Beta Testing with Arod Garlon DB

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Generally speaking, yup. Nolan Ryan was an above average pitcher. Not even in the same ballpark as a Tom Seaver or a Jim Palmer. These days, careers tend to last longer than 7 games.

Above average how? Nolan Ryan is the all-time career leader in fewest hits allowed per nine innings. He is fourth all-time in strikeouts per nine innings. He is seventh all-time and tied with Tom Seaver in career shutouts. He's 13th all-time in wins. Yes, he walked a lot of batters during the first half of his career, but he was the toughest pitcher to hit in the history of baseball.

Ryan was definitely a star pitcher and not simply an above-average player. He showed much improved control in his final 10 years, and he became an even better pitcher as he got older. He had very poor run support and played for bad teams in many of his years with the Astros. And he didn't always have the best of teams around him with the Rangers either. Otherwise he might have gotten another 30 to 40 wins and been a more consistent candidate for the Cy Young and MVP awards.

[Syd Thrift]

And he has an ERA+ of 112 and a career record of 324-292. Above average. He's 13th all-time in wins primarily because he played for so long. I mean, he's also 3rd all-time in losses and I don't see you bringing that up. Also 4th all time in earned runs allowed and 1st all time in bases on balls and wild pitches. The bottom line? His ERA+ (that's his ERA divided by the league average and then multiplied by 100) isn't even in the top 100 and is behind such luminaries as Jose Rijo, Dave Stieb, Bert Blyleven, Orval Overall, Eddie Plank, Clay Carroll, and Andy Messersmith.

And it's not like his contemporaries thought he was anything more than an above-average freak show either. He is ranked #654 all-time in MVP shares; granted, pitchers don't win it all that often, but then again the MVP is a seasonal award, not a single-game award. He is 22nd in Cy Young shares, primarily because the methods used to figure it out require relatively recent voting; Ryan is, again, neck and neck with high-class talent like Mike Marshall, David Cone, Dan Quisenberry, Dwight Gooden, and Rick Sutcliffe. He never finished closer than a relatively distant second to Jim Palmer in 1973. According to baseball-reference.com, the only actual award he ever won in his lifetime was the AL Sporting News Pitcher of the Year (he finished tied for 2nd in a 4 way race for AL Cy Young - Sparky Lyle, was ahead, Palmer was tied, and Dennis Leonard was one point behind).

That's all. He played a long, long time, and he was a very extreme sort of pitcher. He was most certainly not ever a great pitcher - not according to the stats, and not according to the opinions of his contemporaries.

[Scoman]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

And he has an ERA+ of 112 and a career record of 324-292. Above average. He's 13th all-time in wins primarily because he played for so long. I mean, he's also 3rd all-time in losses and I don't see you bringing that up. Also 4th all time in earned runs allowed and 1st all time in bases on balls and wild pitches. The bottom line? His ERA+ (that's his ERA divided by the league average and then multiplied by 100) isn't even in the top 100 and is behind such luminaries as Jose Rijo, Dave Stieb, Bert Blyleven, Orval Overall, Eddie Plank, Clay Carroll, and Andy Messersmith.

And it's not like his contemporaries thought he was anything more than an above-average freak show either. He is ranked #654 all-time in MVP shares; granted, pitchers don't win it all that often, but then again the MVP is a seasonal award, not a single-game award. He is 22nd in Cy Young shares, primarily because the methods used to figure it out require relatively recent voting; Ryan is, again, neck and neck with high-class talent like Mike Marshall, David Cone, Dan Quisenberry, Dwight Gooden, and Rick Sutcliffe. He never finished closer than a relatively distant second to Jim Palmer in 1973. According to baseball-reference.com, the only actual award he ever won in his lifetime was the AL Sporting News Pitcher of the Year (he finished tied for 2nd in a 4 way race for AL Cy Young - Sparky Lyle, was ahead, Palmer was tied, and Dennis Leonard was one point behind).

That's all. He played a long, long time, and he was a very extreme sort of pitcher. He was most certainly not ever a great pitcher - not according to the stats, and not according to the opinions of his contemporaries.

This is about the biggest load of bull ive seen on here in a long time, labeling Nolan Ryan as simply a "above average pitcher".The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract ranks Ryan as the 24 best pitcher of all time.


He is considered by many to have been the hardest throwing pitcher of all time; only Smokey Joe Wood, Walter Johnson, Satchel Paige, Bob Feller, and Sandy Koufax are thought to have nearly equalled his velocity. Ryan was an eight time MLB All-Star and his 5,714 career strikeouts rank first on the all-time list. Given the nature of modern pitching, with starters seldom going beyond 100 pitches (or about 6 innings), and given the gap between that record and second place, it is difficult to see how the record could be broken. Ryan is also the all-time leader in no-hitters with seven, which is at least three more than any other pitcher, and tied with Bob Feller for the most one-hitters with twelve. Ryan ranks first all-time in strikeouts (5714), fewest hits allowed per nine innings (6.56), fifth in innings pitched (5386), second in games started (773), seventh in shutouts (61) and tied for 13th in wins (324).


Best Season, 1973
Though he pitched for a struggling Angels team, Ryan was in the zone in '73. He hurled two no-hitters, pitched 326 innings (allowing 238 hits), and struck out a record 383 batters. He posted a 2.87 ERA in 39 starts, completing 26 games, and saving one.


Nolan Ryan was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1999, in his first year of eligibility with 98.79% of the vote ,That same year, he ranked Number 41 on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. He was inducted into the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame in 2003.


Baseball-reference.com compares Nolan Ryan to the following pitchers:

Steve Carlton
Phil Niekro
Don Sutton
Gaylord Perry
Bert Blyleven
Early Wynn
Tom Seaver
Roger Clemens
Warren Spahn
Fergie Jenkins

Pretty solid list of fellas there,all just "above average pitchers' too,right?

[Charlie Hough]

My guess is that Syd Thrift didn't actually witness the relevant history here. Did you actually see Nolan Ryan through most of his career, dating back to the Astros, the Angels and maybe even the Mets? This sort of unfounded judgment usually stems from not witnessing the history or simply getting so lost in sabermetrics that common sense dissipates.

Scoman pointed out some of the absurdities beautifully. But I have a bit more to add.

First of all, let's see the quotes to show that most of his contemporaries believe that Ryan was simply 'above average'. Every quote I have ever seen from players and managers that faced him say that he was a great pitcher. I've never read a quote from any player or manager that claimed he was 'above average'. And I'll take the qualified opinion of a Joe Torre or a Don Mattingly over some forum poster every time.

Especially with positional bias and the bias toward only giving the award to players on top teams, the MVP award is a complete and utter joke. You cannot claim that a player was considered 'above average' by his contemporaries because he didn't finish high in the MVP voting. Take Derek Jeter and put him on the Kansas City Royals. Then count how many MVP votes he gets. The number will be virtually zero.

Anyway, this is getting far afield. You already proved my point in your last post. Virtually every person you mentioned in your post was a star player. Being a star player does not necessarily mean being one of the greatest of all-time. It means that you were one of the better players in the game during your career. Guys like Sutcliffe, Marshall, Quisenberry, Stieb and Messersmith were all among the better players in the game during their careers. They were all multi-time All Stars and consistently ranked by peers, fans, and media as stars. If Ryan is in the same category as these players, then you've proven my point, which is that he was a star player and not simply 'above average'.

Technically, every pitcher above the statistical average is 'above average', but if the man is in the top 50 or even top 100 out of thousands of pitchers in baseball history, then he is in an elite class. He is in a top percentile that is almost exclusively populated by star players who were among the best in the game during their careers.

[The Wolf]

Nolan Ryan, eight-time All-Star? The pitcher with 5,714 strikeouts, 324 victories, 7 no-hitters and 12 one-hitters? The only pitcher in history to ever have struck out the side on nine pitched balls in both leagues? "Above average"? What a silly opinion.

[glenmere14]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

...he was the toughest pitcher to hit in the history of baseball.

I wholeheartedly agree. Not saying he was as good as Seaver, but think about this - Ryan pitched 600 more innings in his career than Seaver and gave up fewer hits.

[Raidergoo]

What would have happened to Ryan if he'd been on a good offensive team with a good bullpen from 1985 to 1990? What if he'd been a Red or Blue Jay?

He'd would have been carved on Mount Rushmore.

[Scoman]

Originally Posted by Raidergoo

What would have happened to Ryan if he'd been on a good offensive team with a good bullpen from 1985 to 1990? What if he'd been a Red or Blue Jay?

He'd would have been carved on Mount Rushmore.

So true,if he would have had average run support in his career he would have easily won 375-400 games.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

My guess is that Syd Thrift didn't actually witness the relevant history here. Did you actually see Nolan Ryan through most of his career, dating back to the Astros, the Angels and maybe even the Mets? This sort of unfounded judgment usually stems from not witnessing the history or simply getting so lost in sabermetrics that common sense dissipates.

Scoman pointed out some of the absurdities beautifully. But I have a bit more to add.

First of all, let's see the quotes to show that most of his contemporaries believe that Ryan was simply 'above average'. Every quote I have ever seen from players and managers that faced him say that he was a great pitcher. I've never read a quote from any player or manager that claimed he was 'above average'. And I'll take the qualified opinion of a Joe Torre or a Don Mattingly over some forum poster every time.

Especially with positional bias and the bias toward only giving the award to players on top teams, the MVP award is a complete and utter joke. You cannot claim that a player was considered 'above average' by his contemporaries because he didn't finish high in the MVP voting. Take Derek Jeter and put him on the Kansas City Royals. Then count how many MVP votes he gets. The number will be virtually zero.

Anyway, this is getting far afield. You already proved my point in your last post. Virtually every person you mentioned in your post was a star player. Being a star player does not necessarily mean being one of the greatest of all-time. It means that you were one of the better players in the game during your career. Guys like Sutcliffe, Marshall, Quisenberry, Stieb and Messersmith were all among the better players in the game during their careers. They were all multi-time All Stars and consistently ranked by peers, fans, and media as stars. If Ryan is in the same category as these players, then you've proven my point, which is that he was a star player and not simply 'above average'.

Technically, every pitcher above the statistical average is 'above average', but if the man is in the top 50 or even top 100 out of thousands of pitchers in baseball history, then he is in an elite class. He is in a top percentile that is almost exclusively populated by star players who were among the best in the game during their careers.

As a matter of fact, I did see the Ryan Express play many times. It's disingenuous to try and belittle my age when a. you obviously don't know it (I'm in my 30s, son), and b. you're doing it because you can't refute my points.

Hey, I liked Stieb and Sutcliffe and Quiz as well. Actually, I'm a huge Quiz fan; back in the day, young Mariners fans tended to root for a second team in order to experience some semblance of victory, and my team was the Royals. Anyway, I like all those guys. They certainly are not in the pantheon of great players.

As for the opinion of the people around him... I repeat, for all those adulations when it came time to give out awards, those same people who said Ryan was great gave those awards to other people. And stop the silliness about "Ryan never got to play with a contender and that's why he never won" crap. Andre Dawson and Ernie Banks won awards with bad teams. One thing, too, an ace pitcher does is he adds wins to his ballclubs. Ryan's one of those guys like Jim Kaat who was a very good pitcher (okay, if you want me to amend "above average", there you go) for a long time but who was never a dominant one on the level of Randy Johnson or Greg Maddux or Tom Seaver or Jim Palmer or Roger Clemens. In fact, it's something of an insult to those players to mention his name among them.

One other thing about the Angels and the Astros (who definitely were not a bad team when Ryan was there): as much as the lack of run support hurt his won-lost record, the ballparks he played in made his stats look much better than he really performed. The Big A in the 70s and the Astrodome were 2 of the biggest pitcher's parks in the history of baseball. One thing that does is it makes people remember the Angels' and Astros' offenses as horrendous (which they weren't) but it also made people attribute a lot more to Ryan than he had. 1985, for example... Ryan was actually a below-average pitcher that year. Yep, that's what a 3.80 ERA in the Astrodome means. He was, if anything, the 4th best pitcher on the staff. And yet, who made the All-Star game that year out of him, Mike Scott, Bob Knepper, and Joe Niekro?

What Ryan was, was an extreme pitcher. No pitcher in the history of the game was less willing to allow a hit than Lynn Nolan Ryan. As a result, he had lots and lots of strikeouts. Also lots and lots of walks and wild pitches and, ultimately, more runs allowed than you'd expect a pitcher of his supposed caliber to have. I can see the #24 ranking in the Abstract based just on his long, long career... I don't agree with it and wonder where Kitty Kaat fits in (Fergie Jenkins, another similarly above-average player with a long career, also made the top 100 IIRC), but I can see that argument. He's still a long, long ways off from the 5 guys I mentioned.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Scoman

So true,if he would have had average run support in his career he would have easily won 375-400 games.

If he'd have played for teams other than California or Houston y'all would have realized that over the course of his career, he actually did receive average run support. His wins and losses are pretty congruent with a guy with his ERA+.

[Charlie Hough]

Let it go. You've already lost all credibility.

Anyway, how about some more test results Raidergoo? Jimmie Fox, Vic Power, and Dick Stuart spring to mind.

[Scoman]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Let it go. You've already lost all credibility.

That goes without saying.

[Raidergoo]

Keep it clean in my thread.

I will look up players cited and post them. After that, since a new build was issued a short time ago, I will go repeat all of them, again.

Here's my key takeaway.

SP are lasting longer.

SP are staying SP, and not converting to junk MR.

Real world CL are importing as CL and used as such, unless the AI has a clearly better option.

Note that I have not said or claimed these observations are more than snapshots, and I've not said aging for SP is "fixed".

All that I can comfortably say is that things are "better"

[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, I agree @ Raidergoo, it does look like not every starter is trying to turn into Dennis Eckersley. You still see a bit of that very late in players' careers, but I'm thinking the only way that can be fixed is to hard code a "I've been a starter all my life and I won't change" bit of personality into things. The game manager would have probably converted the much-discussed Nolan Ryan into a reliever his last couple years, but Ryan probably would have retired instead.

Good news overall though.

And what is it with people spending so much time with the "you've lost all credibility" garbage? Obviously my opinion about the Ryan Express is not a popular one on these boards. It doesn't make it invalid.

[DaddyO]

View Nolan Ryan's career: http://www.baseball-reference.com/r/ryanno01.shtml

As someone who watched Nolan Ryan's career from its inception, and a lot growing up as a Dodgers and Angels fan, Nolan Ryan was exactly what Syd Thrift says UNTIL he began to morph from a thrower into a pitcher. Check out the drop in walks that starts to happen around 1979 and then really asserts itself when he moves to Houston. During that same time he stops having seasons with 16+ losses that offset his wins.

Charlie Hough points out this shift. During his California career he would frequently beat himself with walks, averaging more than a walk very two innings. In the 1980s Nolan Ryan was a terriffic pitcher for a mediocre Houston team.

And I don't see how someone who was able to pitch at the level he did for a length of time very rarely seen can be classified as "above average." I don't think you can dismiss the longevity achievments of Nolan Ryan so easily. He had some of the best mechanics I have ever seen, interestingly enough, similar to Tom Seaver in that regard.

I can see where Syd is coming from if you only focus on Ryans career up to 1979. But you can't ignore 25 years of production. In fact, that's another huge plus for Ryan, because starting in 1972 he reeled off 20 consecutive years with 28+ starts (not counting the strike year of 1981). And in all those years he only dipped below 100 in ERA+ four times. Two of those were 98, one 94, and his worst ERA plus was a one-time mark of 91. Meanwhile he also posted ERA+'s of 194, 142, 141, 138, 128, and 124 (twice). And five more season of 110 or better.

So this kind of sustained excellence makes one a rather unique pitcher and one which is worthy of far more respect than "above average." If this guys is "above average," show me your comps that can match these sort of achievments.

[Syd Thrift]

I'm definitely not denying that Ryan's career was remarkably long. And actually, most of my memories of the guy were when he was with Houston and then Texas, as an elder statesman of sorts. It's 100% true that there really isn't *anybody* truly comparable to Ryan. That's why I listed guys who were comparable in terms of their ability to prevent runs. Certainly Ryan has an edge over a guy like Fergie Jenkins in that he was able to keep up his high level of ability for longer. And okay, "above average" was overstating things. I did amend that to "very good."

But this is my point. At no time was Ryan ever in the same pantheon as Seaver or Palmer or Clemens or Maddux or Pedro in his prime or Randy Johnson or Lefty Carlton. That's the level I think of when I consider the term "great". Is he a Hall of Famer? Absolutely. If Sunny Jim Bottomley is a HOFer, Ryan is without question. But there's something to be said about the idea of the "inner circle" of the Hall, a mythical place that includes the true greats of the game. I constantly hear people talk about Nolan Ryan as though he belongs in that inner circle. He was clearly not in that group.

[Raidergoo]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

But there's something to be said about the idea of the "inner circle" of the Hall, a mythical place that includes the true greats of the game. I constantly hear people talk about Nolan Ryan as though he belongs in that inner circle. He was clearly not in that group.

Inner ring, outer ring, whatnot. I'd divide the hall into three realms, and I am not saying where I'd put Nolan.

The issue is that the game did not make a pitcher last 25 years. The game amputated SP into MR.

12267 coupled with Arod seems to not butcher a select number of SP.

See the Lahman thread for a freak of nature who may pitch like Matthewson and last like Ryan.


It also goes without saying these results are now obsolete with the newest build, 12268.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

But there's something to be said about the idea of the "inner circle" of the Hall, a mythical place that includes the true greats of the game. I constantly hear people talk about Nolan Ryan as though he belongs in that inner circle. He was clearly not in that group.

You really think Nolan Ryan doesn't belong in that ring? LOL, what a silly opinion.

[Scoman]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

And okay, "above average" was overstating things. I did amend that to "very good."

Now thats the most accurate thing ive seen you say,good job.

[Zitofan75]

Originally Posted by DaddyO

View Nolan Ryan's career: http://www.baseball-reference.com/r/ryanno01.shtml

As someone who watched Nolan Ryan's career from its inception, and a lot growing up as a Dodgers and Angels fan, Nolan Ryan was exactly what Syd Thrift says UNTIL he began to morph from a thrower into a pitcher. Check out the drop in walks that starts to happen around 1979 and then really asserts itself when he moves to Houston. During that same time he stops having seasons with 16+ losses that offset his wins.

To me, that's what makes Ryan pretty amazing is that he made this transition, made it on mediocre teams, and made it around age 32-33. In fact he got better from the one year to the next. That's pretty good considering it's not uncommon for many players to begin to wear out, particularly one like Ryan who was throwing so hard. The fact that he adapted his game like he did when he did is remarkable since I don't see alot of guys doing that.