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PITCHING EXCELLENCE WILL BE RECOGNIZED IN 1869
FIRST “PITCHER OF THE YEAR” AWARDS WILL BE HANDED OUT AFTER THE UPCOMING SEASON

NEW YORK CITY (Mar. 15-19, 1869) – The annual Spring Meeting was a relatively boring one for the NBBO Executive Committee. There were no notable rule changes being pushed, the autumn announcement allowing payments to select players meant there was peace on the illicit cash front, and the NBBOEC was left satisfied after an 1868 season that saw five new entrants to the Tucker Wheaton Cup when the 1866 & 1867 cup fields were identical. Still, there was one area in which the NBBOEC thought it was time to make a change: increased recognition of pitching and its impact on the game.

At the dawn of organized base ball, pitching was little more than the way to initiate the action on the field. Even though Scranton’s John Anderson ended the inaugural NBBO season with its first, and to date the only, 30-win season, he saw only 25 batsmen strike out against him over 309 innings. His success was just as much due to the defense behind him as it was his own efforts to confuse the opposition with the limited arsenal he had available as an underhand-only pitcher.

Pitchers in the NBBO are still limited to delivering the ball via an underhand motion, but in the years since that 1857 season the competition has seen pitchers arrive and show off the ability to affect the outcome of games with their ability to manipulate the ball or deliver it with surprising speed.

Of course, the first man to show that pitching can be about far more than just lobbing the ball in and hoping for weak contact was Jim Creighton. Since his teenage debut in 1860 Creighton has become the first pitcher in the NBBO to strike out 50, 75, 100, 125, 150 & 175 batters in a season thanks to his ability to pitch the ball at inconceivable speed. Excelsior BBC has made the Tucker Wheaton Cup finals four times over the past six years while finishing second in Brooklyn the other two seasons, and much of that success has been due to the work of Creighton, now a 4x NYL Most Valuable Player winner.

Another pitcher who has become a master of the art of combative pitching is James Goodman, who was an enigmatic teenager experimenting with the ball as much as he was pitching for Minuteman during the NBBO’s first season but after 7-8 years of development figured out how to use his vast array of grips and speed changes to bend batsmen to his will. Goodman has been stuck on mostly mediocre Minuteman teams over the course of his career, but in 1865 took a team with only four batsmen who had a WAR over 1.0 and dragged it, kicking & screaming, into the postseason. Goodman’s Pitching WAR over the past four seasons: 8.2, 8.1, 8.6, & 8.6. His highest ERA during that span? 2.66 – better than Creighton (2.85).

A third significantly dominant pitcher has emerged over the past three years: Susquehanna’s Elmer Seabold. As a 22-year-old in 1866 the prodigious Seabold was 21-11, sported the NEL’s best ERA at 2.32, and struck out 127 batsmen over roughly 300 innings. After a dip in form in 1867, Seabold was 29-11 last year with 134 K’s and 8.5 WAR for a Susquehanna team that miraculously beat out Alleghany for the Inland Championship thanks in no small part to his efforts.

With those three, and the frequent tweaks to pitching rules & regulations during the 1860s, in mind, the NBBOEC has decided that it is time to start giving the best pitchers in the sport their due with something more than a spot in the Team of the Year and a chance at the MVP award.

Starting with the 1869 season, the NBBO will hand out the “Pitcher of the Year” award to the best of the bunch in each league. Whether that means the most talented pitcher, the one with the best statistical output, or simply the one with the most wins – the standard for a Team of the Year nod – will be up to the voters. The favorites for the first “PotY” awards will obviously be Creighton & Seabold, but there is always the chance for a major surprise.

Since pitchers will now have their own major individual award to look forward to, the NBBOEC has also decided to give instruction to the Writers Pool that redefines the Most Valuable Player award. There has been no set MVP criteria, so in past seasons it has gone to the player with the highest Batting WAR, the most Win Shares, a unique season on a winning team, the Batsman of the Year runner-up, or to a player who clearly had the largest positive impact on his team.

Now, the writers have been told the MVP should go to a player on one of the three regional champions in each league. That means there will still be three finalists in the NYL and three more in the NEL, but those six finalists will come from the six teams that make it to the Tucker Wheaton Cup. That will narrow the MVP pool significantly, but in past seasons MVP’s have often come from regional champions. The most notable exception has been Willie Davis winning the NEL MVP while playing for a Susquehanna team that finished sixth in Inland, but it should not surprise that the best teams would also have the best, most valuable players.

Now that the pitchers of the NBBO are getting their recognition as more than just men who lob the ball in to start a play, it will be interesting to see if there is increased competition among the sport’s premiere pitchers for top billing.