn’t make a relief appearance. Then, once transitioning to the bullpen, he didn’t have a year when he pitched in as many as 70 games, and there wasn’t a season when he was in the top five in the league in games. Yet he is 5th all time in games. Defies credulity.

What he did have going for him was a) coming up at 20 b) being an iron man health-wise. I can see that whether you pitch 82 games in seasons or 65 games isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of the statistic, but I do find it amazing that he got where he did being half a starting pitcher.

Hoyt Wilhelm is just one game behind Eckersley. I thought he too had had a good run as a starter, but actually he just pitched extremely well in his limited time in that role, so maybe that’s what I was thinking of. In 1959, he led the American League with a 2.19 E.R.A., but that is the only year in which he made more starts than relief appearances.