When Denny McLain won 31 games in 1968, he only needed help from his bullpen three times. That’s right, of McLain’s 31 wins, 28 were complete games. While he needed help from his hitters and his defense, calling him the winning pitcher was hardly out of line.
At the time he won 20 games, Snell had never thrown a complete game. Not once, in 72 career starts. It wasn’t his fault, and it doesn’t make him a lesser pitcher. He’s the product of his era, and that era (and his team) rarely allow a pitcher to go nine innings. The Rays had two complete games in the last four seasons combined.
In half of his first 20 wins of 2018, Snell didn’t throw a pitch after the sixth inning. The night he won his 20th, Rays manager Kevin Cash pulled him after just five innings, even though he’d allowed just one hit and no runs. Again, not his fault, except that he threw 92 pitches in those five innings, and in today’s world that can be a red flag even for a pitcher who is otherwise dominating.
We don’t have accurate pitch counts for 1968, but newspaper reports said McLain threw 229 pitches in one complete-game win in 1966. He walked nine and struck out 11, and decades before anyone talked about the “third time through the order,” he faced the best of the Baltimore Orioles hitters five times and allowed just three runs.
Can anyone really say McLain didn’t earn a “win” that day?
If you want to argue that wins are no longer predictive of future success, or even that they never were predictive, that’s fine. If you want to argue that Jacob deGrom pitched tons better than his 10–9 record in 2018 and that wins don’t do him justice, well, you’re right.
Wins don’t tell the whole story. They never did. They’re not the best stat to predict who will succeed in the future. They never were.
But they do help tell the story of what happened in a season, and just as no one wins a home run title by hitting only cheap home runs, no one puts together a 20-win season with only cheap wins. Snell needed help from his teammates, but he also had to be consistently good over six months. He needed them to make plays for him and score runs for him, but he had to pitch well enough to make those plays and those runs add up to wins.
He didn’t have 41 starts, as McLain did in 1968, because teams no longer use a four-man rotation. He had to rely on his bullpen, because teams no longer allow starters to routinely throw complete games no matter the pitch count. What Snell had to do was put himself in position where he could get credit for 20 wins, if the other factors went his way.
He put himself in position. Things went his way. In a game where there’s a winner and a loser, his team won a lot more often than it lost when he was pitching.
There’s nothing wrong with adding that up. There’s nothing wrong with adding up the number of home runs one player hits, the number of runs that score as a result of one players’ hits (a simple way to describe RBI).
Count them up and celebrate the big numbers. It’s part of what most of us grew to love about the game.
It’s equally true that in the modern game, we have other numbers that dive deeper to tell which player performed better. Many of those numbers are worth looking at, too. When I had a vote for MVP or Rookie of the Year, I wanted to see who was leading in WAR and wOBA and OPS+, which attempt to give more of an overall picture to a hitter’s season. I looked at WHIP for pitchers, and at walk rates and strikeout rates and the number of home runs allowed.
I didn’t have a Cy Young vote in 2018, but if I’d had that vote in the National League, deGrom would have been first on my ballot, despite his low win total. I would have voted for Snell first in the American League, not solely because of his wins but because his overall season made him the best choice.
Wins aren’t a “completely arbitrary number,” as one commenter on Twitter claimed when I joined Kepner in celebrating Snell’s 20-win accomplishment. You can believe they don’t have the significance they once did and still think they’re worth counting, noting, and even celebrating when one pitcher gets a whole bunch of them.
That goes for Snell and his 20 wins, and for Bartolo Colon and the 244 career wins he needed to pass Juan Marichal for the most ever by a pitcher born in the Dominican Republic. It goes for Justin Verlander, who got his 200th career win in 2018, leaving him right about where Nolan Ryan was after his age-35 season.
Could Verlander pitch until he’s 46, as Ryan did, and get to 300 wins, as Ryan did?
If he does, I’ll be watching. And if Brian Kenny doesn’t want to watch with me, he’s more than welcome to calculate instead what effect those extra years and games are having on Verlander’s career WAR.
55. When It Comes Down to It, It’s Still about Playing the Game Right
EARLY IN THE 2018 SEASON, VETERAN SECOND baseman Ian Kinsler was talking about how the game has changed.
“If anything, analytics is through the roof,” he said. “It’s kind of a joke, really.”
He’s not alone in thinking that and I understand what he means, even if I don’t agree at all that the numbers and numbers people are ruining the game. Shifts make sense. Bunting a lot less frequently makes sense. Using every bit of information available to try to win a game is exactly what managers and players did years ago, with the only difference being there’s plenty more information available and plenty of smart people willing to figure out how to best use it.
At the same time, the games are won by the best players most of the time.
“When it comes down to it, the game’s about execution,” Kinsler said. “You can have an opener, like Tampa did, because of some statistic, but if the hitters execute at the plate and the pitcher doesn’t, it’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter what the stats say. That’s why baseball is special, because there can be a stat that says this guy hasn’t hit a homer off this pitcher for 30 at-bats, and then he hits a homer.”
I know exactly what he means by that.
In May 1991, I was covering a game at Tiger Stadium between the Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox. Roger Clemens was on the mound for the Sox, at a time when he was without much argument the best pitcher in the game. He was in the middle of a stretch where he would finish in the top three in American League Cy Young voting five times in seven years. He won it three times, including that season.
He was tough for anyone to hit, but even the rudimentary numbers available back then told us he was near-impossible for Pete Incaviglia to hit. Incaviglia had been to the plate nine times against Clemens in his career. Each and every one of those nine times, Clemens struck him out.
A manager today would look at those numbers and decide a game against Clemens was a good time to give Incaviglia a night off.
Sparky Anderson made him the designated hitter.
It didn’t look good when Clemens struck out Incaviglia in his first two at-bats, running their personal head-to-head record to 0-for-11 with 11 Ks. But in the seventh inning of a game that was tied 2–2, Incaviglia ripped a double to left field to put the Tigers ahead.
They went on to win the game.
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” Sparky had said before the game, when we asked why Incaviglia was in the lineup against a guy the numbers said he couldn’t hit. “Every night is a different night. Those numbers, that’s the biggest and silliest thing. Guys use computers instead of keeping it up here in their head. You watch the game with your eyes.”
You watch the game with your eyes, and when you watch it today you’re seeing some of the best players who ever played.
“I think we’re in the golden era of baseball right now,” Kinsler said. “Absolutely. The things that are happening on the field every night [are] ridiculous. It’s harder to get a base hit, but there’s still guys that are hitting [.350]. Power numbers are as good as ever. Strikeout numbers. Athleticism is better. There’s more ground being covered. It’s a great game right now, and people lose sight of what’s actually happening on the field. They want to know
what the next great thing is. Well, there’s a great thing every night.”
At the time we spoke, Kinsler was playing for the Los Angeles Angels, where he was teammates with Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, the new pitching and hitting sensations. Later in the year, he was traded to the Boston Red Sox, where he was teammates with Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez and would win a World Series for the first time in his career.
“If your view of the game is that it’s boring, then you probably shouldn’t watch it,” he said. “I’m not going to watch something if I think it’s boring. I’ll flip the channel. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. There’s plenty of people watching it.”
And there are still plenty of players and teams who understand what it means to play the game right.
Acknowledgments
THE DAY AFTER I SENT IN THE MANUSCRIPT FOR this book, the Oakland A’s announced that reliever Liam Hendriks would start the American League Wild Card Game at Yankee Stadium. The next day, the Milwaukee Brewers announced they would use an opener in Game 1 of the National League Division Series against the Colorado Rockies.
“We’re trying to get away from what the words ‘starter’ and ‘reliever’ mean,” Counsell said.
A day after that, Justin Verlander took a no-hitter into the sixth inning and was out of the game one out later, before he’d even allowed a run.
“They’re going to get him?” Dennis Eckersley screamed into his TBS microphone.
Yes, the game is changing. In reality, it’s changing all the time. It always has.
The idea of this book was to figure out how those changes affect the unwritten rules. How is the game played today? What does it look like? What can you do that you may not have been able to do years ago? And what seems like it has changed but really hasn’t?
Thankfully, people around baseball love talking about all of that. For nearly two seasons, while working on this book, I got input from players, coaches, managers, executives, scouts, broadcasters, and even other writers. Some of them are quoted in these pages. Some just shared a few of their thoughts and observations.
Most of them added that they love the subject.
Arizona Diamondbacks coach Jerry Narron told me that he’d read how Frank Crosetti almost never shook a home run hitter’s hand when he coached third base for the New York Yankees for 37 years. I looked it up and he was right; according to the obituary Bill Madden wrote in 2002 in the New York Daily News:
“Crosetti was noted for never shaking hands with a player who had just hit a home run. Instead, he would merely pat him on the back. However, Crosetti made an exception to that rule when Mickey Mantle hit his mammoth home run off the Cardinals’ Barney Schultz in the 1964 World Series.”
That anecdote didn’t even make it into the book—until now.
There were so many others from so many people. There was so much I learned from Sparky Anderson in my early years covering the Detroit Tigers, and also plenty I learned from Jim Leyland in my final years on the Tigers beat.
Among current managers, Joe Maddon, Gabe Kapler, Clint Hurdle, Kevin Cash, Don Mattingly, Brian Snitker, Terry Francona, Dave Roberts, Torey Lovullo, Ron Gardenhire, Bud Black, and Bob Melvin all provided insight. So did current and former managers and coaches Juan Samuel, Mike Matheny, Doug Brocail, Phil Nevin, John Gibbons, Mike Scioscia, Perry Hill, Ron Washington, Lloyd McClendon, Chuck Hernandez, Walt Weiss, Kirk Gibson, and Brad Mills. Former players Gregg Olson, Alan Trammell, Jack Morris, David Cone, John Smoltz, Ray Fosse, Buck Martinez, Jim Price, David Wells, John McDonald, Steve Sparks, C.J. Nitkowski, Matt Keough, Rick Sutcliffe, and Ron Darling shared insights. So did current major leaguers, including Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, Ian Kinsler, Justin Upton, Martin Prado, Freddie Freeman, Kenley Jansen, Kenta Maeda, Yasiel Puig, Brad Ziegler, Peter Moylan, Archie Bradley, Jason Heyward, Kris Bryant, Max Scherzer, Gio Gonzalez, and Jose Bautista.
I talked unwritten rules with former big leaguer Gregg Zaun and while his words aren’t in this book, those conversations helped me figure out some of my own views.
Those views go back decades, to growing up in Los Angeles. Vin Scully won deserved plaudits for the way he called baseball games, but those of us who were raised with the Dodgers of the 1960s and ’70s remember how he also taught us the game. On those nights when we went to bed with a transistor radio under the pillow—yes, we really did. On those mornings we snuck radios into school to listen to the first spring games from Vero Beach (sorry, teachers, we did that, too).
I learned from Vin, and I learned from my father, who would take me to a few games a season at Dodger Stadium and explain what was going on down there on the field. I learned from Gary Adams and Glenn Mickens and others at UCLA, and from Vern Plagenhoef, who understood the game better than any writer I know and who I was fortunate enough to work with at Booth Newspapers.
Now, all these years later, my father and mother and my brother are the best editors I have. If you find any errors in here, those are all mine. So are the ones my family caught before they made it into print.
What they didn’t catch, Jesse Jordan did. I worked with Jesse and all the fine folks at Triumph Books on my first book, Numbers Don’t Lie. I was thrilled when they wanted to work with me again, and with how Jesse helped shape this book.
Thanks also go to Josh Williams, Noah Amstadter, and Tom Bast, and to everyone else that make Triumph such a pleasant company to work with.
I never forget how fortunate I’ve been to make a career out of writing about baseball, and for the last five seasons much of that writing has appeared at Bleacher Report. In a business that continues to get more difficult, people like Stephen Meyer, Jake Leonard, Bill Eichenberger, Paul Forrester, and Mark Smoyer make Bleacher Report an outlier for giving us the space, time, and leadership to seek out and pursue the interesting stories that make baseball the best game of all to write about.
And, of course, working for Bleacher Report has given me more chances to collaborate with Scott Miller. We’ve been friends for years and professional colleagues since Scott helped bring me to CBSSports.com in 2008, and I couldn’t have picked anyone better to work with.
I couldn’t have picked anyone better to share this last decade with than my wife, Lek. Just as I wrote in the acknowledgements for the first book, she was always patient every time I told her I needed to “tahm ngahn” on the book.
Sources
BASEBALL HAS CHANGED OVER THE YEARS, AND in the pages of this book I’ve explained how and why some of those changes have happened. Baseball writing has also changed, and some of those changes helped make this book possible.
Start with Baseball-Reference.com, the website Sean Forman debuted in April 2000, because nearly everything we do begins there. Whether it’s to simply look up a player’s career record or to do a detailed search through the wonderful Play Index, Sean’s site has become indispensable. Most of the stats listed in this book either come from Baseball Reference or were checked through Baseball Reference.
MLB.com’s Statcast is quickly becoming every bit as essential, especially with the work Daren Willman has done with his BaseballSavant.com website. Daren’s site was a great help in writing about shifts and pitch velocities, among other things, and he keeps adding more and more goodies.
Other statistics come from Fangraphs.com, BaseballProspectus .com, and BrooksBaseball.net.
Baseball history is about more than just numbers, and several other books and websites provided access to quotes and information that helped describe many of the unwritten rules of the game and how they’ve been applied. MLB.com provides a good record of recent events and even the ability to view entire games. The New York Times archive at Nytimes.com helped with many quotes from the pre-Internet age, as did the archives at the Newspapers.com site.
I also referenced these books in telling the story of baseball’s unwritten rules:
Cepeda, Orland
o, and Fagen, Herb. Baby Bull: From Hardball to Hard Time and Back. Taylor Trade Publishing. 1998.
Lolich, Mickey, with Tom Gage. Joy in Tigertown: A Determined Team, a Resilient City and our Magical Run to the 1968 World Series. Triumph Books. 2018.
Verducci, Tom. The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse. Crown Archetype. 2017.
Francona, Terry, and Shaughnessy, Dan. The Red Sox Years. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2013.
Ritter, Lawrence S. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. Harper Perennial. 1966.
Prager, Joshua. The Echoing Green. Pantheon. 2006.
Abbott, Jim and Brown, Tim. Imperfect: An Improbable Life. Ballantine Books. 2012.
Kenny, Brian. Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution. Simon & Schuster. 2016.
Weaver, Earl, with Terry Pluto. Weaver on Strategy: The Classic Work on the Art of Managing a Baseball Team. Simon & Schuster. 1984.
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Danny Knobler
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Triumph Books LLC, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data available upon request.
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