Statistical Stories of Right-Handers Who Controlled the Running Game

Granted I’ve abused the concept, but I’ve lost patience with notes that exceed the character limit. So despite the hour and my enervated state of mind, rather than editing or breaking up this last one that went haywire, I figured I would just post it here. Take it for what it is, and supply a better alternative word as needed….

So I am working with this list of pitchers who accumulated 30 or more grounded-into-double-plays in a season in the ‘70s. Once in a while, I browse through stuff randomly. And I saw some really gnarly stolen base/caught stealing totals on the list. For instance, no wonder Jim Kaat won those 16 Gold Gloves: in 1975 base stealers were caught 12 times against him in 16 attempts. I’ve been able to do stats on Claude Osteen quite a bit over the last year, and his numbers in 1971 were almost identical to Kaat’s 1975: 12 for 17. Fritz Peterson wasn’t a clown, he knew his craft: maybe he wasn’t picking people off like Kaat and Osteen probably were, but with the help of Munson, he allowed just 6 total steals over 70 starts in 1971 and 1972. Mike Cuellar actually allowed 18 steals in 28 attempts in his 31 GDP 1974, but the next year embarrassed base stealers to the tune of 6 for 26.

But it’s a rigged game, I thought: all of these guys are left-handed.

Having seen these cases, I expected the total comparison of stolen bases and caught stealing against all righties and lefties in the ‘70s to be dramatic. The difference was large, but also indicated there were clearly a lot of lefties not nearly in the Kaat category. Per 625 plate appearances, when the pitcher was right-handed, batters logged 11.3 steals and were caught 5.7 times (66% success rate). Against lefties, batters stole 7.8 bases per 625 PA, with 5.6 caught stealing (58.1% success rate).

But the examples still suggested to me that, to truly shut down the running game, you have to be left-handed. So, using the trick of Stathead’s stat ratio, I did the following test. Were there any right-handers debuting in 1960 or later, who allowed a SB success rate of 50% or less, and had 25 career caught stealing?

There have been 23. There aren’t any 2020s pitchers yet; whether this is because the decade is too young, or because of the elevated stolen base rate with the new rules, remains to be seen. But otherwise, there is a really good mix of decades. I coded everybody based on the average of his first and last year and placed him. Here’s the group and how they break down.

1960s pitchers: Dallas Green, Al McBean, Bob Humphreys, Steve Blass

1970s: Jim Hardin, Steve Kline, Stan Bahnsen

1980s: Dale Murray, Roger Erickson, Rick Langford, Dave Rozema, Ed Lynch, John Stupor

1990s: Kirk McCaskill, Rich DeLucia, Alan Benes

2000s: Garrett Stephenson, Ryan Drese, Chris Carpenter

2010s: Chris Tillman, Josh Collmenter, Hisashi Iwakuma, Johnny Cueto

Sometimes it’s more fun to see names you barely know or rarely see than luminaries, but it’s not a very good group. When Josh Collmenter and his 109 career ERA+ rates 6th, that says something. But diving into some of the guys, they had periods when they were considerably more interesting. Maybe Steve Blass typifies that. In fact, he was so successful a pitcher at his peak (World Series hero), that I won’t feature him.

So, in general, we can probably conclude from the mediocrity of the list that this skill either probably isn’t central to being a really good pitcher, or that the kind of guy who perfects it is often an Ed Lynch type, who does so partly because he has little margin for error. But ironically, maybe the pitcher with the most eye-popping caught stealing prevention numbers on here was also the best pitcher: Chris Carpenter.

To take Carpenter’s running game prevention first, he rates first on the list, having only allowed a 37.9% successful steal rate. My requirement of as many caught stealing as stolen bases was no object for him. The only guy who ranked with his differential in favor of caught stealing was the mostly Oakland Athletic Rick Langford. Both Carpenter and Langford allowed 47 steals during their careers, and Langford had 73 caught stealing, to Carpenter’s 77.

After those two, the highest differential between caught stealing and steals belongs to Stan Bahnsen. For some reason, runners did try some against Bahnsen, swiping 121 bags, but they were caught a crazy 134 times. Bahnsen ranked 3rd worst on the list in rate, allowing 9.6 steals per 200 innings. Dallas Green was at the bottom, with 10.3.

One hates to be so reductionist to choose the best pitcher based on career wins, but this is the kind of list where a simple weeding out process effectively narrows the candidates. There are five 100-game winners on the list. Chris Tillman is #6 in wins, and I don’t think he was the best pitcher. Number 7 is Langford (his birthday today, BR tells me), 33 games under .500 for his career. One-hundred game winners 4 and 5 are Kirk McCaskill and Blass. But with 146, 144, and 144 wins, Bahnsen, Carpenter, and Johnny Cueto stand out from the pack. Bahnsen has his fans, but with a career 97 ERA+, doesn’t measure up.

Not only did Carpenter and Cueto both win exactly 144 (although apparently not with an organization, let us stress that Cueto may not be done), both had a 116 ERA+. That’s the best in the group other than Dave Rozema, who had a 118. Although he had a fine 20-year-old rookie 1977 (5.7 bWAR, led the AL in BB/9), Rozema probably isn’t the answer for the best pitcher. First, he’s no Cueto or Carpenter; who’s heard of him? Then, he started just 132 games while appearing in just 116 more. Other than his rookie year, the most wins he had in an over .500 season was 8.

Continuing the Carpenter/Cueto comparison, of which their mastery of the running game in my opinion is not the least significant similarity, their career innings are 2219.1 and 2256.1, respectively, and their walk totals 627 and 637, respectively. It’s probably largely due to debuting later, but Cueto had 160 more strikeouts, and tops the list with a rather humdrum 7.4-per-9. Cueto actually beats Carpenter, and leads everyone on another list, giving up only 3.6 steals per 200 innings pitched.

Dale Murray is a fun one for the trivia and stats person. It’s hard to make this list as a reliever, I would think just because it’s hard to pitch enough in relief to accumulate 25 caught stealing. Plus, base stealers perhaps can take advantage of pitchers in the late innings. The only two pitchers on here with fewer than 10 career starts are Murray and Bob Humphreys. Murray was what we would call a long reliever, though, averaging almost 1.75 innings per game. His one start came at Wrigley Field in July of ‘77, with the Reds going down 16-15 in 13 innings, and Murray giving up 6 earned runs in 1+ inning.

Three years before that, he’d actually had an amazing rookie year. He came up for the Expos in July, and over 32 games and 69.2 IP, pitched to a 1.03 E.R.A. Two years later, he pitched in 81 games, leading the National League.

He was obviously a super-finesse pitcher: a career 4.0 strikeouts per 9 innings. I think he had the control marking one, too, but sometimes he didn’t get to show it. Twenty-four percent of the career walks he issued were intentional. In 1978 alone, he had 4 intentional walks with the Reds, and 19 with the Mets! The Mets were managed by a 37-year-old Joe Torre, by the way….

Murray was involved in, and actually appeared to be a significant element (which wasn’t crazy; he was a pretty successful pitcher) in trades for Hall of Famers Tony Perez and Fred McGriff. The Perez trade came after the Reds won the World Series in ‘76. McGriff was a baby in the minor leagues at the time of his trade after ‘82, but that trade is hard to figure, although I suspect Davey Collins was a salary dump….Collins and McGriff and eventual 28.7 WAR guy Mike Morgan to the Blue Jays for Murray and Tom Dodd, whose major league career would consist of 16 plate appearances 3 ½ years later.

Hisashi Iwakuma certainly may rate as one of the five best MLB pitchers on this list, to say nothing of his Japanese baseball contributions. First, trivia (or at least smallness) in his case: he and Ryan Drese are the only two pitchers on this list who never committed a balk. I bet if we looked at left-handers, we’d find totals way north of Cueto’s leading 17, however. We know that the Andy Pettittes cut it close, but I bet there is a tendency even among the stingiest right-handers against the steal for the same thing, and 0-balk guys would be easier to find on a random list.

At age 32, in his second year of action in the States, Iwakuma garnered bWAR black type with a 7.1 in 2013. Although he didn’t complete a game, today we would salivate for those 219.2 innings he threw. It was combined with a 2.66 E.R.A. Iwakuma followed with a 21 BB, 154 K, 179 IP, 15-win 2014. While his numbers dropped off some over the next three seasons, I wondered if he had continued his career in Japan. But it appears he did not, to any significant extent, and injury just hastened the end, if at an age when there was little reason for bitterness.

His Japanese stats don’t scream “star” to me, not that I know how to interpret them. He did have a 107-69 mark. This broke down to 21-4, 1.87 in the Pacific League in 2008, and 15-2, 3.01 in 2004. But in 2005, he was 9-15 with a 4.99.

He is charmed to be part of this list, as both his caught stealing (25) and caught stealing percentage (50) were the minimum and maximum I allowed in those categories! Not that there’s any shame in being the 23rd-most effective right-hander against the running game since 1960!

My baseball fandom was in high gear when Andy Benes was the #1 all-around pick in 1988, much less so when his brother Alan debuted for the Cardinals in 1995. I think what made me look into Alan was that I saw that his ks-per-9 trailed only Cueto here, and he wasn’t pitching in a time when strikeouts were as easy to get as they are now.

Benes’ record looked finer when I got the season by season. He was obviously raw in 1995 and 1996, and did his numbers no favors with aborted and ugly comeback attempts after 1997, but he was dynamic that season before going down with a shoulder injury at the end of July. How does a .303 OBP and a .327 SA over 23 starts in a 4.20 E.R.A. league sound to you?

An interesting thing….he’s the one. He pitched 161.2 innings. With his rate stats pretty sexy, I assumed he didn’t qualify for leading the league being a third of an inning short, and that was a shame, but it appears they round you up. Maybe we can just call it the “Alan Benes rule.” I say they must round up, because unlike with something like batting average or slugging average, they can’t just assume the worst for you and see where you’d rank with the additional inning. Well, that could be done with strikeouts, But with hits and runs, you can fill in an infinity there, as you can’t assume anything. And then with the 162 innings, you’re not on the leaderboard any more. As it happens, counting his 161.2 innings, he was still just 6th in ERA+, behind at least three luminaries (Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux, and Kevin Brown), plus the late Darryl Kile, and Ismael Valdez.

Of course it was a small sample size, but this talent Alan had at holding the running game appears to have been for real. Cardinal catchers as a whole allowed the standard 67% success rate on the year, and 134 total steals.

Andy, for his part in his career, also did not stand out as an anti-stolen base pitcher, also yielding 67%, with 12.5 steals allowed per 200 innings.

Maybe it’s just that the game has changed, but since Alan got hurt after game 106, he was on pace to pitch 247 innings that year. He had five games that year where he threw 124-128 pitches. A first-round pick out of Creighton in 1993, at least he was 25 years old. An element that makes his workload questionable is the Cardinals were 51-55 at the time of his injury.

It’s interesting how, even in a post about anonymous guys, so many Hall of Famers inevitably get mentioned. I started with Jim Kaat, and ended up with an opaque shot at Benes’s manager, Tony La Russa!

PS Hey, a post without footnotes!