Is a starting pitcher with a losing record hof worthy?

[BaseballMan]

Asking cause at some point i will have to decide if i should allow this guy in the hall.

[kq76]

I think it really depends on the rest of the league. I like to ask myself, "would this player make a roster of the best players who played during his 5 or 10-year peak?". You could easily have a league where this player should make it or definitely shouldn't. At first blush, he had a good run from 82-86, but a lot of pitchers had really high WARs in the 1800s.

[BaseballMan]

I think the reason he had a lot of losses early on but also won a lot of games
was that the teams that lasted longer usually had the best players.
Might have been a different story if he had traded places with Al Spalding.
In my league Spalding on paper looks like the best pitcher ever.
Six Cy Young awards, highest winning pctg and is 5th in all time wins so far.
Oh did i mention he pitched for Boston and Chicago who won a combined 5 championships during his career for them.
Not sure if those loaded teams had anything to do with his win total.
Some time i might switch Mathews and Spalding and just sim till Spalding retires and compare the totals with this sim.

[Woodman19]

he shouldnt be punished for a historically awful team around him.

[LansdowneSt]

He had (mostly) better stats irl and didn't make it. His in-game ERA+ has him less than league average. How's the career FIP-? History thinks less of the opponents he faced when he racked up the W's in Philly as he was in the American Assoc.

[Syd Thrift]

I personally like to ask the Ken Keltner questions to try and figure out HOF-ness moreso than counting stats. In this case, was this guy the best or 2nd best pitcher in the league for a reasonable period of time (i.e. not just a year but maybe several, all looked at a bunch)? I usually look a little further down than, like, 1 or 2 for pitchers but not so much in the 19th century when a lot of teams ran 2 man "rotations". This guy could be a top pitcher in the 1880s and that would put him in my Hall but he might not be, it's hard to say just from his own stats to be honest.

[Matt Arnold]

To me looks like two halves of a player. Early on he was a decent innings-eater, but obviously on a terrible team. Then moved to Philly and had a great 3 year run in his early 30s. I would guess over that 3 year period he was one of if not the top pitcher in the game.

To me, that's probably just enough to get him in. Solid Peak run, plus enough depth of a career to round it out. Depending on your league, though, I wouldn't be opposed if he didn't make it, as his career ERA+ is below league average. Give him maybe 2 more seasons like those great ones he had at the end, and it would be a slam dunk, even as a .500 pitcher.

[jpeters1734]

Hard to say without seeing the players he's compared to. At a glance, the only comparison stat shown is ERA+ and that's very average, although that could be affected by terrible defense.

As far as the original question about the win-loss record, I would not consider it relevant. There are too many factors that affect wins that are outside of the pitcher's control for it to be of any use in judging individual performance.

I'd say that if you feel he's a HOFer without factoring his record, then add him.

[Pelican]

The short answer is no. Just as deGrom should not have won a Cy Young with a losing record. Yes, wins are a vastly-overrrated stat. But a pitcher’s job is to win games. If that means overcoming a leaky defense, and/or winning those 1-0 and 2-1 games, so be it. To some extent, you play the hand you’re dealt. Otherwise we would have to boot all those Yankee hurlers for great hitting teams from the HOF. I would say this. A losing record creates a strong presumption against HOF. I don’t think this guy, over his career, quite overcomes that presumption. Hey, I’m old school. The Hall should be special. As one of the OOTP quotes has it, the problem is not who didn’t get in (with the exception of Shoeless Joe and Pete Rose), but who did. You need to overcome the adversity of a bad team to make it. “Of course it’s hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it….”

[texasmame]

Originally Posted by kq76

I think it really depends on the rest of the league.

First glance, no way he makes it, at least not in my league.



However, is his career ERA outstanding for your league? How about his peripherals compared to league averages?


Impossible to answer without knowing these things.

[Syd Thrift]

Ooh, I didn't see ERA+. It looks like this guy was a top pitcher for 2 seasons. That's not enough in my book.

[MathBandit]

To me wins shouldn't even begin to enter the discussion. If this guy was 100-448 or 500-48, it wouldn't change my HOF vote on him at all.

[jpeters1734]

Originally Posted by Pelican

The short answer is no. Just as deGrom should not have won a Cy Young with a losing record. Yes, wins are a vastly-overrrated stat. But a pitcher’s job is to win games. If that means overcoming a leaky defense, and/or winning those 1-0 and 2-1 games, so be it. To some extent, you play the hand you’re dealt. Otherwise we would have to boot all those Yankee hurlers for great hitting teams from the HOF. I would say this. A losing record creates a strong presumption against HOF. I don’t think this guy, over his career, quite overcomes that presumption. Hey, I’m old school. The Hall should be special. As one of the OOTP quotes has it, the problem is not who didn’t get in (with the exception of Shoeless Joe and Pete Rose), but who did. You need to overcome the adversity of a bad team to make it. “Of course it’s hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it….”

"A pitcher's job is to win games", eh I don't really buy that. I think that's an antiquated view of a pitcher's job. Winning is no more on the pitcher's responsibilities than on the hitter's.

An interesting point to consider for the OP, are you judging this based on 2023 values or early 20th century values since that's where you are in your save

[BaseballMan]

I don't plan on starting my hall of fame till 1936 but i ran a test after 1888 and these are the players that were elected.
I set it for only 5 years of service to give Spalding a chance.
Here are the players elected to the hall.
Seems like the computer thinks Mathews was a hall of famer.
I don't know if he will get in when i start my hall.
I plan on starting it in 1936 with a vet vote added in 1937. Not sure if i will follow the real hall on veteran players
just add 1 or 2 a year. If i start the veteran vote in1937 then a player will have to have ended his career either in 1911.
Then in 1938 the cutoff date would be 1912. However i may use 1901 instead of 1911. I'm thinking if i start in 1911
the 19th century players will suffer due to early years of not as many scheduled games.

[BaseballMan]

the rest

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by jpeters1734

"A pitcher's job is to win games", eh I don't really buy that. I think that's an antiquated view of a pitcher's job. Winning is no more on the pitcher's responsibilities than on the hitter's.

An interesting point to consider for the OP, are you judging this based on 2023 values or early 20th century values since that's where you are in your save

OK but consider that in 19th century terms, wins were probably as good of an indicator of overall pitching talent as anything else. In that era there weren't very many strikeouts or HRs so mostly in OOTP terms (and I think in real life terms) it was about avoiding walks, getting your defense to get you through innings, and finishing games. Of course, wins are heavily, heavily based on how talented your team is overall but park factors have a heavy, heavy effect on ERA. I guess ideally maybe you'd look at FIP because that does "control" for sequencing inasmuch as it measures the components that add up to runs... but FIP's also going to put players into a fairly tight grouping since there's not really a lot to actually differentiate one pitcher from the next and IRL small differences might result in much bigger results - for instance a guy who gave up a ton of flyballs to a fast outfield is going to be a lot more effective in "real life" terms than what FIP might predict. Accepting that pitchers in general didn't have anywhere near the kind of impact on games compared to what they do now, wins circa 1890 are probably as good a single statistic as any in terms of measuring who was better than who.

Of course that's not longer the case for pitchers and I'd argue that wins stopped being a useful stat to look at in isolation by, jeez, the 1930s at the latest. And I'm certainly not arguing that pitchers have some special ability to just win, not in OOTP and certainly not IRL. But wins, especially in old timey baseball, were a measure of how confident a team was to play a particular pitcher matched up with how available they were (availability is an ability, especially given how many pitchers crapped out by the time they turned 25 IRL in that era), and to a great extent how well they pitched when they were out there.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

FIP because that does "control" for sequencing inasmuch as it measures the components that add up to runs...

It does? How so? By sequencing I'm presuming you mean like how a single then a home run and 3 outs is worse than a home run then a single and 3 outs.

Interesting points otherwise.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by kq76

It does? How so? By sequencing I'm presuming you mean like how a single then a home run and 3 outs is worse than a home run then a single and 3 outs.

Interesting points otherwise.

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly it. There's zero evidence that pitchers have any control over sequencing beyond the fact that guys who allow more hits will continue to allow more hits when runners are on base and so on. This isn't super important when you're talking about pitchers who threw like 400 or more innings in a season because that stuff all washes out in the end but for modern relievers it can be huge either way.

Going back to that, there were soooooo many errors in the 19th century that even ERA isn't a great gauge of talent. You could just plain have no ability to get batters to miss pitches and as a result your team commits a million errors and you lose 7-2 but only 2 of those runs are earned. In a sense, some percentage of all of those runs are "earned" in the sense that they wouldn't have happened if you had gotten 6 guys out with Ks per 9 instead of the league rate of 4.5, or if, like Pud Galvin, you had monster control even for the time and only allowed a few walks (Galvin led the league in BB rate 3 times) and thus when the inevitable miscues happened, they weren't multiplied by your own errors in missing the strike zone.

[BaseballMan]

If Mathews gets in by the computer or through my vet process then i think i will not overrule it.
I don't think i see a clear cut yes or no on his hof worthiness.
I kinda like that.
Players like Jeter are pretty much gonna get almost all the time.
I like those borderline type cases.
I will try and remember to come back and post the year he gets elected if he does.

[AESP_pres]

The game always put him in the HOF, but for me it's always a no, sure he have the wins needed but at the end of the day he lost more than he won (even if his time with New York didn't help) and his era isn't that impressive for a 19th century pitcher.