Forty Years Ago, Pitchers Threw Less Than Is Believed

Forty years from now, many people presently reading this will be complaining that the ballplayers of 2047 aren't a patch on those of the old days. I certainly will be.

"You should have seen Curt Schilling!" I'll grouse. "260 innings a year, and another 50 in the playoffs. That's when ballplayers were real men! Pitched the Red Sox right into the World Series on a broken ankle. And none of this genetic engineering business, either." While exaggerated, this will be true to a point. Schilling has thrown around 260 innings four times in his career, and in one of those years, 2001, he then pitched another 50 innings in October. Similar claims can be made about Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Kevin Brown, and Randy Johnson, among others. I will make them.

My error, of course, will be assigning the virtues of a few exceptional players to an entire generation. It isn't routine for even a great pitcher like Schilling to throw 260 innings and then follow up with several complete games in the playoffs. It's memorable because it's unusual.

Last week, I wrote a column arguing that the pitchers of today are about as durable, within the context of the game, as the pitchers of 40 years ago were. The point was that you don't see top aces pitching 300 innings every year, but that's mostly because the game has changed. While this is true, there's another, more basic truth about the difference between today's sixinning pseudo-aces and the iron men of 40 years ago. The old timers didn't really pitch as much as everyone thinks they did.

Just as an example, compare the National League pitchers with the best 10 earned run averages of 1966 to those of last year. In 1966, legendary aces like Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, and Jim Bunning were brilliant at the height of a pitcher's era. Last season, a rather less distinguished lot, none of whom won 16 games, ranked as the best in the circuit. What's really interesting, though, is that for the most part, both sets of pitchers threw about the same number of innings. In 1966, six of the top 10 ERA leaders threw between 224 and 240 innings; last year, eight of the top ten threw between 213 and 240 2/3. The difference is to be found at the margins: Koufax, Marichal, and Bunning each threw at least 300 innings, and Gibson threw 280.1. By contrast, in 2006 Clay Hensley and Chris Young, two young pitchers with the San Diego Padres who finished in the top 10 in ERA, didn't pitch 190 innings.

Overall, however, the 1966 pitchers didn't throw that much more than their present-day counterparts. Koufax and company averaged 7.4 innings a start and 6.95 innings a game. (There's a gap because a few of these pitchers had a fair number of relief appearances.) Roy Oswalt and company averaged 6.62 innings a start and 6.43 a game. Even measuring by the extremes, we're talking about a gap of an inning a start, which isn't a terribly large amount — and most of that gap can be accounted for by the exceptional performances of four all-time greats who were unusual even in their own day. Looking at this information and concluding that pitchers were more durable 40 years ago is a bit like looking at the 1911 batting race, when Ty Cobb and Joe Jackson both hit .400, and concluding that today's hitters aren't as good as those of the Taft administration.

Further, it's not clear to me that having all those aces of yesteryear pitch into the ninth inning all the time was a very good idea. In my previous column, I noted that today's aces are vastly more effective in the latter third of games, relative to their own performance, than their predecessors were, which suggests that today's managers are better judges of when to pull pitchers out of games. Nothing about the difference between 1966 and 2006 makes me think this isn't so. In 1966, the pitchers under consideration allowed .075 runs a plate appearance through the first six innings, and .082 thereafter; in 2006, the same figures were .096 and .082.

Expressing this another way, in 1966 the typical top-10 ERA finisher was 8% less effective in the latter third of games than he was in the first two thirds; last year, he was 17% more effective. I don't have access to complete enough pitch count records from 1966 to make a comparison, but I suspect that we'd see a similar breakdown if contrasting pitcher performance at different pitch count levels. Looked at this way, the big difference between the past and the present isn't in the pitchers, but in the way they're used, and there's little reason to think they're not being used more effectively today. We've exchanged innings in which the best starters in the league were exhausted and pitching like it for innings pitched by top setup men and closers, who are far more effective over an inning or two than even the best starters. It's hard to see how this isn't progress.

You can't draw large conclusions just by contrasting top pitchers from two different years, and it would be Panglossian in the worst way to say that today's patterns of pitcher usage are the best they possibly could be. Managers today probably are a bit too cautious with their best, most durable pitchers: there are doubtless pitchers that could handle a fourman rotation, and no one likes an endless parade of relievers at the end of games. It's important to recognize, though, that these are mainly aesthetic objections, and that managers aren't in the business of providing an aesthetically edifying spectacle, but of trying to win ballgames. If patrons find the overuse of one-batter relievers boring, for instance, they should lobby for rule changes that would penalize managers for using them, rather than complaining that today's starters lack guts. They don't. And we can fully appreciate how great the pitchers of the past were without pretending that today's best pitchers aren't at least as good — at least for now. Come 2047, all bets will be off.

tmarchman@nysun.com