Quote:
Originally Posted by Carlton
in 1928 when he DID face the Yankees and their Lefty power he stunk...went 1-6 and I can't recall the ERA think it was high 6's
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I'm not going to dispute your figures, but I guess I don't understand your logic here. You started out by saying that managers held back some of their pitchers so that they pitched either against good teams or against bad teams. In Grove's case, you use IP to argue that Grove didn't pitch against the Yankees, but you also say that he didn't pitch well against the Yankees when he did pitch. Well, as I see it, that could mean that Grove didn't get a lot of IP against the Yanks because he got pulled from those games because he was being shelled, not because he was being held back.
The better metric is probably how many games he started against 1st division teams, not how many innings he pitched against them. In 1930, he started only twice against the Yanks, but those also happened to be his first two starts of the season, so it doesn't look like Mack was holding him back, at least not initially. But we need to remember that NY didn't finish second that year - Washington did, and Grove started 5 times against the Senators. He also had 5 starts against Cleveland, which means that, of his 32 starts, 12 came against 1st division teams, which is about what one would expect just from a random distribution. And Grove probably lost a start in the last series of the year -- against NY -- because Mack was resting him so that he could start the first game of the world series.
So I'm not convinced, just by looking at Grove's stats, that Mack held him back from 1st division teams. He may very well have held him back from pitching against NY, but then, if you're right that Grove didn't have any success against the Yankees, I wouldn't have blamed him if he did. That doesn't mean that there was a two-tier ranking among the pitchers, it just means that some pitchers pitch well against some teams and not so well against others. Grove was 2-1 with 3 saves against Washington, which was the team that the A's had to beat to win the pennant, so I don't think he was being held back just so he could pad his stats against bad clubs.