So the Indians Might Have the Best Pitching Staff Ever
Sunday night, the Indians pushed their winning streak to 18 games. The next-longest active winning streak in baseball is five. Since this all began, the Indians, of course, have gone 18-0, and the next-best record in the American League has been 9-7. The goal is to win the World Series, and the Indians will be disappointed if they again come up short, but at a certain point, this will just become their legacy. Somebody wins the World Series every year. The Indians have one of the longest winning streaks that baseball’s ever seen. Doing something like this is more improbable, and it’s a reflection of how well the Indians have been built, from top to bottom.
A truth about baseball is that a winning team is never as good as it looks when it’s winning, and a losing team is never as bad as it looks when it’s losing. The Indians feel like they’re bulletproof, mostly because they’ve been bulletproof for about three weeks. Their odds of winning everything haven’t meaningfully changed. It’s useful to keep the Dodgers in mind. The change in perception has been abrupt, even though it’s more or less the same active roster. Invulnerability isn’t forever, as demonstrated by the reality that everything dies.
The Indians aren’t unbeatable. The chances are still that they won’t win it all. Upon eventual reflection, the team shouldn’t be judged only by how it performed when it didn’t lose a game. One should attempt to consider the whole of the picture. Let’s do that right now. Let’s talk about the Indians’ pitching.
On August 17, Travis wrote a post titled, “Cleveland’s Rotation Is Distancing Itself from the Pack.” It was! The rotation came together, and the rotation got hot. There might not be another rotation more fearsome when it’s hot. Now we can take an even grander view. We can think about the entire 2017 season, and we can think about the Indians’ entire pitching staff. This plot should be very easy to understand. Here’s how all the staffs rank this year, by WAR.
That’s FanGraphs’ version of WAR. (On FanGraphs, it’s always FanGraphs’ version of WAR.) The Indians are way out in front, having achieved a measure of separation. The Indians are in first, and they’re in first by more than five wins. The gap between the Indians and the Red Sox is a hair wider than the gap between the Red Sox and the Nationals. It’s uncommon to have a team achieve such an outlier status.
The picture doesn’t look very different if you choose to evaluate the teams by the runs they’ve actually allowed, instead. The regular WAR model is somewhat theoretical. The RA9-WAR model is less theoretical. Here’s how that looks.
Indians in front, now by about four wins. The first-place status isn’t threatened, nor is the separation between first and second. Every team looks a little different by RA9-WAR, as opposed to regular WAR, but the impression of the Indians is unchanged. This year, the Indians have had baseball’s best pitching, and it’s been true by a significant margin.
Once you understand who looks the best in a given season, it follows that you should be curious about historical context. Let me tell you — there have been very nearly 2,500 individual team-seasons going all the way back to 1900. I don’t know when you, personally, believe that baseball “began,” but when discussing statistics, I don’t know that 1899 is ever relevant. Even 1900 is probably going back too far, but, whatever. Since then, the Indians’ current staff ranks seventh in total WAR. They still have a few weeks left to play. To make everything even, I calculated every team’s WAR per 162 games. Behold the top 10.
| Team | Season | Games | WAR/162 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Indians | 2017 | 143 | 30.9 |
| Braves | 1996 | 162 | 29.5 |
| Braves | 1994 | 114 | 28.8 |
| Braves | 1997 | 162 | 28.5 |
| Yankees | 2003 | 163 | 28.4 |
| Yankees | 2002 | 161 | 28.4 |
| Phillies | 2011 | 162 | 28.1 |
| Braves | 1999 | 162 | 27.8 |
| Braves | 1995 | 144 | 27.2 |
| Cubs | 1970 | 162 | 27.1 |
The Indians are on track to finish in first place. First place! Out of so many decades of baseball! But, again, maybe you don’t love the theoretical model. Maybe you don’t love how much our WAR equation strips out. So here’s the same table, only this time sorting instead by RA9-WAR per 162 games.
| Team | Season | Games | RA9/162 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cubs | 1905 | 155 | 39.2 |
| Cubs | 1906 | 154 | 39.0 |
| Cubs | 1909 | 155 | 38.0 |
| Cardinals | 1944 | 157 | 37.1 |
| Yankees | 1939 | 152 | 37.1 |
| Braves | 1974 | 163 | 35.2 |
| Braves | 1993 | 162 | 34.2 |
| Cardinals | 1943 | 157 | 33.9 |
| Indians | 2017 | 143 | 33.8 |
| Cubs | 1907 | 155 | 33.5 |
Now the Indians drop all the way to…ninth. Third, since the end of World War II. Therefore, this doesn’t change things too much. Yet just as regular WAR might strip too much away, RA9-WAR might leave too much intact. A shortcut we use sometimes is to simply average the two measures to get a clearer impression of true talent. So here’s one last table, which looks like the last two tables. For this one, I’ve just found the midpoint for each team’s WAR and RA9-WAR per 162 games.
| Team | Season | Games | Blend/162 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Indians | 2017 | 143 | 32.3 |
| Braves | 1997 | 162 | 30.9 |
| Cubs | 1909 | 155 | 30.7 |
| Phillies | 2011 | 162 | 30.4 |
| Cardinals | 1944 | 157 | 30.2 |
| Braves | 1974 | 163 | 30.2 |
| Braves | 1993 | 162 | 30.0 |
| Braves | 1999 | 162 | 29.9 |
| Dodgers | 2003 | 162 | 29.5 |
| Braves | 1995 | 144 | 29.4 |
And there it is. First place again. The Indians’ season isn’t complete. Their pitching numbers are going to change, possibly for the worse. And it should go without saying that our WAR metrics are far from perfect. They don’t, as one example, consider strength of opposing schedule. Maybe regular WAR is too far removed from reality. Maybe RA9-WAR isn’t removed enough. Maybe it’s too sloppy to just find the average of the two numbers as if it really means anything. You can argue as much as you’d like to, because there is always room for disagreement. But there’s a legitimate case to be made that the 2017 Cleveland Indians have the best pitching staff in baseball history. This is the evidence. By all-time WAR/162, they rank in first place. By all-time combined WAR/162, they rank in first place. They still have games to play, but they can perform worse while remaining where they are.
When you think about the Indians’ staff, you think about Corey Kluber. He’s great! And when you think about the Indians’ staff, you think about Andrew Miller. He’s also great! Carlos Carrasco, further, has been great. The Indians have benefited from remaining generally healthy; Miller is down now, but he’ll be back soon, and the team’s needed to use only seven starters. An underrated aspect here has to do with depth, as the Indians have given just 24.2 innings to pitchers with a below-0 WAR. All those innings have been thrown by Shawn Armstrong, whose WAR is -0.1. The Indians rank first in baseball in having the least negative pitching WAR, combined. They, again, stand at -0.1. The league average, and median, are -2.2. The Indians haven’t had to give time to bad pitchers, which is a subtle means of keeping the overall numbers terrific.
The conclusion to something like this is always that, moving forward, it can mean only so much. Look back at that last table again. The 1997 Braves lost in the NLCS. The 2011 Phillies lost in the NLDS. I don’t need to tell you that this year’s Indians staff could lose, just as last year’s depleted playoff Indians staff mostly managed to win. There’s no such thing as solving October. The goal is always what lies at the end of October, but a team can only try to solve October by solving April through September. That’s where the Indians have accomplished their mission. Just in recent weeks, they’ve ripped off one of the longest winning streaks of all time. And if you go back to the beginning, the Indians have thrown what might stand as the best pitching staff in baseball history. It’s no wonder they’ve been a hard team to beat.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Oversimplifying: How can the Indians staff be so much better than the Dodgers’, lets say, when LAD has given up the same amount of runs and earned runs, has a tick better OPS against, etc. Defense doesn’t explain it (and Cleveland fields well, if memory serves). From whence the WAR? Maybe this is a DH (AL vs NL) effect?
There’s a massive gap in the offenses of NL vs AL, yes.
Plus, Cleveland is a lot more hitter-friendly than Los Angeles, as ballparks go.
Are you talking about the AL’s longstanding talent advantage, or just the DH scoring boost? The DH effect has been much diminished by the interleague schedule of 20 games for each team.
From 1973-96, AL averaged +0.33 R/G over the NL. Since 2013, just +0.21.
These reasons listed below are why “league and park adjusted” stats are so common place — straight runs, or even straight OPS, isn’t necessarily that meaningful for comparing apples to apples.
Taking Baseball Reference WAR for those Top 10 teams and you see the 2011 Phillies at the Top with 37.3 WAR, and they are about 7 wins above the next team. It appears to be because BR takes into account the defence behind you which in the Phillies case was -57 runs (including Rollins, Howard and Ibanez).
I know FG and BR calculate their WAR differently but BR does not like those nineties Braves teams as much as Fangraphs. Looks to me it has most to do with a) the Braves had really good fielders behind them, and b) the weaker opposing NL offences
BRef and FGs also calculate their park factors differently. Plus, it looks like that 2011 Phillies team sequenced the hits against it pretty well, stranding lots of runners. Comparing past pitching performances is really hard.
What’s really unusual about this year’s Cleveland pitchers is how their low ERA isn’t really due to beating their peripherals in any significant way.
The sequencing argument is why i think fangraphs WAR is the weakest in this situation. There’s value in good sequencing even if it’s just luck. In a situation where you’re trying to predict what’s gonna happen it’s definitely best to strip out things like sequencing but if I’m picking who I’d rather have in hindsight (decisions like MVP or best pitching staff ever) I think sequencing should still be included because it did happen that way and that does matter.
I don’t disagree. A huge reason why talking about past pitching performance is so hard. Even for hitters, WAR in general seems much better suited for comparing projected performances, when you don’t know how PAs will be ordered or relate to other players. Backwards looking, you can argue for like 5 different ways to compare guys.
And that’s one of the cool things about this year’s Cleveland staff: because their peripherals back up their adjusted ERA, you can just pretty much call it historic without any of the typical complicating stuff like sequencing or BABIP or whatever.
I can’t be the only one wondering where the 1998 Braves fall on the WAR/162 list…
They just missed out at 27.0 WAR – tied for 11th with the 2003 Dodgers who also got bumped out of the overall top 10 once you convert to “per 162 games”:
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=0&type=8&season=2017&month=0&season1=1900&ind=1&team=0,ts&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=19,d
I get the argument, but some point we probably have to allow that pitcher WAR isn’t sufficient to support claims like this yet. Take the 1997 Braves by comparison…in a similarly nuts offensive environment, they were nearly a half run better per 9 than the next best team. The Indians, as good as they have been, don’t even lead this current season. Yes, ERA is quite imperfect, but the 90’s Braves aren’t adequately explained by FIP, etc. either.
AL vs. NL offenses, hello?
No, not really…it is that pitcher WAR isn’t so great and in particular isn’t great at old-guy analysis. Glavine on those Braves teams was an example, as Jeff pointed out here:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/tom-glavine-who-was-differently-gifted/
Modern metrics clearly do a very poor job of translating historic data. Don’t you find it curious that so many teams are among the best ever these days? Last year it was the Cubs defense. Earlier this year it was the Dodgers. I get that it makes a nice headline, but the headlines are worth less to those keeping count. This is simply a reflection of WAR weights. You could argue that CLE simply fits the WAR model better than any other staff in 2017. It doesn’t have any real historic significance. Re-write the pitching WAR weights around 70s-80s baseball values and you would have a different list.
Chalk me up for getting sick of the “best ever” headlines. The game itself (baseballs) has changed – I don’t know how you can really compare it to past generations. Well, you can, but you are really doing a disservice to baseball history – and I am not on board with that. Baseball is about its history. If you discredit the history of America’s past-time, then all you have left is a boring game – which is ironically the subject of the progressive narrative. Selling the history of the game for headlines is not in the best interest of the game. Its good for clicks though.
A big part of the problem is experiencing modern-day seasons on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. We know the final numbers from players and teams in previous years. As we follow current years, though, content is published in April and May and June and July and August, before the season is complete. So plenty of players and teams will have numbers that are on track to be historically relevant, just because the samples are still small enough to allow for such volatility. Then, in time, most extreme data points regress. You can’t fairly compare a partial season to a completed season. That all being said! These Indians have played 143 games. The majority of the season is in the books, and it’s unlikely their pitching staff is going to tank. So this really does look like one of the best staffs ever, and if that seems hyperbolic, it’s because of other articles, and not this one.
Thanks for the reply. I don’t think that we have any tools to compare historic staffs.
In reality this is a staff that includes Trevor Bauer along with a floating 5th starter and that absolutely excludes them from being one of baseball’s all-time great staffs. Who is their #3? Currently it is Bauer and at times it has been Salazar. If anything, I think this is making a case for how we need to fix the pitcher WAR equation. Maybe it is telling us how bad the other staffs are… this is the same staff they had last year which was not one of history’s best.
Really? You don’t think we have ANY tools to compare historical pitching staffs?
Exactly
their #3 has been more like Clevinger. And Bauer’s been good; he’s 13th in the AL in fWAR. For pitchers who’ve thrown more than 90 innings, the Indians have 5 of the top 11 pitchers in k/9, Salazar (2), Kluber (3), Clevinger (9), Bauer (10), Carrasco (11). They also have a really good bullpen
Clevinger and Bauer are not a historic 3/4 IMO.
I think you don’t realize how good Clevinger has been. He’s 9th in K/9 and 7th in swinging strike % in the AL for pitchers with over 100 innings. He’s 10th in ERA. He hasn’t given up a run in his last 3 starts. I mean, the team has won 19 in a row, which is obviously historic, and they’ve done it primarily because their pitchers have been giving up 0-2 runs every day
I know who Clevinger is. It is a lot easier to call someone good when they are coming off their best 3 starts of the year with a grand total of 100 innings. He has gone beyond the 6th inning twice… His advanced pitching metrics don’t agree with the top 10 ERA. I have seen him pitch quite a bit and I am not buying him as a quality 3rd starter. I get that he has been over his last three starts. He walks well over 4 batters per 9 innings and he works with a 92 mph FB.
So you are complaining about Clevinger’s “advance pitching metrics”, the same ones that are showing cleveland as having the best group of pitchers in history? It is literally the exact opposite of what you are arguing, since Clevinger’s fWAR is based on that advance pitching metric. If you’re going to look at Clevinger from the realm of FIP instead of ERA, then why are you ignoring Bauer’s FIP and looking at his ERA? Bauer’s a top 10 pitcher by FIP, and Clevinger’s top 10 by ERA. What does it matter how long he goes in his starts? That’s where throwing Miller, Shaw, Cody Allen, Joe Smith comes in. The other part of this is that the Indians worst bullpen pitcher who’s been there all year, McAllister, has an ERA under 3. They don’t really have a bad option in the bullpen, so if a starter goes 5 or 6, you’re just throwing other guys out there who have ERAs under 3
LOL at downvotes on this
This is beyond silly. You could just as easily say that the 1997 Braves should be excluded because they gave over 200 innings to the likes of Mike Bielecki, Joe Borowksi, Paul Byrd, etc. As Jeff points out, one of the things that distinguishes this Tribe staff is that there’s almost no flotsam. With one minor exception, everyone, even all depth, has been somewhere between really good and awesome.
I am not going to waste much more time with nonsense replies here, this is not a beyond silly statement at all. Two front-line starters is not a historic staff.
See aweb’s excellent comment below. There is a bit of a semantic issue in all of this. Jeff’s argument is really that this is a historic staff performance (taking park, league, and run environment into account), not a historically talented staff.
Related to that, the chart indicates that the best nine team pitching performances (by fWAR) have all come in the last 22 seasons (from 1995 to 2017). The odds of that (that all nine would come in the same 22-year period out of a 117-year sample) are (22/117)^9, or 0.0000294%, if I’m calculating correctly.
Which is possible! But also quite unlikely. So I think it’s a fair comment/criticism, or at least raise the question of what flaws might this uncover in the fWAR methodology?
(Of course one very fair and valid counterpoint is that the team seasons are by no means independent of one another; see the recurrence of the Braves’ staff from 1994 to 1999 on the list.)
I don’t think it’s really a problem in methodology, just that what WAR measures is what current teams value, strikeouts, limiting walks. Not that those weren’t always good things, but before the 80s-90s pitching was very different, because you didn’t have the bullpens, a starter “pitching to contact” when he could made sense because it was important to get depth from your starter. It makes lots of sense that the leaders in fWAR would come after the advent of modern bullpen usage.
This is why WAR should not be applied across generations.
Most of baseball has been played in more contact-friendly environment. Modern metric are always going to float modern players and teams to the top. If they didn’t, then people would reject them. Everyone wants to witness greatness, even if it is part of a fabricated context.
It makes perfect sense that modern teams would be at the top of the fWAR list. fWAR focuses on things the pitcher has direct control over. When the ball is put into play less, the pitcher is getting more of the credit for each out. There is no doubt that the ball is being put into play less and less. Not to mention, as others have said, specialized and deeper bullpens are going to make staffs perform better.
Less balls in play = more credit going to the pitcher in fWAR = higher WARs in modern times.
I believe that the split between pitching and hitting WAR is kept constant from year to year. I know that’s how BR does it.
A quick check to see if Fangraphs does the same. Last year pitchers accumulated 429.3 WAR or 14.31 WAR per team. Going back to 1977…pitchers accumulated 372.1 WAR or 14.31 WAR per team.
So yeah, it’s not because of pitchers getting more credit.
My guess is that it’s more about free agency which allows teams to stockpile talent in a way that they couldn’t before.
Without free agency, the Braves don’t acquire Greg Maddux to anchor their great rotations. Without free agency, the Indians don’t trade away Cliff Lee and he’s not part of the 2011 Phillies. The Yankees of course had plenty of free agent pitchers on their 2002-2003 teams. The current Indians are a bit of the reverse in that three of their starters were acquired when they traded away players they were afraid of losing via free agency.
I don’t understand how this gets downvotes. 100% on point. The sensationalist clickbait is so silly, especially in the greater context of baseball history.
There’s nothing clickbaity about observing that the Indians are on track for the best-ever WAR, just as there was nothing clickbaity about observing that last year’s Reds had the worst-ever WAR.
Respectfully, frequently describing things as “the best” or “the worst” is inherently clickbaity. I get that to generate daily content, you have to play with some small samples or weird data, but at this point, there are so many “bests” and “worsts” that the words have lost their impact. We have so many stats now that there are many possibilities for best/worsts, but playing a game of “sort the leaderboard,” whether it’s to say “The indians are the best,” “corey kluber is the best,” or “jonathan schoop is one of the best,” the superlatives lose impact (at least in my opinion) the more they’re used. And since a lot of this data wasn’t available in the past, we don’t really know what “the best/worst” are anyway. There’s always room for a new best of something in the statcast era that’s only a few years old. I have no problem appreciating great performance, but like RonnieDobbs, I’m not a fan of calling modern things “the best/worst.”
Saying “respectfully” does not then make it respectful when you accuse someone of “sensationalist clickbait.”
It doesn’t hurt!
I am afraid that you and I are in the minority. We live in the era of headlines and instant gratification. I can’t even stomach the headlines that circulate in the real news!
I initially thought the same thing – the list seems to slant modern. But really, the list is just dominated by the 1990’s Braves which featured 3 HOFers at the peak of their primes. Add in that they always seemed to have 4th and 5th starters that pitched really well (at least they went somewhere other than Atlanta) along with stellar bullpens (Rocker before he was outed for being a ilttle nuts, Wohlers before he lost it) and it’s really not that surprising that they have multiple years there.
You can say similar things about the 2002-2003 Yankees (Clemens, Mussina, and Pettite with Rivera at the back of the pen) and the 2011 Phillies (Halladay, Lee, Hamels, Oswalt with Lidge at the end). Just awesome compilations of elite pitchers.
If the list had continued on to the next 10 you would have seen the 71 White Sox, the 88 Mets, and the 66 Dodgers.
I do think though that the list slants more toward high run-scoring environments (1993-2002 or so) and to some extent, that makes sense. When there are more runs, it is easier to separate yourself from the pack. If you were pitching in the 1968 when the league average ERA is literally 2.98, it’s harder to separate yourself from that. A shutout in 1968 (League ERA 2.98) wasn’t as impressive as a shutout in 1998 (league ERA 4.45). I’ve often thought that it has been greatly overlooked that the Steroid Era also coincided with the careers of some of the greatest pitchers of all time – Maddux, Clemens, and Pedro to start with.
I had been curious on this myself, had looked back to 1980 and had seen the Braves staff had been the highest and that no staff got to 30 WAR, while Cleveland may get there.
The winning streak they’ve been on has been ridiculous, I think outside of the first game of the streak, when they beat Boston but Bauer gave up 4 runs, the only game a starter has given up more than 2 runs is the one Salazar started, which was basically a rehab start in MLB.
Jeff says that chances are the Indians won’t win the WS. This is probably correct, but I like their chances of getting to the WS better than any other team (and thus, their chances of winning it).
Fantastic Indians day going on here at Fangraphs. Thank you for it.
Blending the two articles:
Hattery noted the Indians player development staff usage of analytics with the development of hitters (using Haase’s increased prospect profile in 2017 as an excellent exmaple). Hitting has also been the main focus on player development in this 2017 season (with the Airball Revolution – or as I prefer, the Elevation Revelation- in full effect).
Going back though to the great work done by Jeff Passan and others here at Fangraphs in 2016, the player development field was first expanded on the pitching side. That analytical development caused much of the offensive degradation in the years preceding the second half of 2015 (when the ball may or may not have been altered).
One of the leading teams in that pitching focused development? Yes, the Cleveland Indians led by Ross Atkins and Carter Hawkins.
The team’s willingness to listen to Alan Jaeger, Ron Wolforth, Kyle Boddy, and others is what led them to employ Eric Binder (a Texas Baseball Ranch alum) and Ken Knutson (Arizona Baseball Ranch proprietor), which helped them implement the methods throughout their systems.
Everything the 2017 team pitching is experiencing cannot be perfectly traced back to this early adoption, but it certainly was a significant factor.
Think you have to lean towards the WAR analysis, because it’ll incorporate the fact that the Indians are doing this in a year where offense is way up across the league. There have been better ERA-wise team pitching seasons (look at several at once in 2015), but those were apparently different scoring environments.
The Indians are sitting at: ERA-76/FIP-77/xFIP-78.
Their ERA- is the 8th lowest figure (76) since 1900. (2016 Cubs place 7th at 75)
Their FIP- is the lowest ever, 2nd comes from the 1996 Braves (80).
Their xFIP- (2002-present) is the lowest ever. They have distanced themselves from the 2003 Dodgers (84).
This year’s Dbacks have an ERA- of 79, but I don’t think anyone would make the argument that they are anything close to the greatest staff of all time
*
Well, they’re in for some pretty clear regression when that 76 ERA- becomes closer to that 77 FIP-.
The Indians have the best SIERA (3.27) ever, as well. The only thing is – it’s not this 2017 version of the Indians. It’s the 2014 club.
*SIERA 2002-present
I think the “R” in WAR is of particular importance here. Is Cleveland’s staff in 2017 really better than the 90s Braves? Or is the collection of hypothetical 2017 AAAA pitchers in the AL simply (relatively) worse than the 90s AAAA groups from the NL?
I don’t think there’s an obvious answer, but my intuition tells me that outside of guys like Martinez and Johnson, the gap between “random 5th guy” and stud is larger today than it was in the 90s.
Intuitively I would have guessed the opposite, given how nowadays every random middle reliever that gets called up is throwing 95, unlike previous eras.
Mary mother of god those 90’s Braves
Passes the the eye test too.
If you’re purely talking about rotations, I’d probably take the 2015 Mets rotation over any of these other teams. deGrom, Syndergaard, Harvey, Matz all healthy and dominating, plus Colon. Right now the Indians third ace-type pitcher (Salazar) isn’t in the rotation.
Still, in terms of total pitching staff the Indians probably win out; Miller+Shaw is much much more dominant than the Mets 2015 bullpen, which really wasn’t all that good outside of Familia (Clippard blew a few games in the playoffs).
I can’t see the Indians as having the best pitching *staff* of all-time, but they certainly might end up with the best pitching staff *performance* of all time. I think that is an important distinction to make that might be tripping some people up – the 90’s Braves teams had (IMO) the best staff, which to me is “which group of pitchers would you prefer to start with” – probably measurable by looking at projections, although retrospective projections can be tricky.
Cleveland’s record breaking numbers, as noted in the article, are all about crazy good depth performance. I’d rather “count” on 3-4 great pitchers having great years than 10, but if the Indians keep this pitching staff model going (no IP workhorses, just lots of guys who strike out everyone in limited starts and/or as a reliever) for a few more years, I guess maybe they deserve this sort of listing.
This x 100. It’s been an amazing run, backed by the peripherals (so not just BABIP luck, incredible fielding, or fluky HR suppression), but almost surely exceeds actual talent level. Which is fine- still deserves lots of attention and praise.
The articles about all the pitchers, not just starters. The ’17 Indians won’t touch the ’96-’97 Braves starter WAR. The Braves bullpen was good but not great. Some guy named Brad Clontz pitched 80 bullpen innings for them with an ERA of 5.69 and a FIP of 5.03. Indians don’t have a Clontz, or a Borowski in their bullpen, and that’s where they make up the gap.
I glanced over the first chart and took in the top 10 all time pitching staffs….and came to the 1970 Chicago Cubs!!??? Holy crap. Had to go to Baseball Reference, I knew they had Ferguson Jenkins, but what else qualified them for 10th best staff ever? Bill Hands and Kenny Holtzman, mostly. This is the team that famously blew a 9-game September lead to the Miracle Mets in 1969. And in 1970, their Pythagorean called for 94 wins, but they won only 84. Scored 806, gave up only 679. I don’t have data to back it up, but this HAS to be one of the most extreme Pythagorean differences ever….doesn’t it? Leo Durocher led both teams….his failure to mesh with the new breed of ballplayer is well-known, but could this somehow be part of the Pythagorean issue?
Thanks Shawn Armstrong. We could have been the best…aroouuuunnnddddd, nothin’ else was gonna bring us down….except you.
It’s smart to be skeptical of any claim that something happening now might be the best of its kind. But it’s also smart to keep an open mind.
It is a fact that this Cleveland team is well into the 99th percentile for run prevention in the live-ball era, on the basis of comparing each team to the average of others in its own league. Through 145 games, Cleveland’s yielding 3.55 R/G, while the rest of the AL averages 4.78. Out of 2,162 teams since 1920, Cleveland ranks:
— 7th on a percentage basis (74.3% of other AL teams RA/G average)
— 5th by raw numbers alone (1.23 RA/G less than other AL teams)
Every other team in the top 9 by either measure was pre-integration or played in a pitcher’s park. So there is certainly a reasonable argument that this team is the best ever at run prevention.
That alone doesn’t mean it’s the best pitching performance, but it’s a good start.