Best Final Seasons, Part One

A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

While the last time we did this as a four-parter, this time we’re going to scrunch it down to two posts. Because… well, I’ll let Comic Book Guy handle this one:

Just like last time, we’re going to filter this in two ways – by player type and by WAR threshold. Also, we’re limiting the sample to players who played from 1901 to the present, because before 1901 weird stuff happened a lot. For instance, if you just sort by all-time, the leader in the 30-39 WAR pitchers bucket is Toad Ramsey, who piled up 37 WAR by the age of 25 and then never pitched again. He recorded 7.5 WAR in his final season. And it’s not because he died. (He wouldn’t for another 16 years.) He was just gone. Would this ever happen today? Clayton Kershaw posted 7.1 WAR as a 25-year-old in 2013. Could you picture him just walking away after that season? Of course not. Later to all that pre-1900s jazz. I also had to remove several current players from the equation – 40 position players and 15 pitchers. With those caveats, and a big thank you to the handsome Jeff Zimmerman for data-query assistance, here are the number of players in each bucket.

When I did the worst final seasons, I limited it to five players per bucket. Here, I’ve made a couple of exceptions, and I think you’ll grant me those exceptions because they’re in keeping with the spirit of the thing. Today, we’re going to start with pitchers, just to keep you in suspense about comparing other hitters to Ortiz.

30-39 WAR

It’s a bit sad to see J.R. Richard here. Richard is one of just nine players in major-league history to post multiple 300-strikeout seasons. He did so in consecutive seasons, in 1978 and 1979, at age 28 and 29. Unfortunately, Richard suffered a stroke in 1980, and never returned to the majors, despite four years of trying in the minors. There’s no telling how gracefully he would have aged, but the former No. 2 overall pick in the 1969 draft would have had a better than decent shot at a Hall of Fame plaque had he pitched another decade.

Van Mungo, on the other hand, was a lot of fun. He had a song named after him, and his career was filled with humorous/scandalous run-ins with teammates and others. An example from Wikipedia:

While he finished his career with two 18-win seasons, one of them also included 19 losses. Mungo’s teammates contended that he could easily have won more games had he not tried to strike out every batter; Mungo countered that he wouldn’t have tried to strike everyone out if he had more confidence in his teammates’ fielding abilities.

Seems like he would fit in just fine in today’s strikeout-centric era.

40-49 WAR

The top of this segment has a bunch of less remarkable pitchers. Further down the list, we see Cliff Lee at 1.9 WAR, Johan Santana at 1.6 WAR, and Dennis Martinez at 1.1 WAR. The three of them are generally more famous than the peers who actually did better than them in their last hurrahs.

Eddie Cicotte, in case you don’t know, was one of the best pitchers in White Sox history. He’s currently sixth on their all-time list, though he’s most (kin)famous for being the first of the eight Black Sox players to confess to throwing the 1919 World Series. He was permanently barred from baseball following the 1920 season. While he was 36 in that season, he didn’t really get good until he was 33. In those age-33 to -36 seasons, he posted 6.6, 5.6, 5.8 and 4.8 WAR, and had never posted better than 4.0 WAR in his prior 10 seasons. As such, I’m confident in saying that he would have pitched in 1921 and beyond had he been allowed, and this wasn’t a “true” final season.

As such, I’ve included a sixth pitcher here, which turns out to be Jack Powell, an early 1900s pitcher who was steadily above average but never great. His best season came in 1904, when he posted 4.5 WAR on a 2.44 ERA and 2.67 FIP, the latter of which was barely above league average. You could say the same for the three pitchers above him, as Burnett, Burkett and Milwood rarely scraped the five-win threshold, with Millwood’s 5.5 WAR as a 24-year-old in 1999 representing the best season among the three.

Larry French was pretty interesting, though perhaps more for what he did in later in life. When the knuckeballing pitcher retired following his age-34 season in 1942, he enlisted in the Navy, and served until 1969, when he retired with the rank of Captain. In case you don’t know, this is the highest rank you can achieve in the Navy without congressional approval, and you can’t attain it until you’ve been in the Navy for 21 years. Not a lot of people in life who can say they did that well in two incredibly challenging careers.

50-59 WAR

If you’re looking for the granddaddy of the final season, it’s this one by Mr. Koufax. And it’s not particularly close. No one else even got to 8 WAR. Retiring at age 30, Koufax did so because his body was breaking down rapidly, and he chose to live a long, full life, rathter than try to kill himself playing a child’s game. This was a great decision on his part, and if you want some great detail about it, go buy Jeff Passan’s book, The Arm. To think that Koufax was this good when his arm was killing him is nothing short of remarkable.

Chuck Finley is rarely recognized as being great, and instead is thought of as someone who has good for a very long time. But his final season, in which he posted a career-best 77 FIP-, was one of the better ones on this list. It’s just that here it’s dwarfed by Koufax. Larry Jackson did get one small victory over Koufax — in the 1964 Cy Young Award voting, he finished with one more first-place vote than Koufax. They were actually pretty close in total value, though that was mainly due to Jackson’s extra 74.2 innings pitched.

Javier Vazquez was long one of the pitchers I really loved to watch, and he never got the shine he deserved in my opinion. Three times he finished with 6 WAR or better, and in eight of 10 seasons from 2000 to 2009, he finished with at least 4.6 WAR.

Mark Buehrle probably doesn’t think Mark Buehrle should be on this list, since Mark Buehrle technically might pitch in the majors again. I guess we’ll see. Check back here in 2017 to call me an idiot if he does. If you want the sixth member, it was Jack Morris, who just missed the cut at 2.0 WAR.

60-69 WAR

Like his former teammate Musina, Andy Pettitte knew just when to call it quits. There were calls for him to return once again in 2014, but he never bit, choosing to stay blissfully retired. Overall, this list is a bit unremarkable, and it has mostly to do with the weird quirk that there are only 17 pitchers in this bucket. It’s easily the smallest of the 10 buckets in this exercise, and the only one with a player in the top five with less than 1 WAR. Paul Derringer was pretty good in his final season, but you’ll note it was the final season in which baseball’s talent pool was severely diluted thanks to all the ballplayers doing actual good fighting for the United States in World War II.

70+ WAR

Every time I think about how Mike Mussina is not in the Hall of Fame, I get angry. So I try not to think about it, because I try not to be angry. But now I’m seeing him at the top of this list, and thinking about how he was always good. I didn’t even hate him when he was on the Yankees. If you look back, he was actually the best pitcher on the team in his final season. Granted, it was an off-year for Yankees pitching. This was the year that Darrell Rasner somehow pitched 113.1 innings, and then never pitched in the majors again ever. But down year or not, he was the most valuable pitcher on an 89-win team, and he finally got his elusive 20-win season in the process. That’s about as good as a non-playoffs ending as one can script.

If you want to know how good Tom Seaver was, consider this: Seaver pitched at least 100 innings in 20 straight seasons from 1967-1986, and his final campaign of 1986 was only one of two in which he finished with an ERA above 4.00. And barely at that: he posted a 4.03 ERA, which was still above average, good for a 93 ERA- and 95 FIP-. Mets fans, if they remember this final season, may actually be bitter about it, since he spent the latter half of it on the Red Sox. It was actually in Boston where he derived most of his value that season. His splits were 72.0 innings, 4.38 ERA, 117 FIP- and 0.3 WAR for the White Sox, and 104.1 IP, 3.80 ERA, 80 FIP- and 2.3 WAR for the Red Sox. Fortunately for Mets fans, Seaver didn’t end up pitching for Boston in the playoffs that season.

It’s interesting to see Greg Maddux on this list, because my memory of Maddux was that he hung on a couple more seasons than he should have, but I think that’s just because we were so spoiled by how awesome he was at the height of his powers. Clearly, he was doing just fine. In his final season (we lost Maddux and Mussina that year, just another example of Mussina getting overshadowed) he still posted a 97 FIP- and walked fewer than 4% of the hitters he faced. He’s one of just nine pitchers to pull off that feat in his 40s.

Like Seaver, Lefty Grove and Curt Schilling both also finished their careers with the Red Sox. But while Schilling finished his career with two World Series wins, Grove’s only chance to pitch in the postseason came in 1931, a decade before he retired.

Tomorrow, we’ll tackle the position players. Well, not literally. Most of them are bigger than me.