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.
19
The Phils do not hae a very good rotation, but it doesn’t help either that their ballpark is a joke
18th this year in run-scoring, 12th in HR-hitting (mostly thanks to a great-hitting lineup)
15th in run-scoring and 11th in HR-hitting last year.
CBP gets a bad reputation.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/stats/parkfactor
Bill B., the Phillies ballpark is a hitter’s park, there’s no doubt about it. A couple months of one season is pretty paltry evidence to prove that it isn’t.
Ah, I see you mentioned last year as well. Reading skills is one thing this miracle drug doesn’t improve, unfortunately.
It’s definitely hitter-friendly, just not as much as everyone would have you believe.
Is that really the right collection of pitchers? “Historically Bad Playoff Rotations” seems like it should differ from “Playoff Rotations Cobbled Together from a Really Bad Pool”. If you want playoff pitchers, doncha kinda gotta look at who pitched in the playoffs?
The point is more to look at teams that held up through a season and actually got to the playoffs riding bad starting pitching. What they did in the playoffs isn’t as important as far as this discussion is concerned as whether they were able to stay in first or win the Wild Card with their pitching.
The 2006 Cardinals definitely stuck out when I was looking for bad rotations. As a Cardinal fan, I remember them running one guy after another out there on the mound that year, and none of them faring well. They did at least have Carpenter, though, who was second in the NL in ERA and first in WHIP that year, and Suppan made 2 of the 3 starters with 30 starts (also the only ones with 20 starts) at least decent. I was trying to stick with teams that were universally bad, or as close to it as I could find, in the rotation when I picked the Rangers and Sox teams (I couldn’t find any recent teams where every regular starter had a worse ERA than average) and also had relatively poor K:BB ratios and FIPs to keep with the spirit of the Phillies’ current rotation, so I passed over some worse overall staffs like the Cardinals who had one legitimate stud.
Looking at the teams the Cardinals had from 2004-2006, it is pretty remarkable that the 2006 team was the one to win it all.
Their pitchers got hot during the postseason. Jeff Suppan, MVP of the NLCS? Ugh. That team had no business being in the WS.
That’s why I would rather do away with the postseason and go back to just the pennant winners playing in the WS. But, to be fair, they also had no business not being in the WS the year before when they Astros went instead after finishing 11 games behind St. Louis for the division.
Suppan had actually been pitching great for the whole second half of the year, though. Other pitchers like Weaver and Reyes were more of a surprise at that point. It was also the first time in months that the team had been healthy, and the team that went through the playoffs looked a lot more like the team that had won 100 games each of the past 2 years and went 34-19 through the first two months of the season than the team that had floundered through the second half of the year.
About the 2006 Cardinals, I knew they would be mentioned as soon as I saw the topic. And those pitchers were pretty terrible, but as some of the other posters have mentioned, it’s not as if they ran all five of those starters out there during the same point in the season. Reyes and Weaver basically replaced Ponson (who was decent for about a month or so until the wheels inevitably fell off) and Mulder, although it was a little more complicated than that. Mulder was also decent until he had a string of hideous outings. Marquis had two games where he had to absorb 12-run beatings to save the bullpen. And Weaver put it together in the last month of the season after having a bad year.
Anyhow … it is funny that they were the team to win the WS (not the ’04 or ’05 team). But it’s not fair to say that they had no business being in the World Series, since they beat the teams that were in front of them (w/o home field advantage). And Suppan did deserve the MVP on the basis of his performance in that series (not the rest of his career). 15 IP, 1 ER? He was good in that series. Not 4 year/$40 million good, but still good.
Right, and I specifically mentioned this in the post in that it wasn’t as if these guys pitched 30+ games each. The fact still remains that, at various times, these guys started for the Cardinals and combined for 96 of their 162 starts (Carpenter and Suppan had 64 between them and the other two were Brad Thompson and someone else).
Regardless of whether or not they formed a stalwart rotation for the whole year, the Cardinals made the playoffs while giving 96 starts to pitchers with below average numbers.
We weren’t bad, we just played in the Coors FIeld of the 1975 American League.
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Its a bit late but I decided to look at overall pitching stats to see if this pitching staff is as bad as assumed think that one has to look at thier offense and errors if the Phillies have a particularly good offense then they can stand up to having subpar pitching, fortunately for them thier pitching has actually been consistantly bad(only gave up more than 7 runs 5 times) so its not completely outside of thier offensive capability to have a winning record with an offense that is averaging 5.55 runs per game and averageing about 5.06 runs against. in the last month the phillies have been relatively decent at pitching with a team era of 4.44 and thats probably closer to what we should expect out of this team and it should be remembered that the philies werent known for thier pitching last year with the exceptions of Hamels and Lidge, neither of whom were exactly untouchable.