Historically Bad Playoff Rotations

Last night, I felt compelled to write a brief post discussing the drastic woes of the Philadelphia Phillies pitching staff. None of their five starters had an ERA below 5.35 and the triumvirate of Brett Myers, Jamie Moyer, and Joe Blanton had surrendered more home runs between them than just about half of the teams in the entire sport. In spite of these horrendous numbers, the Phillies still occupy first place in the NL East. The kneejerk reaction to this combination is to suggest that either the starters will regress or else the team will not make the playoffs.

Curious, I posed a question at the end of the post wondering if anyone could recall similarly poor numbers from a starting rotation that went onto win the division or the wild card berth. The teams brought up in the comments thread were the 1999 Texas Rangers and the 2000 Chicago White Sox. Frequent commenter Kincaid compiled the numbers showing that six Rangers starters with a minimum of 15 starts ranged from 4.56 to 8.60 in the ERA department. The six White Sox starters with a minimum of 13 starts ranged from a 3.79 ERA to one of 6.46, not quite as bad.

The issue with looking solely at the numbers of the individuals is that we are using the current context to look at past numbers. Last season, the NL averaged a 4.30 ERA with the AL not too far behind at 4.36. Certainly, the teams discussed above look awful when placed in the context of the 2008 season, but that is the wrong context. We need to compare these teams and players to the year in which they made the playoffs.

In 1999, the AL ERA sat at 4.87, about a half-run worse than last season. The next season it slightly rose to 4.92. Therefore, when Rick Helling and Aaron Sele posted ERAs of 4.84 and 4.79, respectively, in 1999, they were essentially average at worst.

With this idea in mind, I linked together my Lahman and Retrosheet databases in order to do the following:

a) Calculate AVG ERA for each league in each year
b) Create a table with all starters making at least 12 starts in a season on a team that either won the division or the wild card
c) Compare the ERAs of each individual in each rotation to the league average in that specific season
d) Pool all of those with ERAs at least 0.10 runs worse than the average into a new table

I then told the database to count the number of pitchers for each team and year and sort by the highest number. Since 1969, there have been 170 teams to make the playoffs with at least one pitcher fitting the above criteria. The 170 teams broke down like this:

1 Pitcher: 76
2 Pitcher: 59
3 Pitcher: 26
4 Pitcher: 8
5 Pitcher: 1

One team over the last 40 seasons to make the playoffs featured five starting pitchers with below average ERA marks: the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, who went onto win the World Series! Now, the numbers here are not entirely perfect in the sense that only one of these pitchers, Jason Marquis, made more than 17 starts. The other pitchers here–Mark Mulder, Sidney Ponson, Jeff Weaver (in his StL stint), and Anthony Reyes–all made 17 or fewer starts.

On top of that, it isn’t as if these five were the concrete rotation of the team entering the post-season. Still, it is incredibly interesting that a team was able to win the world series, let alone make the playoffs, when 96 of their 162 games were started by pitchers with below average numbers.

The teams with four pitchers were:

1975 Boston Red Sox
1977 Philadelphia Phillies
1980 Philadelphia Phillies
1981 Milwaukee Brewers
1995 Colorado Rockies
1998 Chicago Cubs
1998 Texas Rangers
2002 Minnesota Twins

Pitching is certainly important, but as this data shows, including two championship winning teams (2006 Cardinals, 1980 Phillies), teams can certainly get away with employing below average starters some of the time.