pick the better career

ERA ERA+ FIP WHIP BB/9 K/9 H/9 HR/9
4.36 97 4.45 1.396 4.1 7.7 8.5 1.0
3.55 112 3.82 1.198 3.0 7.4 7.8 0.9

I'm sure you know the answer already, but those are two guys who at the very least similar pitchers.

ERA relative to the aggregate ERA of the pitchers he faced in the games in which he faced them.
W/L percentage relative to that of his teams.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Where are the innings pitched?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

We are trying to isolate for W/L percentage, so you can't use that as a stat.

Feel free to pull the other stat for both Park and Cain in any seasons that you want. The ERA stat. Just post it when you have the data.

Top player pitched 1993.0 Innings
Bottom player pitched 1931.2 Innings.

I am not making this up.

Well, I know the bottom guy is Cain. I've looked at him more than once today. And we both know that Cain has the edge in everything but his percentage. I assume the top guy is Park. But most games come down to a few situations and some guys make pitches better in those situations than others. That isn't illustrated in those statistics, but it will show up in the guy's record.


Sure, there are some guys that got cheated a bit on their records and others that have had theirs boosted. Aaron Sele is a guy who received an inordinate amount of "run support". But he did it for a long time. If a guy is that lucky, maybe it isn't really luck. I'm not saying that it all smooths out perfectly, but none of the other stats do either. I still believe Park had a better career as it stands today. The way Cain is pitching his averages are likely to decline if he doesn't end up out of baseball first.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I'll give you this much, you're selling me on Cain's career being better than I had heretofore considered it. I'm still going to say Horlen is the best starter with a losing record, but Cain is in the conversation.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

First you post positive things about the Cubs and now you change your opinion on Cain.

Look at JORR evolving as we speak.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

And actually, the r for that top chart is 0.36, indicating a medium level of correlation, bordering on a stronger level of correlation.

If we express "run support" as "runs scored per start" (or simply, RS/GS), we get a better correlation coefficient at .401:



Interestingly, a polynomial line of best fit increases r-squared to above 2, though I'm not sure if that is indicative of anything, because a polynomial relationship between runs scored per start and winning percentage is nonsensical to me.

The thing is, I tend to look at players in terms of their careers. I know that isn't really popular in our "what have you done for me lately" world where every guy is either a stud or a dog. You've seen yourself Cubs fans on this board go from thinking Arrieta was an unbeatable machine to saying he's finished. Both things are laughable. Most guys have periods where they're very good. In a lot of cases these pitchers get hurt or they lose their fastball and they're still good enough for someone to give them a job, but not good enough to really be good pitchers anymore. And if you stay around long enough like that, you're career is going to look worse. In any case, I'm fine with saying there are precious few guys you would call good starting pitchers with losing career records.

For the record, I know you laughed in the playoffs last season when i said I was a Mets fan as a kid. But it's true and I loved Jon Matlack. I actually thought they could beat the A's. Hell maybe they would have if Matlack hadn't gone 1-2.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

The last few days have clearly shown why you are the best baseball poster on this site. Your knowledge of the game and the history of the game is second to none around here. I don't always agree with you, but I always respect where you are coming from. And that is exactly why I get so frustrated with you when you go through your periods of just living in the Cubs/Sox meatballery that goes on around here so often. May your next flight be full of sportcoats.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Dude, you're grasping. As it stands today Cain is better than Park. I think you know this whether you want to type that into a post and submit is your choice, but you've said he's more dominant, you said all of his numbers are better except W/L. That's just overwhelming evidence that Cain was better.

Can can't pitch crappy enough over the next 2 seasons or however long a team pays him to suck to drag his averages near Park. He's just got too big a lead in every one of those categories except HR/9 and K/9.

Let me help you, there is no shame in admitting there are outliers to a huge sample size. It happens. It happened with Cain it happened with Matlack, it happened with Gubicza. It happens.

I said it happened much less than I thought. That's being honest with the data.

Again, you picked the parameters and I analyzed the data points.

You said Park is a good pitcher, I completely agree with you on that. He had a "good" career.

Cain is better by every measure except one, the one we are isolating for. And if Cain is better or at the very least equal to Park, then Cain is a good pitcher and he's a good pitcher with a losing record and more than 200 starts.

You'll feel more free when you admit it. It will be cathartic. Then you'll be able to give love to Matlack because he was better than both Cain and Park. Likely same with Gubicza.

I'm not grasping at anything. I've granted that Cain may be somewhat better than I was giving him credit for being, but that's no reflection on Park. And Cain's strikeouts just aren't as valuable as Park's. Cain is pitching in a time where every team has guys that strike out over 150 times. That wasn't the Case during Park's career. And Gubicza has a worse winning percentage than the teams he was on. I don't know how you can say that's good. By the way, I never said any of these guys in question were absolute horseshit or anything like that. Just that they're not really memorable guys. The thing most people remember about Park is that he gave up two grand slams in one inning.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Thank you, RFDC.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Made the last post before I saw this.

I mean, yeah, this is all I've been saying. When I threw Cain out there a day or two ago, I actually expected you to say something like "Wow, I never thought of him, did you find any others."

Like I said a bunch of times, I wasn't trying to pick a fight about Cain being good or not, I think that it pretty self evident. To me it was a curious question and fun to look into. I mean there were other candidates, some I mentioned but I picked Cain because he's had a good career and a recent career, figured there would be an easy consensus on him.

I'm sure if you change the parameters to 300 starts or something you'll have no candidates, but I didn't look at that. Change the parameters if you want, but under the parameters you presented, there are a dozen or so guys that probably break the mold.

Outliers.

Yeah, and I am open to the idea that Quintana maybe is one. I know I said that in this or one of the many other threads on W/L records. But in his case, I've actually seen him pitch in probably 100 of his career starts and the way he works is very familiar. I also admit that if I had been around in 1929 I would have been arguing here that Red Ruffing was an absolute turd.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Park's best K seasons:

2001 - NL K% = 18%
2000 - NL K% = 17.1%
1998 - NL K% = 17.4%
1999 - NL K% = 16.9%

Cain's best K seasons:

2012 - NL K% = 20.2%
2008 - NL K% = 18%
2006 - NL K% = 17.4%
2011 - NL K% = 19.1%

Untill 2011 the NL K rate was between 17-19%, it didn't spike until 2011. So I'll tell you what, I'll give you a 5% haircut on Cain's K rate. That's more than generous given the numbers. So that takes his K/9 from 7.4 to 7.0. All other numbers are the same.

Dude, it's time to give up.

How is that different from what you do?

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Never once said "Let's pack up the car Chan Ho Park is taking the bump tonight!"

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I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

Is Quintana appointment baseball for you?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Dude, I've allowed that Cain is one of the better pitchers with a losing record. What more do you want?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

He wants dinner, a movie, and for you to admit that there is no more than 249 pitchers in MLB history that were better than Matt Cain.

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No

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I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

Cool, so we are in agreement that there are a handful of "good" starters with 200+ career starts and a losing record.

Fuck, I feel like Michael Scott in the Office after the Murder in Savannah episode.

Not for nothing, but if Matlack doesn't throw a COMPLETE GAME TWO HITTER against the Big Red Machine in the NLCS with the Mets down 1 game to 0 in the best of 5, he doesn't have the chance to go 1-2 vs the A;s.

Sure, and I know I said there are no good ones, but that was a hyperbolic statement to make my point. And as we talked about, there is ambiguity in terms like "good" and "bad". As I was discussing with leash last night, I often type in this board the way I would talk. It's not like writing a white paper. I really just meant, none of these types of guys are really memorable pitchers in baseball history. Sure, you and I might like Matlack. I like Joel Horlen and I would never say he's a bad pitcher. It's just that his record says more about him than the other stellar numbers he posted during his career. I could post Horlen's numbers alongside Catfish Hunter's like you did with Cain/Park above and it would be tough to argue Hunter was better, but of course, he was.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Neither one could sniff Stan Bahnsens jock !

_________________
I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

I think Tanner and Sain fucked Bahnsen up by pitching him in the three man rotation in '73.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Once saw Stash throw a 12 hit complete game shoutout

_________________
I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

Right, and I guess that's my point. You put out the parameters and as I've said a bunch of times, I really was curious to see who was out there that might have the 200 starts, be a good starting pitcher, and have a losing record. I was actually curious.

You're a huge baseball fan. I thought you'd be curious too. I certainly didn't think I'd get into a two day pissing match over whether Matt Cain was a good pitcher because (1) he clearly was and (2) that is something nobody wants to do.

Honestly JORR I really expected you to say, something like "Good catch on Cain, did you find any others?" Then Matlack, and Gubicza (one nice thing about this exchange is I'll never have to look up how to spell Gubicza again) who I think we both agree are good pitchers. I mean there are other candidates that we could logically discuss.

Mike Moore, 161-176 career record, 1600+ K's, one Cy Young top 3 finish, key contributor to that Oakland team in the late 1980s early 1990s, 28 career WAR for those who want that, 95 ERA+ over a long career, 4.39 actual ERA. Telling stat though, when he played on the Mariners, some of those teams just pure garbage his record was 66-96, once he got to Oakland 66-46. Christ, same number of wins, and FIFTY fewer losses.

Interesting case if he's "good" or not.