As the baseball season rounds the back turn and heads into the homestretch, the national media's unhealthy man-crush on Jim Leyland has officially made the leap into a full-blown love affair. It's almost impossible to turn on ESPN these days without being told what a great manager Leyland is, how he's turned the Tigers around, how he's one of the smartest skippers in baseball, how he's a lock to win the American League Manager of the Year award. The whole thing is starting to drive me bonkers.
My problem is not with Leyland, who has proven over his career that he can do a good job when given the necessary tools. His success with the Pirates, for instance, came at about the same time Barry Bonds was breaking out as an MVP-caliber player and ended when Bonds bolted to San Francisco, while the 1997 Marlins' lineup featured Bobby Bonilla (in his last good season), Edgar Renteria, Moises Alou and Gary Sheffield. And this year, he inherited a team from Alan Trammell that included a crop of great young starting pitchers (Bonderman, Verlander, Miner) and several seasoned veterans (Magglio Ordonez, Ivan Rodriguez, Todd Jones, Kenny Rogers).
I'm not denying that Leyland's managerial style has helped the Tigers realize their potential in a way they weren't able to under Trammell, but there is a limit to the number of wins a manager can win or lose for his team over the course of a season. It's a rough measure, but the good Pittsburgh teams of the early 1990s generally won between two and four more games than they should have according to the Pythagorean Win Theorem. This might be attributable to luck or statistical variance, but we can also credit Leyland with pushing the right buttons to get his club those victories. The 2005 Tigers won 71 games; their 2006 counterparts have already reached 79 and are on pace to hit 106. (The Pythagorean Wins for the Tigers is 101; the five added wins is right in line with Leyland's past totals.) Even if this is a spectacular year for Leyland, his managerial Magnum Opus, he can't possibly be credited with an increase of 35 wins from one season to the next.
Of course, try telling that to the media, which has covered up its uncertainty on how to deal with the Tigers unfathomable season by focusing the bright lights on Leyland and proclaiming his style to be just short of genius. Yahoo Sports! writer Jeff Passan, for example, recently wrote of Leyland, "There is something special with him, and there always has been, from his years in Pittsburgh turning a dormant franchise into a three-time division winner to 1997 when he won the World Series with the Florida Marlins." Leyland was in Pittsburgh for four seasons before making the playoffs in 1990 - what was special about those years (and why did the team begin to win division titles when Bonds emerged as a superstar and stop when he moved to another team)? And it's true that he got a bad deal in Florida, losing almost his entire starting lineup after winning the World Series in 1997, but shouldn't a smart, passionate manager have been able to figure out some way to coax a few more wins out of a young team in 1998? Or in Colorado in 1999, where he stayed for a season before moving on because he had lost his passion for the game?
Look at it this way: the most celebrated teachers in our schools are not the ones who get a little extra out of the super talented kids, but the ones who go out of their way to help the students who have been written off as lost causes.
Don't get me wrong, Jim Leyland is a very good manager who made a great decision when he accepted the job offer from the Tigers last winter. He knew that the team was not as far away from winning as it had seemed the past few seasons, with those great young arms on the horizon and the veteran leadership to show them the way. His "stay out of the way" mindset (“I fill that card out and hope they do good,” he told Passan) has allowed him to gain the trust and respect of his players by placing those leadership roles in their laps while still maintaining the sense that this is his team. The laid back atmosphere has undoubtedly resulted in a few extra wins, with his on-field work probably yielding a few more. But when it comes down to it, it appears the person with the best understanding of where those extra thirty wins are coming from is Leyland himself. When reminded of the World Series victory in 1997, he replied, “Players got me the ring. I didn’t get it.”
For the first part of this article, I used the Favorite Toy formula originally developed by Bill James to look at active pitchers who have a chance at reaching 300 career wins. While my first effort yielded more than thirty players under the age of 35 who have a legitimate shot at winning 200 games, raising the criteria to 300 wins reduced the field greatly, leaving just ten pitchers to consider. A couple of those names were surprising (none more so than the Cardinals' Jason Marquis) and some expected pitchers were missing, but for the most part the list hit the nail on the head.
One of the key findings concerned the age of all ten "finalists", the oldest of whom was 28. Because of their relative youth, only Oakland's Barry Zito was projected to finish 2006 with more than 100 career wins, leaving a lot of room for change (both positive and negative) as these guys get older.
This time around, I will be discussing the next level of pitchers: those who have either already won 200 games or are within striking range of that mark, but have some distance to travel before they hit 300.
Before I get started, here is a brief recap of the formula used to calculate the Favorite Toy:
Part 1: EYW = (3*Y0 + 2*Y1 + Y2)/6 – Y0 is last season’s total, Y1 is the previous year’s total and Y2 is the total from three years ago. The result will be what I called “Expected Yearly Wins” (EYW), which is the number of wins the pitcher will be expected to average per season for the remainder of his career.
Part 2: YR = max(0.6*(40-age),1.5) – Age is, of course, the player’s age (all ages were based on those found at Baseball Reference.) This number gives the expected years remaining in the player’s career. If the pitcher is older than about forty, as several on this list were, the YR will fall below 1.5 when calculated; in this case, 1.5 is used as the baseline measure.
Part 3: EXP = (EYW*YR) + Career Wins – Multiplying EYW times YR gives the number of projected wins the player has remaining in his career. This number is added to the career wins up to this year to reach the final projected total.
Part 4: P = EXP/X - 0.5 expresses the pitcher’s chances of reaching an established mark (the P stands for Probability) – in this case, 300 career wins – as a percentage. If a number is negative, the chances of reaching the milestone given the information supplied is zero; if it is higher than 100, it is a virtual certainty that the milestone will be passed. Because nothing is guaranteed, however, such results are rounded down to 97%.
Using these formulas for pitchers nearing or at 200 career wins yielded the following results (note: these numbers were originally calculated using 2006 victory totals on August 5, then redone on August 12):
Again, the first thing that stands out among the pitchers on this list are their ages: of the eight, three are over forty, two more are 39 and one is 37. Only two - Pedro Martinez and Andy Pettite - have yet to celebrate their 35th birthdays, a fact that works well in their favor as they round the bend at 200 and head for the 300 win mark.
Because of his age and dominance in the late 1990s, Pedro Martinez is the only member of this group with a measurable chance at 300 wins (although I found it interesting that Mussina's odds work out to exactly 0.00%). Martinez has always been of personal interest to me as a fan, first for his seemingly natural greatness and then because of the parallels of his career with another personal favorite, Sandy Koufax (I've always felt that Martinez's career has served as an example of what might have happened if Koufax had pitched beyond 1966, but that's a thought for another time). The dominant pitcher in the game from 1997-2000, Pedro's 2001 season ended prematurely when he experienced some serious shoulder problems. When he returned, he was still an exceptional pitcher, but not the same transcendent guy we had seen in previous years. For the last four seasons, including a twenty win campaign in 2002, he has plodded along slowly but surely, winning his 14-16 games a year and projecting to a final total of 261. Along with his small chance of reaching 300, he has a 77.5% possibility of getting to 250.
Perhaps the best thing that can be learned from this list is that consistency throughout a career can mean the difference between reaching 200 and 300 wins. Schilling is the best example, posting double digit win totals just six times in his first eleven full seasons. Ironically, his career took off at the same time Martinez's armor started to crack - the 2001 season, when he was 34 years old, was Schilling's first with twenty wins. The late start means his chances of reaching 300 are nonexistent (he would have to channel the spirit of Warren Spahn and average 20 wins a year until the age of 43, and even then would still be a few short), but he might be able to get to 250 if he continues to pitch after his current contract expires after next season.
Moyer is another case of a pitcher who seems to get older with every start, yet keeps on winning. Like Schilling, his early career struggles (two double digit win seasons in his first eleven years in the bigs) have come back to haunt him, although he later benefitted from several years with the strong Seattle clubs of the late 1990s and early 2000s, winning twenty games for the first time at 38 and again at 40. Unfortunately, he has also been harmed by Seattle's recent struggles, with his production limited to 26 wins in the past seasons while his age continues creeping toward fifty.
Wells has seemed as ageless as Schilling or Moyer, posting seasons of 20, 19, 18, 17 and 16 wins since turning 34 during the 1997 season. The problem is that he didn't see regular service as a starting pitcher until joining Detroit in 1993 (prior to joining the Tigers, Wells had appeared in relief 168 times in his career; since 1993, he has come out of the bullpen just twice). Wells' chance at winning 300 went out the window when he failed to crack Toronto's starting rotation at a younger age, but he does still have a 13.75% chance of reaching the 250 win mark. Whether he is able to do so depends entirely on his health and his will to continue playing - knee problems have landed him on the disabled list more than once this season and he has indicated a desire to hang 'em up at the end of the year.
Speaking of the effects of time spent on the bullpen on the probability of winning 300 games...the number ten pitcher on the list, John Smoltz, has to have mixed feelings about the four seasons he spent as a reliever for the Atlanta Braves. Unlike Wells or Kenny Rogers, who didn't receive regular opportunities in the starting rotation until close to or past the age of thirty, Smoltz came up through the minor leagues as a starter and worked his firt twelve major league seasons in that role until injuries forced him to take the lighter workload of a closer. Those four seasons not only caused a zero in the Y2 value when factoring the Favorite Toy, they also removed roughly 60 wins from his career total (assuming he was able to consistently pitch without injury during that time). (On the other hand, the 154 saves he posted might have punched his Hall of Fame ticket.) As it currently stands, Smoltz has little chance at reaching 250 or 300 career wins; just for fun, however, I reworked his numbers, adding sixty wins to his projected 2006 year end total of 190. This altered his line as follows:
Name TM AG Y0 Y1 Y2 PC1 EYW YR EFW PCW TN2 P300 Smoltz, J2 ATL 39 13 14 15 250 14 1.5 21 271 50 -9.00%
Using this data, Smoltz still presents as having zero chance of reaching 300 wins, even with the additional sixty tacked onto his record. The question at this point becomes, with which team will Smoltz end his career? Though he has expressed a desire to retire as an Atlanta Brave, having spent his entire career with the team, it is obvious that the Braves have slipped from the elite of the NL East to another of the league's also-rans, a fact that led to trade speculations concerning their ace earlier this season. Smoltz's contract runs through the end of this year, with a team option for next season. It would not be surprising for the team to pick up the option (Smoltz is only 39, after all), see how things go early in the season, then swing a deal with a contending club if necessary. Depending on the team he plays for in the next two or three seasons, Smoltz could add a handful of victories to his totals and strengthen his chances of reaching at least 250 for his career.
Besides Pedro Martinez, the one player on this list who might have the best chance at reaching 300 wins is Mike Mussina. Despite the 0.00% chance the Favorite Toy gives him to reach that mark (the only player out of nearly 100 initially considered who achieved exactly 0% chance of reaching a milestone), he has two factors that work in his favor. First, his age: Mussina is only 37, which means he should have at least two to three quality seasons ahead of him. Second, his team: the Yankees have won eight consecutive division titles and are in the lead again this season. They are getting older, but the strength of the team remains in the lineup, which allows a pitcher to make more mistakes, knowing his team will pick him up. Mussina could post ERAs over 4.00 in the next few years and still emerge with a good looking record.
As touched upon previously, the Favorite Toy is an interesting method of predicting wins, but it is important to be careful not to take it too seriously. Perhaps moreso than any other pitching statistic, wins have a volatile nature that depends heavily on the other eight players on the field. Pitcher A can take the hill, allow four runs in five innings, yet still get the win because his team scores five times and the bullpen holds the lead; conversely, Pitcher B might head out to the mound, give up one run in eight strong innings, but lose because his lineup can't push a run or two across for him. Therefore, the chances an individual pitcher has of reaching 300 wins depends heavily on the quality of team he is on. This is more a problem for the good young pitchers, who might not have reached free agency and therefore are locked into a situation in which they can't always compete (i.e. Dontrelle Willis). While such a situation can still trouble older pitchers (i.e. Jamie Moyer), especially if they become attached to a certain team or city and determine to stay there through thick and thin, they do generally have shorter contracts and greater freedom when it comes to moving around.
To review, of the eight pitchers on this list, only Pedro Martinez has a current measurable chance at 300 career wins while Mike Mussina has zero statistical probability of reaching 300 but an ideal situation in which to do so. Six of the eight (all except Smoltz and Moyer) stand a good chance of reaching at least 250 wins - the projected high total is Mussina's 271, although Smoltz could have ended up in the same range had he not posted six victories in four seasons while serving as Atlanta's closer.
If I were forced to make a bet, I would choose two pitchers from this list to surpass 300 career wins: Martinez and Mussina. The former is a likely choice due to his relative youth and the strength of the team for which he plays; the biggest question will be his ability to avoid further injuries to his hip, toe and shoulder, but he is also a great competitor who will do everything to close the gap once he sees the mark in sight. The latter is the more likely choice because, barring a sudden collapse, he should have at least two or three good seasons left with only about fifty wins to go until he reaches 300. If he can avoid injury (which hasn't been an issue in his career to this point) and the Yankees remain a competitive ball club, he could become a member of the 300 win club sometime around 2009.
Up next: I'll look at two pitchers who are on the brink of passing 300 career wins and two who are already well beyond and see how far all of them can go before Father Time chases them down.
I am a 28 year old sports fan who enjoys following the Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots and Boston Celtics (and I wrote that before Garnett and Allen came to town).
I've lived my whole life in southern New Hampshire, graduating from UNH in 2003 with a degree in history/relig ious studies. Two of my favorite jobs have been related to baseball, first as an intern with the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002 and then as an intern/Media Relations Manager with the Nashua Pride in 2003 and 2004.
