Reality Check: Game Seven

Tonight's the last game of the 2014 season. Does history tell us who's going to win?

Yesterday (I'm sorry I didn't read it until today), ESPN's Jayson Stark had a piece about how the Royals, as the home team for the last two games of the Series, have an advantage. Specifically, here are two of his datapoints:

Starting in 1982, the home team has gone 22-3 in Games 6 and 7. And yes, you read that right. We said 22-and-3. That's an .880 winning percentage. Which makes no mathematical sense at all. If you subtract those 25 games, the winning percentage of home teams in all other World Series games, including this year, is just .540. Amazing.No home team has lost a Game 7 in 35 years, since the Pirates won their last title in Baltimore. Since then, road teams have lost eight straight Game 7s.

Now, my purpose here isn't to call out Jayson Stark. He's a great journalist. His coverage of the game is passionate and humorous, and he's an old-school print journalist who's not afraid to bring on new concepts. His latest book is on my reading list. And the statistics he cited have the virtue of being, you know, correct.

However, they're also selective. True, the home team, since 1982, is 14-3 (after last night, 15-3) in World Series Game Six and 8-0 in Game Seven. But that's only since 1982. What happened before then?

• From 1905 (when the World Series became a best-of-seven tournament, excluding 1919-21, when it was best of nine) to 1982, the home team was 27-18 in Game Six.
• From 1905 to 1982, the home team was 10-18 in Game Seven. Won ten, lost eighteen.
• So from 1905 to 1982, the home team was an unimpressive 37-36 in Games Six and Seven.
• Adding that to the Stark's figures, the home team, in all of baseball history, is now 60-39 (.606 winning percentage) in Games Six and Seven, comprised of a 42-21 (.667) record in Game Six and just 18-18 (.500) in Game Seven.  

Did something significant happen in 1982 that changed the way the game's played, making the post-1982 record more relevant to today's game? We'd already gone to the modern bullpen: In 1982, reliever Bruce Sutter got a win and two saves for the champion Cardinals, while Brewers reliever Bob McClure had two losses and two saves. It was the tenth year of the designated hitter, so that wasn't a new thing, though the practice at the time was that the DH used was used throughout the Series in even-numbered years and not at all in odd-numbered years. (The current rule of using the DH only at the American League park began in 1986). It's hard to see that minor DH change making the home team suddenly invincible. Stadiums have gotten a little smaller (shorter fences) and the fields slower (grass replacing artificial turf), but that shouldn't change the home-field advantage. In short, the game didn't really change. So neither should the outcome of the last two games of the Series.

So in looking at tonight's game, I don't think it's any less accurate, nor less predictive, to say "the home team is 18-18 in Game Sevens" than it is that the home team's 9-0 in the past 35 years (8-0 since 1982, and a winner in 1982 as well), the last home team Game Seven loss being the Orioles to the Pirates in 1979.

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On another Game Seven topic, a friend asked me, "Rob, I'm looking game 7 starters and thinking to myself 'whatever happened to aces that pitched games 1,4,7?'" My quick answer was, "That went the way of the four-man rotation." Turns out there's more to it than that.

There have been, including this one, 37 World Series that went seven games. That means there have been 74 opportunities for a pitcher to start games 1, 4, and 7. That happened only 14 times, just 19% of the time: Boston's Smoky Joe Wood and the Giants' Jeff Tesreau in 1912 (the Giants' Christy Mathewson started games 2, 5, and 8--the second game was an 11-inning tie); Washington's Walter Johnson in 1925; Brooklyn's Joe Black in 1952; Pittsburgh's Vern Law in 1960; St. Louis's Bob Gibson in 1967 and 1968; the Mets' Jon Matlack and Oakland's Ken Holtzman in 1973; St. Louis's John Tudor in 1985; the Mets' Ron Darling in 1986; Minnesota's Frank Viola in 1987 and Jack Morris in 1991, and Arizona's Curt Schilling in 2001. The golden era was 1967-2001, when there were 13 Series that went seven games, and eight of them had a pitcher go in the first, fourth, and last games, but that's still only 35% of the total (nine pitchers, including two in 1973, divided by 26 teams).

Part of the reason for the infrequency is that the current pattern of two games, off day, three games, off day, two games didn't emerge until 1957. Still, there have been 23 seven-game series since then, and pitchers started 1-4-7 only ten times (22% of possible). Prior to 1957, there were seven pitchers who got three starts in a seven-game series, but they weren't in games 1, 4, and 7. Since then, there have been 18 such pitchers, including three pitchers in each of the 1962 and 1965 World Series and the Cardinals' Chris Carpenter in 2011.

But I was wrong about the four-man rotation. The only pitchers among those to have started at least 39 games in a 162-game season or 37 in a 154-game season--reasonable indicators of a four-man rotation--were Wood and Holtzman. (Black was a reliever who'd started only two games in the regular season when he was called upon to start three games in the 1952 Series.)

So I suppose the answer to the question is that aces pitching games 1, 4, and 7 was never really all that common in the first place.

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And one other Game Seven note: Yesterday on SiriusXM, Steve Sax was speculating on whether Madison Bumgarner might pitch in Games Six or Seven after throwing 117 pitches in a complete game shutout on Sunday. Sax said that Bumgarner could, or even start one of the games. After all, said Sax, Babe Ruth, when a pitcher, would sometimes start both games of a doubleheader. 

Babe Ruth started 147 games in his career. On Tuesday, July 11, 1916, he started the first game of a doubleheader against the White Sox. The box score shows that he pitched to one batter and didn't record an out. I assume he was pulled after just a pitch or two. (The story is that the Red Sox starter that day, Rube Foster, wasn't ready for the start of the game, so Ruth threw some pitches while Foster completed his warmup.) Anyway, he started the second game as well, pitching a complete game in a 3-1 Red victory. That's the only game in which he started both games of a doubleheader, and it really doesn't count. 

Reality Check: Stretching Them Out

I enjoy The Will Leitch Experience podcast (though I usually skip the episodes involving sports I don't care follow, i.e., pretty much everything other than baseball). Last week he had three consecutive appearances by Joe Sheehan, whose newsletter I strongly recommend. Joe previewed the 2014 season for all 30 teams. When discussing the Cardinals, he and Will talked about plans to move young pitcher Carlos Martinez from the bullpen to the rotation.

Joe mentioned that giving a young pitcher experience in the bullpen to prepare him for a starting role has become rarer in baseball due to the predominance of one-inning specialists. In 1965, the Baltimore Orioles had 19-year-old pitcher Jim Palmer in 27 games: six as a starter and 21 as a reliever. In those relief appearances, he pitched 56 innings, an average of exactly two and two thirds innings per relief appearance. That workload helped prepare Palmer for a Hall of Fame career as a starter.

Since the speaker here was Joe Sheehan, one of the top analysts in the game, the purpose of this Reality Check is not to determine whether Sheehan's assessment is correct. It is. The question is, how right is he?

I looked at five-year periods of baseball beginning in 1965, Palmer's rookie year. I used Baseball Reference's Play Index (invaluable research tool) to count the number of seasons in which a pitcher younger than 25 had at least 15 relief appearances of at least two innings. These appearances, we could reasonable conclude, are better than a shorter stint at preparing a young pitcher's arm for the rigors of starting. Here are the results. In the table, "# Seasons" means the number of seasons within the date range in which a pitcher younger than 25 had at least 15 relief appearances of at least two innings:

   Years   # Seasons   Prominent example
  1965-69     30       Ferguson Jenkins, 25, 1966
  1970-74     59       Bill Lee, 24, 1971
  1975-79     60       Jack Morris, 18, 1978
  1980-84     39       Rick Sutcliffe, 16, 1980
  1985-89     38       Chuck Finley, 16, 1987
  1990-94     15       Pedro Martinez, 31, 1993
  1995-99     15       Chan Ho Park, 15, 1996
  2000-04     13       Johan Santana, 18, 2000
  2005-09      5       Brandon McCarthy, 18, 2000
  2010-14      2       still waiting
Source: Baseball Reference Play Index. 

As you can see, over the past 50 years, there have been several cases of Hall of Fame and All Star-caliber starting pitchers who have begun their career pitching long relief. As the bullpen has evolved into a series of one-inning specialists, Sheehan's right: it's become hard for a relievers to develop the arm strength to move into the starting rotation. We may be looking a future with fewer stars starting out in relief like Ferguson Jenkins and Pedro Martinez and more promising youngsters who break when they try to move out of a short-outing relief role like Joba Chamberlain and Neftali Feliz.

This is the Age of the Internet

As I've said, I wouldn't vote for Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame, but I won't be upset if he gets in. I don't get that excited over it. That doesn't stop some journalists, though:

For years, Morris’ Detroit Tigers were in the AL East with the Yankees and, counting his many postseasons, I got to see him 30-40 times and never once was he not the best pitcher on the mound that day.

The author is Bill Madden of the New York Daily News. He joined the paper in 1978, so he was presumably in attendance at some of these games in which Morris started against the Yankees and was, he claims, the best pitcher on the mound that day (stats for each team's starter shown):

Date    Pitcher        IP  H ER BB  K
9/8/79  Ron Guidry    7.1  5  3  2 10
        Jack Morris   3.0  6  4  3  1
8/16/81 Dave Righetti 6.0  4  1  3  7 
        Jack Morris   4.2  4  4  5  0
4/14/83 Dave Righetti 6.2  7  3  1  7
        Jack Morris   7.0  8  5  5  4
5/17/83 Jay Howell    5.2  1  1  3  4
        Jack Morris   5.0  6  5  2  1
9/25/85 Joe Niekro    5.0  4  1  4  2
        Jack Morris   5.0 10  7  3  4
4/20/87 Rick Rhoden   6.2  5  1  4  5
        Jack Morris   7.1 10  8  7  2
6/21/88 Al Leiter     3.1  3  0  3  4
        Jack Morris   1.2  5  5  3  2
9/10/88 Rick Rhoden   9.0  7  4  0  3
        Jack Morris   6.1 11  6  3  7
9/29/89 Eric Plunk    8.0  3  0  4 10
        Jack Morris   8.0 11  4  3  7

Now, did I cherry-pick those starts? Of course I did. (But so do people who base Morris's candidacy on Game 7 of the 1991 World Series.) Overall, Morris was decent against the Yankees, with a 17-12 W-L record. But:

• His ERA was 4.30 and his WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) was 1.38 against the Yankees. Much has been made of Morris's career ERA 3.90, which would be the highest in the Hall. His career WHIP was 1.30. His ERA and WHIP against the Yankees were worse than his middling career averages.
• Morris's prime years were 1979 to 1992. During that time, the Yankees had a winning percentage of .524. That works out to an average record of 85-77. That, as it happens, was the Yankees record in 2013. Do you think "juggernaut" when you think of the 2013 Yankees? They were an okay team, but not playoff-bound. It's not like Morris was 17-12 against the Joe Torre Yankees. 

More to the point: Why do people say things like "Never once was he not the best pitcher on the mound that day" when it can obviously be refuted? Did Madden do the cursory check that I did of the Baseball Reference game logs? If not, didn't he realize that some schlub like me would? I'm not picking on him; this is something I see all the time: people saying things that can easily be proven wrong. I'm not sure who it was who said "this is the age of the Internet, we can fact-check your ass," but it was a while ago, and not enough people have taken heed.

The Most Miserable Time of the Year

No, not the holidays. I’m down with the holidays.

I’m talking baseball. There aren’t any games, obviously. The biggest news is contract signings, which, because of the amount of money Jhonny Peralta, who was suspended for 50 games last season, is getting, has led to a new round of teeth-gnashing over PEDs. And the Hall of Fame ballot was released.

I don’t know what annoys me more, articles about PEDs or articles about the Hall of Fame. (Lately, there has been a convergence, amplifying the annoyance.) They have nothing to do with what goes on On The Field of Play. Worse, the Hall of Fame voting season allows sportswriters who don’t even write about baseball (really: you don't have to be currently following baseball to vote) to pontificate about a game that you and I know more about.

And the controversies…The cause célèbre in recent years is Jack Morris. Personally, I wouldn’t vote for him.* But if he gets in, as I expect he will, good for him. No hard feelings. It won’t ruin the Hall for me. But you can be sure that the pro- and anti-Morris prose will go over the top, what with this being his last year on the ballot.

I get more upset by deserving players who don’t get in. Ron Santo, probably one of the ten best third basemen of all time, didn’t get in until 28 years after he retired and two years after he died. That was classy. A Hall of Fame without Tim Raines, possibly the second best leadoff hitter of all time, doesn’t work for me. I get more upset by exclusion than inclusion.

But we are now in the midst of sportswriters and baseball fans and all sorts of baseball commentators talking about how nobody should get in who isn't of the same caliber as Willie Mays, or how nobody should get in at all because Barry Bonds took steroids (some writers returned blank ballots last year to "protest" PEDs that Raines and Craig Biggio, to name two, didn't take), mixed in with people complaining about how much money players make today.

When do pitchers and catchers report?

*Morris was a regular starter from 1979 to 1994. During that period, there were seven pitchers with over 2,800 innings pitched: Morris, Charlie Hough, Dennis Martinez, Bob Welch, Nolan Ryan, Frank Tanana, and Dave Stieb. Of them, Morris had the worst career ERA, even adjusted for playing in a hitter’s park at Tiger Stadium. His most-wins-in-the-1980s can be attributed to fantastic run support: 4.9 per game, 0.6 better than the league average. That's a lot. None of the others got more than 0.2 over average. So he had a high ERA (3.90--that'd the worst among pitchers in the Hall) and a won-lost record that as much a product of his teammates as his doing.