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Yankees vs. A's |
Mariners vs. White Sox |
Braves vs. Cardinals |
Mets vs. Giants
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Monday, October 9
How do first-timers do in postseason?
By Chris Kahrl
Special to ESPN.com
Editor's note: The team of writers from the Baseball Prospectus (tm) writes for ESPN.com Insider. You can check out more of their work at their web site at baseballprospectus.com.
To borrow the phrase from Civil War history that was used to describe the experience of seeing action for the first time, what happens to a starting pitcher who appears in his first postseason series? A couple of months ago, I touched on the postseason records of rookie pitchers since the late '70s. By focusing just on rookies in the postseason, I was glibly making light of the issue of whether or not the Athletics or Cardinals really needed to be overly concerned about youngsters like Mark Mulder, Barry Zito or Rick Ankiel.
As several readers were sensible enough to point out, the study did not address questions of age and postseason performance, or the amount of professional experience a pitcher has going into the playoffs for the first time. After all, by focusing on rookies, the study was making an arbitrary and potentially worthless distinction between a 21-year-old Doc Gooden making his first postseason start in 1986 (in his third major-league season) and a 26-year-old Mike Boddicker making a postseason start in his rookie year of 1983.
So, readers asked a bunch of reasonable questions, and I'd like to try to answer them. I decided to look at all postseason starts from 1980 through 1999, determine which starting pitchers were pitching in their first postseason series, and see how the men "seeing the elephant" did.
The answers should be all the more interesting when you consider that both the Athletics and the White Sox will go into the postseason with four starters apiece without postseason experience, the Mariners will go in with three, and the Mets, Cardinals and Giants will go in with two apiece. Focusing on rookies sort of misses the point, because from the possible playoff starters who have no previous playoff experience, only Zito and Ankiel are rookies. Worrying about rookie performance is obviously a smaller point than the larger issue of how starting pitchers do in their first postseason series.
First, let's look at the big picture. From 1980 through 1999, 151 first-time playoff starters made 194 starts in their first playoff series. They posted a 3.84 ERA, along with a record of 66-70. In their first playoff series, the guys who "saw the elephant" logged 95 quality starts, using a slightly tougher definition of three or fewer runs (not earned runs) allowed in six or more innings pitched. If you're the kind of nitpicker I can be at times, I've got first-time playoff starters down for seven blown quality starts, which are games where the starter posted a quality start through six or more innings, and lost it by allowing a fourth run later than the sixth inning. That adds up to 102 quality starts in 194 games, which means that the new guys had pretty good starts a little more than 50 percent of the time.
|  | | Rookie Barry Zito is slated to pitch Game 4 of the ALDS for the Athletics. |
Overall, that doesn't sound too bad. By ERA, record, and by the odds of getting a quality start from pitchers starting in their first postseason series, it looks like a team has a reasonable chance at winning a game. Even though the overall record is just below .500, if pitchers starting their first postseason game were consistently supposed to get the heebie-jeebies, the overall numbers don't seem to support the idea that previous postseason experience is an automatic requirement for postseason success.
You always run the risk of missing the trees for the forest when you take a big overview, so I decided to break down the data to see if it could tell us some more interesting stories. First, I looked at breakdowns by age. Using October 1 as the point for determining a pitcher's postseason age, I sorted starters by age (the number of pitchers in the group who are rookies are noted in brackets):
20: 2 (2); 21: 4 (1); 22: 11 (10); 23: 13 (4); 24: 14 (3);
25: 13 (2); 26: 16 (2); 27: 18 (2); 28: 14; 29: 15;
30: 7 31: 8; 32: 5 (1); 33: 1; 34: 6 (1);
35: 3; 36: 1
As groups, how did the pitchers perform? I arbitrarily broke them into what I'd call the very young (20-23), the young (24-27), the veterans (28-31), and the old (32-36). The categories were entirely subjective, so your mileage may vary as far as how seriously you want to take this. Anyways, as groups, the performances were a little interesting.
20-23: 36 starts, 19 quality starts, 15 wins, 8 losses, 3.04 ERA
24-27: 83 starts, 37 quality starts, 25 wins, 34 losses, 4.57 ERA
28-31: 57 starts, 28 quality starts, 19 wins, 23 losses, 3.46 ERA
32-36: 18 starts, 10 quality starts, 7 wins, 5 losses, 3.59 ERA
For those of us wiseacres out there, for the purposes of this study I considered El Duque and Ramon Martinez to be as old as they claim to be in team media guides.
There should be little surprise that the 24-27 group was the largest in terms of number of pitchers, starts, innings pitched. As a group, they also ended up on the hook for five of the seven blown postseason quality starts over the last 20 years. For what it's worth, the unlucky five were Orel Hershiser on the 1985 Dodgers, Oil Can Boyd on the 1986 Red Sox, Frank Viola of the 1987 Twins, Tim Belcher of the 1988 Dodgers, and Kevin Tapani of the 1991 Twins. I don't think it's a coincidence that two of the pitchers were managed by Tommy Lasorda, and two by Tom Kelly.
While we can probably agree that all four teams in question didn't have the best bullpens of their day (we all remember the highs and lows of Jeff Reardon, but how many of us would rather forget Tom Niedenfuer or Calvin Schiraldi?), I found it a little interesting.
Another interesting note about managers and how they handled their postseason starters in their first action was Dick Howser in 1985. He was the only manager who took advantage of a losing blowout in Game 1 of the ALCS to let a pair of postseason rookie starters (Danny Jackson and Mark Gubicza) pitch in relief before their starts. Both won their starts, but it could have been a coincidence as much as a great idea. Bill James has already immortalized Howser's genius in that postseason, and I'm obviously simplifying things, but this was a great example of a manager being smart enough to let new guys get their first postseason experience before they'd have to have their first important assignment.
Looking at the results, I'll hazard a not-so-wild guess about why the best performances are on the fringes, among the very young and the very old. First, you've got the happy accident (for most careers) of pitching in the postseason as a very young or very old starter. As a pair of groups, even among the subsets of people talented enough to pitch in the majors, guys good enough to pitch well in the major leagues at a very young or very old age are usually more talented than your average bear.
That talent might be knowing your craft or it might be sheer talent, and maybe it's both. If you take out the very young and old groups, the overall numbers don't look as good for the new guys, as their record drops to 44-57, with a 4.10 ERA and 65 quality starts in 140 starts. Those numbers get even worse if you delete the rookie pitchers from the 24-27 crowd, because they put up a 3.64 ERA while going 7-2, so if you're looking at guys with more than one season of major-league experience between the ages of 24 and 31, you don't have a good overall record (37-55, 4.14 ERA).
So there might be a reason or two to be afraid of your standard experienced major-league starter making his first postseason appearance. Even if they didn't have health problems, maybe the White Sox should be worried about going into the postseason with James Baldwin and Mike Sirotka (both 29), Jim Parque (24) and Cal Eldred (32). The Athletics might take some satisfaction in the numeric coincidence that they've got two guys who would fall in the old category (Gil Heredia and Kevin Appier) and one in the very young (Barry Zito).
The record for teams to win it all with four postseason pitchers "seeing the elephant" is pretty grim. While the 1986 Mets went all the way with Doc Gooden, Bobby Ojeda, Sid Fernandez and Ron Darling, the '83 and '93 White Sox, the '84 Padres, the '95 Mariners and the '81 Expos all fell short. We'll never know what would have happened with the '94 Expos, who featured Pedro Martinez, Ken Hill, Jeff Fassero and Kirk Rueter, all of whom got their first postseason starts in other uniforms in seasons to come. Teams relying on three postseason rookies didn't do much better, at least in terms of winning the World Series: the '80 and '97 Astros, '81 A's and Brewers, '84 Cubs, '86 Red Sox, '90 Pirates, '91 Braves, '93 Phillies, '95 Rockies and Dodgers, and '96 Padres and Rangers all lost, while only the '82 Cardinals and '97 Marlins won.
General trivia: Teams that used a pitcher "seeing the elephant" to open the series won 19 times and lost 18, while eight teams using a man who had never pitched in the postseason before to open a postseason series ended up winning the World Series in the last 20 years.
For the curious, Rudy May was the oldest starting pitcher to make his postseason debut, starting at age 36 for the Yankees back in 1980 in the ALCS. Other names in the old category: Joe Niekro (1980 Astros), both Ken Forsch (1980 Astros) and Bob Forsch (1982 Cardinals), Mike Caldwell (1981 Brewers), Mike Krukow (1987 Giants), Ted Power (1990 Pirates), Tom Candiotti (1991 Blue Jays), Chris Bosio and Randy Johnson (1995 Mariners), Billy Swift (1995 Rockies), Jeff Fassero and Jamie Moyer (1997 Mariners), rookie Orlando Hernandez (1998 Yankees), and Rick Reed and rookie Masato Yoshii (1999 Mets). Other than Jim Leyland's dubious choice of having reliever Ted Power start Game 6 of the NLCS in 1990, there isn't a bad pitcher on the list.
While I don't think the Giants will give him the opportunity, if Dusty Baker let him, 38-year-old Mark Gardner would be even older than May. Chuck Finley would have been a lock as a 37-year-old, but the Tribe fell short of making the postseason.
Similarly, the youngest guys were people we know pretty well: the youngest were the Dodgers' Fernando Valenzuela in 1981 and the Royals' Bret Saberhagen in 1984, but other guys in the young group were Storm Davis, Bob Walk, Bill Gullickson, Dave Righetti, Pascual Perez, Eric Show, Danny Jackson, Doc Gooden, Sid Fernandez, Greg Maddux, Steve Avery, Scott Erickson, Wilson Alvarez, Jason Bere, Andy Pettitte, Ismael Valdes, Jaret Wright, Livan Hernandez, and Kerry Wood. We can look forward to adding Barry Zito, Freddy Garcia, and Rick Ankiel (if Tony La Russa knows what's good for him) to the list, and possibly Jon Garland if Cal Eldred's incredible elbow isn't ready to go.
Chris Kahrl may be reached at ckahrl@baseballprospectus.com.
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