The Best of the ’90’s Nine

by
August 12, 2008

Upon looking back at the best pitchers of the 1990s, whose careers continued into the Y2K era, a general concensus seems to exist involving which ones sit atop the totem pole. The order of these pitchers may differ from list to list but, based on several articles written by some smart and reliable writers, that list tends to include: Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, Tom Glavine, Curt Schilling, John Smoltz, Kevin Brown, and Mike Mussina.

Some feel all nine of these pitchers are Hall of Fame-worthy. Others draw the line after Smoltz. Some more say all but Brown are deserving. Regardless, it does seem that these nine pitchers had the most impact on the game from a starting pitching standpoint, especially in the statistical department. With that in mind, I went to each of their profile pages and isolated, using WPA/LI, their best seasons. Below they are ranked by these context-neutral wins:

Pedro Martinez (00): 8.09 WPA/LI, 1.74 ERA/2.16 FIP, 0.74 WHIP, 32 BB/284 K
Greg Maddux (95): 6.86 WPA/LI, 1.63 ERA/2.25 FIP, 0.81 WHIP, 23 BB/181 K
Roger Clemens (97): 6.23 WPA/LI, 2.05 ERA/2.25 FIP, 1.03 WHIP, 68 BB/292 K
Randy Johnson (95): 6.15 WPA/LI, 2.48 ERA/2.08 FIP, 1.05 WHIP, 65 BB/294 K
Curt Schilling (02): 6.07 WPA/LI, 3.23 ERA/2.40 FIP, 0.97 WHIP, 33 BB/316 K
John Smoltz (96): 5.23 WPA/LI, 2.94 ERA/2.64 FIP, 1.00 WHIP, 55 BB/276 K
Kevin Brown (98): 5.08 WPA/LI, 2.38 ERA/2.23 FIP, 1.07 WHIP, 49 BB/257 K
Mike Mussina (01): 4.28 WPA/LI, 3.15 ERA/2.91 FIP, 1.07 WHIP, 42 BB/214 K
Tom Glavine (91): 4.13 WPA/LI, 2.55 ERA/3.05 FIP, 1.09 WHIP, 69 BB/192 K

First, some commonalities. Nobody here had a WHIP 1.10+ in their best season; the highest ERA, 3.23, belongs to Schilling, who actually had the biggest E-F discrepancy at -0.83. Nobody had an FIP higher than 3 except Glavine, who also had the highest WHIP, most walks, and second lowest amount of strikeouts. Okay, so it seems that Glavine had the worst best-year of this group and Pedro’s 2000 (as well as his 1999 campaign) just might be the best pitched season in the history of the sport, but I’m curious to know your thoughts on the rankings of these best seasons and how you would rank their careers overall.

Would you stick with the WPA/LI in ranking their top seasons? Does this order represent the order for their overall careers?

While I have a feeling the top four will remain the same it should be very interesting to see some takes on how the bottom five are ranked with some reasoning behind it. With enough of a vote we’ll be able to see if any real concensus exists with regards to their order of effectiveness.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

Eric is an accountant and statistical analyst from Philadelphia. He also covers the Phillies at Phillies Nation and can be found here on Twitter.

27 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Guillermo
17 years ago

It all depends on what you mean by “peak seasons”. 2, 3, 5, 8 ? Consecutive or Best? Etc.

In my opinion, “career value” is more important than “peak value” but it’s not a clear cut thing. You can make a reasonable argument that “peak value” is more important.

Anyway…I’m ignoring the top 3. Too difficult and a lot of things to consider.

Johnson, Glavine, Smoltz, Mussina, Schiling and Brown.

Obviously unit is head and shoulders ahead of this pitchers.

Glavine’s longetivity, Smoltz’s dual threath, Mussina’s consistency, Schilling’s big moment’s and “The uncomfortable truth” Kevin Brown. In that order.

0