Max Scherzer Chases Perfection and Collects Milestones
Max Scherzer couldn’t quite pull off a trifecta for the ages on Sunday, but he was utterly dominant nonetheless. Facing the Padres in Los Angeles, he entered the history books with a flourish by becoming the 19th pitcher to reach 3,000 strikeouts, and just the third to record three immaculate innings — nine pitches, nine strikes, three strikeouts — in a career. Along the way, the 37-year-old righty retired the first 22 batters he faced, giving chase to a perfect game and his third career no-hitter, but he couldn’t complete that feat, as Eric Hosmer, who earlier in the game had become his 3,000th strikeout victim, broke up his bid with an eighth-inning double into the right field corner.
Not that the hit put a damper on the afternoon given what Scherzer accomplished. Making his eighth start for the Dodgers and needing six strikeouts to reach the milestone, he simply dominated the Padres all afternoon. He got to work quickly, striking out leadoff hitter Trent Grisham and needing just 12 pitches to get through the first, before mowing down Fernando Tatis Jr., Hosmer, and Tommy Pham consecutively on three-pitch strikeouts in the second.
The immaculate inning made Scherzer the third pitcher and the first right-hander to total three such innings in his career, joining lefties Sandy Koufax and Chris Sale. Scherzer previously threw immaculate innings against the Phillies (May 14, 2017) and Rays (June 5, 2018).
After striking out Wil Myers on a cutter to lead off the third, Scherzer had punched out five out of seven hitters, leaving him one strikeout away from the milestone. A funny thing happened, though: the Padres started swinging early in the counts to avoid making history, and Scherzer seized the opportunity to chew through the lineup. Austin Nola grounded out on his next pitch, and pitcher Nabil Crismatt — who had taken over for the injured Blake Snell in the first inning — faced just three pitches before grounding out as well to end the third. In the fourth, Grisham lost an eight-pitch battle by flying out, but Adam Frazier grounded out on the very next pitch, and Manny Machado faced just three pitches before popping out. Tatis faced just two pitches before flying out to lead off the fifth, but Hosmer battled for six pitches before going down by swinging at a changeup:
The strikeout made Scherzer the 19th pitcher overall and the third in the past three seasons to reach the milestone, after CC Sabathia (April 30, 2019) and Justin Verlander (September 28, 2019). Scherzer reached number 3,000 in his 404th career game, and his 2,516th career inning; only Randy Johnson reached the milestone faster by either count (362 games, 2470.2 innings). While Scherzer’s total owes a great deal to his pitching in a high-strikeout era, he nonetheless has the sixth-highest league-adjusted rate (K%+) of any pitcher who reached the milestone:
| Pitcher | IP | SO | K% | K%+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nolan Ryan | 5386.0 | 5714 | 25.3% | 183 |
| Randy Johnson | 4135.1 | 4875 | 28.6% | 176 |
| Pedro Martinez | 2827.1 | 3154 | 27.7% | 168 |
| Walter Johnson | 5914.2 | 3509 | 12.6% | 152* |
| Roger Clemens | 4916.2 | 4672 | 23.1% | 150 |
| Max Scherzer | 2519.1 | 3003 | 29.5% | 143 |
| Curt Schilling | 3261.0 | 3116 | 23.5% | 139 |
| Steve Carlton | 5217.1 | 4136 | 19.1% | 135 |
| Bert Blyleven | 4970.0 | 3701 | 18.1% | 133 |
| Tom Seaver | 4782.2 | 3640 | 18.8% | 133 |
| Bob Gibson | 3884.1 | 3117 | 19.4% | 130 |
| John Smoltz | 3473.0 | 3084 | 21.6% | 130 |
| Justin Verlander | 2988.0 | 3013 | 24.7% | 127 |
| Fergie Jenkins | 4500.2 | 3192 | 17.3% | 125 |
| Don Sutton | 5282.0 | 3574 | 16.5% | 117 |
| Gaylord Perry | 5350.1 | 3534 | 16.1% | 115 |
| CC Sabathia | 3577.1 | 3093 | 20.6% | 114 |
| Phil Niekro | 5404.1 | 3342 | 14.7% | 105 |
| Greg Maddux | 5008.1 | 3371 | 16.5% | 100 |
*Johnson’s indexed rate is for K/9+ due to incomplete data.
If we lower the bar to 2,000 strikeouts, Dazzy Vance (225 K%+), Sandy Koufax (173), Lefty Grove (170), Bob Feller (168), Sam McDowell (153) and Sale (148) all surpass Scherzer, as does Rube Waddell via K/9+ (197), but it’s his rate and his staying power that elevate him.
Having claimed the milestone, Scherzer was still going strong, able to reach back for velocities 96 mph and higher at will and avoiding deep counts along the way. The 14 pitches he needed to work through Grisham, Frazier, and Machado in the seventh inning were the most he threw in any frame, and that only pushed his total pitch count to 80. A day after the Brewers’ Corbin Burnes and Josh Hader combined for the season’s ninth nine-inning no-hitter, Scherzer wasn’t just vying to add the 10th but to become the first pitcher to throw a perfect game since Félix Hernández did so on August 5, 2012, and to tally the third no-hitter of his career; he threw two in 2015, on June 20 against the Pirates and the other on October 3 against the Mets.
After retiring Tatis on a fly ball to start the eighth, Scherzer was just five outs from perfection, but Hosmer swung at a 2-1 changeup just below the zone, a bit more centered than the one he’d whiffed on in the fifth, and the Padres’ first baseman roped it into the right field corner at 99.5 mph, a clean double. It was the deepest Scherzer had taken his bid for a third no-hitter — something only Ryan, Koufax, Verlander, Feller, Larry Corcoran, and Cy Young have done — since June 20, 2017 against the Marlins, when he also surrendered a hit with one out in the eighth.
With the Dodgers having expanded their lead from 2-0 to 6-0 in the previous half-inning, the potential run that Hosmer represented was inconsequential, but Scherzer stranded him just the same with a Pham groundout and a Myers swinging strikeout on a slider — Scherzer’s ninth strikeout on the day. After the Dodgers extended their lead with two more runs in the eighth, Scherzer was done despite having thrown just 92 pitches.
With the outing — which helped the Dodgers complete a three-game sweep of the Padres, by the way — Scherzer lowered his season ERA to an NL-leading 2.17 and his FIP to 2.86 (third in the league). Since the July 30 trade from the Nationals, he’s put up an absurd 0.88 ERA, 1.26 FIP, and 72-to-5 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 51 innings as a Dodger; over his last five starts, he has a 0.26 ERA, 1.06 FIP, and 49-to-2 K/BB ratio. He already looks like one of the great stretch-drive pickups in recent memory, with a performance reminiscent of the 1.28 ERA and 2.04 FIP Johnson posted for the Astros in 84.1 innings in 1998 after being traded by the Mariners.
Despite that ERA lead and the number two rank in strikeouts (219, six behind Zack Wheeler), I don’t really see a clear path to the NL Cy Young award for Scherzer:
| Pitcher | Team | IP | ERA | xERA | FIP | fWAR | bWAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corbin Burnes | MIL | 152.0 | 2.25 | 1.90 | 1.50 | 7.1 | 5.3 |
| Zack Wheeler | PHI | 195.1 | 2.86 | 2.77 | 2.66 | 6.5 | 6.8 |
| Max Scherzer | WSN/LAD | 162.0 | 2.17 | 2.86 | 2.86 | 5.2 | 5.4 |
| Walker Buehler | LAD | 186.0 | 2.32 | 3.09 | 3.23 | 4.6 | 5.8 |
| Kevin Gausman | SFG | 170.0 | 2.65 | 3.36 | 2.86 | 4.5 | 4.9 |
Scherzer’s significant disadvantages in FIP and innings drop him behind Burnes and Wheeler in terms of FanGraphs’ WAR. While his 35.4% strikeout rate is virtually tied with Burnes for the NL lead, his 1.11 homers per nine pushes him well behind both pitchers (Burnes has served up 0.30 per nine, Wheeler 0.74), and minor groin and triceps injuries that each cost him a turn have kept his innings totals down. Things could certainly change over the final three weeks of the season but right now it’s difficult to see Scherzer collecting his fourth Cy Young award, which would put him in the company of Roger Clemens (seven), Johnson (five), Steve Carlton and Greg Maddux (four apiece).
I do think that Scherzer’s latest run may have elevated him to becoming the favorite to start the NL Wild Card game over Buehler if the Dodgers can’t catch the Giants; despite their major league-best 29-11 record since the trade deadline, they’ve gained just half a game on San Francisco (29-12) and are still 2 1/2 back with 18 to play. To some observers, the decision on starting pitcher might seem obvious — the future Hall of Famer who came over in the blockbuster is the automatic choice, right? — but Buehler has more than proved his mettle in big games, as his career 2.35 ERA in 61.1 postseason innings, and last year’s 1.80 ERA in 25 innings, both attest, and he’s allowed two runs or fewer in 11 of his past 12 turns. Here it’s worth noting that the Dodgers have Buehler ahead of Scherzer in the rotation order, which could boil down to the former starting the Wild Card game with the latter taking the Division Series opener, or the former taking a Game 163 tiebreaker to determine the NL West champion and the latter the Wild Card game… let’s just say that the Dodgers have options.
While Scherzer didn’t get his perfect game on Sunday afternoon, he did add one more record to his collection by furthering his season-opening offensive futility — .000/.000/.000 — to 56 plate appearances. From a JAWS standpoint, his -0.6 WAR as a hitter is offsetting his 6.0 WAR as a pitcher such that this is still only his eighth-best season, but he has a few starts to remedy that, and to push his JAWS (57.7) even closer to the standard for starting pitchers (61.7). Sunday’s milestone, the first major one from a Hall standpoint (he’s still 11 wins away from 200), probably ensures his entry to Cooperstown anyway, but the fun of it right now is that he’s pitching so well that every start becomes appointment viewing. Clear you schedule.
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
I was so hoping for the perfect game yesterday from Max, as it would’ve created the untouchable 3 immaculate innings, 3 no-hitters with at least one perfect game, 3 Cy Youngs with at least one in each league, 20K game club. Have to imagine he’d be the only member of that for a very long time
Interestingly, bWAR really likes Wade Miley, a lot more than fWAR this year. He’s second in NL bWAR for pitchers, which really surprised me. I don’t see him as an NL Cy contender.
fWAR is based on FIP, bWAR on actual runs. So fWAR is essentially based on what a pitcher “should” have done and bWAR on what a pitcher actually did. Miley beats his estimators by a lot
FIP is based on what actually happened – it just chooses only a subset of ‘actually happened’ where we know the pitcher has 100% control over his outcomes, and is not at the mercy of his fielders.
FIP is valuable because it’s more predictive of future ERA than all but the most-complicated estimator metrics (like BP’s DRA), but the reason that that is true is that it isolates the parts of of a pitcher’s performance that are least dependent on those around him and most central to his long-term success.
BR’s war not only uses runs allowed (which is good and useful for historical comparisons), it also makes adjustments based on team defense, and this tends to create some outliers in both directions. For examples, think back to 2018 where Aaron Nola had a very bad Phillies defense behind him, but it performed very well for him in his starts (he he allowed almost no unearned runs), but he still got a substantial bump from pitching in front of a ‘poor defense’. On the other side of the coin, Walker Buehler pitched in front of what BR saw as a fantastic defense (their core metric is DRS, and the Dodgers lead the league), but they made a disproportionate number of their errors while he was pitching, and he was then also penalized over a run for pitching in front of a ‘great defense’.
The “bwar is about what actually happened, fwar is about what should have happened” dichtomy is inaccurate and bad and you should stop using it. Both metrics make inferences, and both are based on what has actually happened and not a projection of future performance. fWAR knows that the relationship between pitcher results and team defense is complicated and so relies on the metric that excludes those entirely. bWAR attempts to include that information and adjust for it, but that approach still has holes and anomalies.
This is all true, but overall bWAR for pitchers is still a lot more accurate in analyzing what actually happened, which is what you want to look at for awards like the Cy Young (as well as past career performances in general).
bWAR has become worse than useless for pitchers. After making adjustments for competition, location, and defense, the adjustments for which seem arbitrary, it reflects little on what actually happened on the field. If you really want to look at “what actually happened”, by which I assume you mean how many runs a pitcher gave up, you need to look at RA9WAR.
I am well aware of how the stats are calculated and it is reasonably accurate to say that fWAR details what “should” have happened and bWAR is much closer to what actually happened. fWAR more or less says Miley “should” have given up 3.73 runs every 9 innings. He didn’t. He gave up 2.89 runs every 9 innings. That is reality. Deal with it.
All of what mikejunt wrote is 100% correct. But I’ll single out two things that’s particularly relevant in this case:
1) bWAR adjusts runs scored by DRS and has a tendency to overcorrect. So you can thank Eugenio Suarez for a good chunk of why bWAR loves Miley.
2) This argument of “he beats his estimator” held a lot more water before xERA and xwOBA showed up. Before, you could say that a guy induced a lot of weak contact that doesn’t show up in FIP. I guess you can still say that, but you have to check it against the xERA and in this case his xERA is higher than his FIP. It’s possible that he’s not getting that much credit for his tendency to force ground balls. But unless there is something like that where Miley is doing something that xwOBA/xERA can’t figure out, he really is just getting lucky.
One thing I’ve thought for a while is that FG and BR should swap their chosen defensive metrics
DRS tends to produce larger estimates about the value of fielding: run values above or below average are simply higher. It views fielding as more impactful in terms of run prevention (or allowance).
UZR is somewhat more conservative
BR pitching WAR uses runs allowed and attempts to adjust based on the quality of defense behind the pitcher. In both choices, they are choosing an approach which splits responsibility for outcomes on balls in play between fielders and pitchers.
FG pitching war, using FIP, is choosing to completely divorce pitching value from BIP outcomes. If pitching is being treated as not-responsible for BIP outcomes, then there is more value to assign to the fielder.
Consequently, I think that BR’s approach would work better with the more conservative/lower magnitude defensive value stat (UZR) and that FG’s approach would work better with the higher magnitude defensive value stat (DRS), as that’s more consistent with the decisions they’ve made in terms of what pitching stats to include.
As it stands, FG’s approach probably doesn’t give enough credit for BIP results (giving 0% to pitchers and the muted UZR estimates to fielders), and BR’s approach over-emphasizes defense in a way that can be particularly toxic with their fielding-adjustment approach, because the run magnitudes of DRS are simply too large for the fine adjustments their metric is attempting to make (the examples I cited above, of Buehler and Nola, both involved the pitcher’s RA/9 being adjusted by -more than a run per 9 innings- based on their team’s defense). BR’s approach, while using DRS, is quite flawed IMO because of this magnitude issue, whereas I equally suspect that FG is not giving enough credit or penalty to defenders given their pitching WAR philosophy is giving 100% of the responsibility to the defense.
I think at this point, we’re probably moving towards statcast-based metrics. xERA/xwOBA and OAA (although I think it was you that pointed out that OAA isn’t complete for outfielders yet and is more comparable to the “range” stat in UZR). Also, I do suspect that xERA is consistently underrating groundball pitchers (like Miley, although nowhere near to the extent posited above) so further tweaking there is probably necessary.
I think there’s something weird going on with DRS that I can’t quite put my finger on and I’d rather use UZR for player value in general. Fielding is important, but it’s not as important as bWAR would suggest. But my understanding is that OAA is similarly twitchy as DRS if you start actually converting the values. So clearly there’s more work to be done on figuring out these measures and the appropriate scales.
For team value, I think you may have a point about DRS vs UZR. DRS is very twitchy for individual players, assigning way more value to fielding than you could possibly ascribe to one player. But since DRS does account for shifting now it seems like it would make more sense to use at the team level.
I think I’ve just talked myself into “DRS, but mute it a bit so it’s on a similar scale as UZR” as a solution. Maybe.
I think Max is a whole lot closer to the Cy Young award than Jay gives him credit for. Wheeler right now is pretty much a total non factor.
It’s pretty much a 3 horse race between Max, Buehler, and Burnes. If one of the 3 has a really great 4 starts and the other 2 don’t- they get the award.
How is wheeler a non-factor? He’s leading in innings, strikeouts, and fWAR, and has a low ERA despite team defense that is widely known to be horrendous. I’m very curious how voters try to adjust for team defense, since the Phillies infield defense has clearly limited his success
His ERA is over a half run behind the other 3. ERA still matters a LOT to the voters.
The problem that I see is that he really doesn’t have a clear path to #1 votes(which are worth 7 points).
The traditional voters who look at ERA go towards Max/Buehler/and even to some degree Burnes.
Advanced metrics voters going pretty hard to Burnes.
I think Wheeler will get a lot of 2nd and 3rd place votes- but very few 1st place votes. His average voting position could very well be the highest but due to how they count the votes, I don’t think he’s got a shot.
That’s true, but Wheeler is also gonna be the only one who eclipses 200 IP, which is also a pretty big deal to voters. I think he might have just the right mix to take it in the end even if his rate stats aren’t as good as the others.
Buehler also should eclipse 200 IP(he’s at 186 right now).
I just think Wheeler will struggle to get 1st place votes.
If Buehler finishes strong and ends up with over 200 innings and having gone 6+ in all but 2 starts with a substantially better ERA than Wheeler, he’s likely to absorb most of the votes from people who value playing time, especially with the extreme consistency in addition to the reliability.
The reality is that a week ago, Buehler looked like he was the leader or a close 2nd, and then he had a poor start and both Burnes and Scherzer had elite ones, so the conversation has shifted based on those most recent showings, but the conversation will continue to shift, and it only takes one elite outing from Buehler to bring attention back to his various merits.
Right. I think right now it’s a 3 horse race.
I think Wheeler could certainly become a part of it with a strong finish of his own, but I agree with you that his advantages in terms of extra IP are likely to get eroded by Buehler’s presence not-very-far behind him in IP and with better rate stats. He’s close enough to the discussion that if he has great starts for his remaining appearances he could certainly win the award.
The problem that Wheeler has is that he’s got 3 guys that he’d really have to pass. IP matters some, but ERA matters more. It’s possible if not likely that 1 of those 3 guys ERA going to wind up in the 2.0x range while Wheeler is best case going to be around 2.60. Wheeler would need really all 3 of them to have a bad start if not more, while he finishes really strong.
I don’t think its impossible, especially if it’s just Buehler who doesn’t finish strong, for Wheeler to get a bunch of votes on the basis of being 40-50 IP ahead despite being substantially behind on rate. Voters really value playing time. Wheeler’s candidacy is dependent on not splitting that vote with Buehler, but if Buehler trails off and he doesn’t have to, there’s enough of those voters to make him a contender.
Max is only 33 innings behind Wheeler now as well. Burnes is 43 behind.
Voters don’t value playing time so much that they ignore everything else. Snell/Verlander in 2018 showed that. Verlander had 33.1 more IP than Snell, but Snell won the vote 17-13.- because Snell had an ERA of 0.63 better.
I think Wheeler really needs all 3 of the others to fall. Especially Buehler and Max.
I agree that Scherzer could be right there in the Cy Young race. If you’re looking at three or four different guys, and all of them have similar cases, I wouldn’t be surprised if some voters go with the big name, future Hall of Famer who hit a major milestone this year.
and is also closing on an absolute tear. Last 9 starts- going back to his last start in DC- he’s 7-0 with a 0.95 ERA. 77 K in 57 IP.
Its interesting because in MLB award voting there’s a clearly demonstrated resistance among voters to giving guys 2nd and 3rd copies of the MVP award, but that’s not historically the case with Cy Young awards.
If this were an MVP discussion, being a 3-time MVP going up against a guy who had never won an award would be a measurable disadvantage given how voters historically vote for MVP, but they’ve always been very willing to give the same guys Cy Young votes.
Yeah- we just saw that 4 years ago with Kluber/Sale.
Are you sure it’s not just a historical coincidence that there have been so many more guys with 4+ Cy Young awards than MVPs (just Bonds in the latter case)? How many cases can you find where a guy already with 3 MVP awards got snubbed in the voting for a potential 4th award? (By the way, 1 or 2 examples could still be a coincidence, especially if the snubs were highly questionable).
This is a legitimate question, by the way. Anyone want to try looking?
Has anyone ever won the Cy Young in a year when they moved teams midseason?
thought it was interesting- here are the gambling odds for the Cy Young right now-
Max Scherzer 5/4
Corbin Burnes 2/1
Walker Buehler 11/5
Zack Wheeler 12/1
I have two questions sparked by clicking on CC Sabathia’s page.
1. Does he have a chance at the Hall? 62 WAR is a lot! but he seems light on JAWs .
2. Why, if you write for FanGraphs now, does JAWS appear on a player’s BBRef page but not on his FanGraphs page?
JAWS for starting pitchers is prohibitively high because of changing pitcher use patterns, and its likely that most future HOF pitchers won’t exceed the standards.
As for the location of JAWS info, Jay addressed it when moving to FG from SI a couple years ago, but it amounts to B-R having been the longtime host of that information, and consequently it already being there and BR being most people’s go-to site for HOF discussion because they also highlight and display the various other HOF measurements (black ink, grey ink, HOF monitor, etc), whereas FG doesn’t really do anything of the sort. It makes a lot of sense to keep that information where people are used to looking for it and where it’s surrounded by it’s other contextual information, and BR’s most people’s go-to for HOF and historical comparison stuff.
not only that- but JAWS also has 4 guys that kind of skew the mark at over 90. Heck- just take out Walter Johnson and Cy Young(both over 120) and the average JAWS HOF SP drops all the way from 61.7 to 59.7. Drop the 4 over 90(Nichols, and Alexander) and it’s down all the way to 58.6.
I mean, that’s true but it’s also true of many positions. Take a look at right field!
The issue for SP JAWS is the same as the one around other, old-school HOF-caliber measurements, like 300 wins. Starting pitchers throw less innings than ever. Even the best of them simply are not allowed to accumulate the same number of innings as even a generation ago, much less most of baseball history when 250 and 300 inning seasons were regular.
This means only the truly elite, inner-circle HOF starting pitchers are going to so much as reach the JAWS median for the starting pitcher. Scherzer’s just such a pitcher, and he’s not at it yet! Kershaw’s one of the greatest pitchers of all time, literally the best starter in history by ERA+, and he’s barely below the average himself!
Pitchers throwing 180 IP-200 IP per season at the top end (which is down from even what guys like Verlander and Kershaw were allowed to do early in their careers) simply can’t accumulate either the single-season or career totals of players who got to throw 220-250-300 IP in a season.
Which is why the HOF standard is likely to be something like 50ish instead of 6 0, which gets Sabbathia over the line, makes Greinke/Kershaw/Verlander/Scherzer obvious (which I think we’d all agree on), and leaves Cole Hamels and Felix Hernandez on the outside looking in (which I think we’d also probably agree on).
In a way it reminds me of the complaints you sometimes see from guys like Nolan Ryan about pitch counts. Ryan would argue that he is evidence that not all pitchers need to be limited, and can safely throw many more than 100 pitches on the regular. And he’s clearly right: he is evidence that guys can do that, and probably more guys like him exist.
But many guys are not like that, and teams aren’t willing to let them throw enough to find out, because the way they find out is by having guys suffer serious injuries. The same principle applies to starting pitcher usage: some guys probably are able to pitch in a 4 man rotation, or to throw 120 pitches per start, or face the order a 3rd and 4th time on the regular, but most pitchers will fail, and teams aren’t willing to test and find out, because the costs of the failures are too high.
There’s a good chance you’ll never see another pitcher throw 250 innings in a season in your lifetime; I’d argue its possible you’ll never see another pitcher hit 225. If the HOF standards don’t change, you’re just more or less deciding to not ever induct HOF starting pitchers again, because the new generations can’t possibly reach the standards of guys who got to play literally 50% more innings per season.
And that leads to the next question- Should we start to see less SP’s in the HOF? I.E., reserved for only the elite of the elite? If they’re pitching less innings, they’re providing less value. You would ding a hitter that only had 450 PA’s every year, so pitchers would get the same treatment, right? It’s not like the seasons or games (except the few double headers) got shorter.
It’s an interesting question that I don’t know the right answer, too. Clearly, we can’t hold guys to the standard of even pitchers like Ryan, Seaver, Carlton, etc, that threw 275=300 innings every year, much less the Dead Ball guys. My guess is the days of compilers like Don Sutton, Jack Morris, etc. getting in are over. They won’t “compile” enough. It’ll only be the true aces like Max, JV, Kershaw, etc.
I think the playing time of modern starting pitchers should now be judged more on how many starts they make per year (while still adjusting for the difference between 4 and 5 man rotations in historical comparisons) rather than IP.
Of course, it’s still going to matter if a guy is only acting as an opener or finds himself getting knocked out of the game early on many occasions, but then again those guys wouldn’t be candidates in awards or Hall of Fame discussions in the first place.
That doesn’t mean that Fangraphs can’t also add that info. It’s not like B-R has an exclusivity contract for that stuff, and statistics and algorithms can’t be trademarked or put under copyright. What does it hurt to have more options?
Wheeler, Burnes, Mad Max and Buehler are the top four for the Cy, and I could see any of the quartet finishing first, depending on which metric floats the boat of specific BBWAA members.
Regarding Scherzer’s “immaculate inning,” I know this has been the year of the no-hitter, but it also feels like there’s been a higher number of immaculate innings too. Does anyone have the numbers on that and how it compares with prior years?
Pretty normal for recent history – 5 this year, 8 in 2019, 4 in 2018, 8 in 2017. Obviously they become less common the further back you go – there were none in 2005 or 2000 for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_pitchers_who_have_thrown_an_immaculate_inning
Immaculate innings have been on the rise along with strikeout rates for fairly obvious reasons in the last few years, but also a lot more attention has been getting paid to them, as they’re a fairly recent statistic: we only have per-pitch data for PAs back to the late 1980s, and information about immaculate innings that precedes that (like Koufax) are the result of people identifying material from game stories where the reporter happened to notice the quirk and comment on it. It’s a recent curiousity that not much attention was paid to until the last 10 years or so, especially the last 5.
This is to say, for example, that it’s possible or even likely that Koufax had more than 3 immacculate innings, because he had 3 that people happened to notice, and it’s also possible or even likely that other great pitchers of his era had some number of them that went unnoticed at the time.
Thanks for the perspective and context. It does explain why we’re hearing about them more frequently. I didn’t realize this wasn’t tracked consistently in decades prior, and certainly the increase in K’s in today’s game is leading to more immaculate innings.
14 of 105 immaculate innings in history have happened in the last 3 years.
105 in history. The 53rd one happened in 2002.
Those are only the ones we know about. As has just been pointed out, there are likely a lot of them from before the late ’80’s that have been lost to time.
Concur, I’ve seen the term “immaculate inning” used more in the last two weeks than I have in my entire previous 30+ years of watching baseball. In fact I don’t remember ever hearing the term used pre-2021.
Edit: mikejunt’s explanation makes a lot of sense. Was wondering why the phrase is suddenly so common.
It’s so frustrating he is not doing all this in DC for my NATS!
The Schwarber injury just derailed the entire year. Well that and a brutal pitching staff.
Immaculate innings are cool, but I’m also a big fan of the 3 pitch inning. Also, no-hitters mean nothing to me at this point.
What about 4 strikeout innings (due to the 3rd strike rule)?