[BirdWatcher]

So in case anyone is interested, here is what Harry Lyerly's rookie season looked like.

A few notes of context:
The Brewers pitching staff allowed the most HR's of any pitching staff. Then again, they pitch in the best park in the league for HR hitters. So even pitchers with quite good MVT ratings allowed more HR's then one would expect. In fact, Lyerly's HR/9 was not the worst on the team. It was tied for 6th highest on the team.
The Brewers pitching staff was, however, also one of the best, if not the best in the league. They allowed the fewest runs, struck out the most batters, allowed the lowest BABIP, BA, and OBP. While Lyerly came up to the big league club roughly mid-season and therefore had only 18 starts, he ended up with, by a fair margin, the best WAR and rWAR on the pitching staff.

The best K/9 among qualifying pitchers was 8.4. (And second place was 7.6.) Lyerly's K/9, as you can see, was 9.7. In his second WPK start (sorry, the log of games pitched here does not show the first two starts- and that horrible last start is in the World Series, where all of the Brewers pitchers were roughed up as they were swept), Lyerly tied the team single-game record with 12 strikeouts. He would tie it again in a shutout start on 08/14/69 and then set a new team record with 14 on 09/24/69. He also had starts where he struck out 11 and 10 and several where he recorded 9 K's.

He was the only pitcher to get any ROY votes, as he finished, tied with one other player, for a distant 4th in the voting.

Eighteen games is still a small sample size and does not make a career. Still, I'm not sure we would have made it to the post-season without his contributions coming down the stretch, so I'm very glad I kept him. Whether this solid start will prove to an aberration only time will tell.
But so far, he doesn't suck.