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Tuesday, August 1
Now that's a bad season
Special to ESPN.com
Editor's note: The team of writers from the Baseball Prospectus (tm) will be writing twice a week for ESPN.com. You can check out more of their work at their website at baseballprospectus.com.
Nothing can throw a team into chaos like the unanticipated collapse of a quality starting pitcher. When it happens to someone playing a key role on a good team, it can turn a division favorite into a team scrambling to stay in the playoff race.
Fans of an American League contender had been subjected to such a scenario, watching one of the best pitchers of the 1990s fall apart with no real warning, turning a set rotation into a jumbled mess. Here's a look at just how steep the collapse was:
W L ERA IP H/9 BB/9 K/9
Pre-collapse career: 87 69 3.40 1309 8.5 2.9 7.7
Pre-collapse season: 13 12 3.97 224.2 8.9 2.6 7.1
Collapse: 5 14 7.20 156.1 12.0 4.8 6.6
That's Jeff Fassero, who in 1999 went from one of the top left-handed starters in the game to a really good argument for wearing helmets in the bleachers. The Mariners, caught flat-footed, never got far from .500 and watched the Texas Rangers win the American League West.
Of course, Fassero isn't the pitcher on everyone's mind these days. No, 2000's most notorious good pitcher gone bad had an even more impressive resume coming into the season:
W L ERA IP H/9 BB/9 K/9
Pre-collapse career: 180 102 3.19 2590 7.5 3.4 8.4
Pre-collapse season: 12 9 3.44 193.2 7.6 4.1 8.2
Collapse: 1 10 6.88 106.0 11.0 4.4 6.5
The Yankees' David Cone came into the season looking to add to a resume that included a perfect game, a Cy Young Award, two strikeout titles, two 20-win seasons and four World Series rings. Instead, Cone, the Yankees and the usually calm and collected New York media are in a tizzy.
But as we see, Cone's fall isn't without precedent, even within the past few years. In fact, there's another pitcher in 2000 who is experiencing a season just as horrifying -- and just as damaging to his team's chances -- as Cone.
W L ERA IP H/9 BB/9 K/9
Pre-collapse career: 46 40 4.37 707.2 9.5 1.7 6.6
Pre-collapse season: 21 10 3.58 246.1 9.4 1.6 6.8
Collapse: 3 13 6.98 125.0 12.0 3.0 6.3
This isn't entirely fair, as the Astros' Jose Lima moved from the pitcher-friendly Astrodome to Enron Field, a much better hitters' park. Still, the park change doesn't account for all of the difference: the decline in Lima's performance has been much greater than the difference between the two parks.
What makes Lima's season surprising compared to those of Fassero or Cone is his relative youth. Those two pitchers were born within three days of each other in 1963, and were 36 and 37, respectively, when they fell off the cliff. Lima is just 27, and appeared to be coming into his prime as a pitcher, not ready to leave it.
Just for fun, Baseball Prospectus' Rany Jazayerli devised a tool called Modified ERA to measure the extent of a pitcher's collapse. It's simply (ERA + ((L-W)/10)) and by no means is a scientific tool. Here are the top 10 pitcher declines as measured by Modified ERA:
Pitcher Yr W L ERA mERA Yr W L ERA mERA Diff W. Spahn '63 23 7 2.60 1.00 '64 6 13 5.29 5.99 -4.99 B. Sherdel '28 21 10 2.86 1.76 '29 10 15 5.93 6.43 -4.67 L. Tiant '68 21 9 1.60 0.40 '69 9 20 3.71 4.81 -4.41 C. Bender '14 17 3 2.26 0.86 '15 4 16 3.99 5.19 -4.33 S. Carlton '72 27 10 1.97 0.27 '73 13 20 3.90 4.60 -4.33 J. Fassero '98 13 12 3.97 1.87 '99 5 14 7.20 8.10 -4.23 D. Kile '97 19 7 2.57 1.37 '98 13 17 5.20 5.60 -4.22 B. Newsom '40 21 5 2.83 1.23 '41 12 20 4.60 5.40 -4.17 J. Morris '92 21 6 4.04 2.54 '93 7 12 6.19 6.69 -4.15 B. Doak '21 15 6 2.59 1.69 '22 11 13 5.54 5.74 -4.05There are clear reasons for some of these "collapses." Warren Spahn was 43 in 1964. Luis Tiant's great 1968 was the pinnacle of the pitchers' era of the 1960s, and his 1969 numbers are as much a function of the strike zone redefinition as his performance. Chief Bender jumped from the best team in the American League to the worst one in the Federal League. Steve Carlton's 1972 is something of a freak of nature, as he won 27 games with a team that won just 59 and scored just 503 runs all season. Darryl Kile's apparent decline was real, but exacerbated by one of the really bad career decisions of the free-agent era: his signed with the Rockies. What can we glean from this information? Well, discarding Tiant, Bender and Kile leaves us seven pitchers. In the season following the collapse year, those seven pitchers averaged a 10-11 record and an ERA of 4.20. Of the 10, six would bounce back to be effective again (seven if you count Jeff Fassero's so-so 2000), although all were younger than Cone is this year. If you're curious, Cone's 2000 performance would place him third on this list, while Lima would be first. Of course, Lima falls into the same category as Tiant and Kile, pitchers whose context changed so much that it's hard to gauge the magnitude of their performance change. There is no question, though, that Cone's collapse is historically significant. While it may be too late for him to salvage a good 2000, there's evidence that he could bounce back and be effective for a few more years. Joe Sheehan is the managing editor of the Baseball Prospectus, the annual book by the same name, covering over 1500 players with in-depth statistical analysis and hard-hitting commentary. Joe may be reached at jsheehan@baseballprospectus.com.
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