Bert Blyleven
Posted by Andy on August 11, 2007
Bert Blyleven finished his career with 287 wins (26th) all-time and has never received significant support for the Hall of Fame, at least from the voters. It turns out that he was a remarkably unlucky pitcher, not only because he played for a lot of below-average teams, but also because he got losses or no-decisions in a lot of very close games.
For example:
10 times he pitched at least 5 innings allowing 0 ER but got a no-decision
20 times he pitched at least 5 innings allowing 1 ER but got a no-decision
35 times he pitched at least 5 innings allowing 2 ER but got a no-decision
2 times he pitched at least 5 innings allowing 0 ER but got the loss (due to unearned runs)
14 times he pitched at least 5 innings allowing 1 ER but got the loss
31 times he pitched at least 5 innings allowing 2 ER but got the loss
So that's a total of 65 games he did 5+IP / 2 or fewer ER and got a ND, and a total of 47 games he did 5+IP / 2 or fewer ER and got the loss. Let's compare this to some pitchers with similar win totals. Picking out pitchers who pitched 1957 or later, we see these guys with very similar win totals: Tommy John (288), Fergie Jenkins (284), Randy Johnson (284), and Kitty Kaat (283.)
We can't look just at losses an no-decisions because these guys all pitched different numbers of games. To get started, let's tabulate wins, losses, and no-decisions in starts where they pitched at least 5 innings and allowed 2 or fewer earned runs:
Player Wins Losses No-Decisions --------------------------------------------------- Blyleven 224 47 65 John 227 58 74 Jenkins 201 57 37 Johnson 219 37 59 Kaat 199 58 39
Now let's express those totals as percentages. I'll break it out as percentage won, and percentage either lost or no-decision.
Player % Wins % Losses or No-Decisions --------------------------------------------------- Blyleven 66.6% 33.3% John 63.2% 36.8% Jenkins 68.1% 31.9% Johnson 69.5% 30.5% Kaat 67.2% 32.8%
It's not as stilted as I expected, and you can see that by this particular measure, Tommy John pitched in even worse luck than Blyleven. Still, if you take the average W% for the three other guys (68.3%) and apply that to Blyleven's total number of such games, he would have won 229 instead of 224, giving him 292 wins in his career instead of 287. By the same measure, Tommy John would have won a whopping 18 games more, giving him 306 career victories instead of 288.
But getting back on point that Blyleven has had some bad luck, here's one more stat for you. Since 1957, most complete game losses:
Games Link to Individual Games +-----------------+-----+-------------------------+ Gaylord Perry 76 Ind. Games Bert Blyleven 75 Ind. Games Jack Morris 64 Ind. Games Phil Niekro 63 Ind. Games Nolan Ryan 59 Ind. Games Fergie Jenkins 59 Ind. Games Bob Gibson 55 Ind. Games Tom Seaver 45 Ind. Games Jim Palmer 45 Ind. Games Mickey Lolich 45 Ind. Games Frank Tanana 44 Ind. Games Luis Tiant 40 Ind. Games Catfish Hunter 39 Ind. Games Juan Marichal 38 Ind. Games Steve Carlton 38 Ind. Games Wilbur Wood 37 Ind. Games Rick Langford 37 Ind. Games Charlie Hough 35 Ind. Games Jim Kaat 33 Ind. Games Tommy John 33 Ind. Games Ken Holtzman 32 Ind. Games Jim Slaton 31 Ind. Games
Blyleven is second at 75, with he and Perry way ahead of the pack. Of the 5 guys we considered above, Jenkins is next with 59, Kaat is down at 33, and John at 32. Randy Johnson has 24 such games, a pretty impressive number given that he's pitched in the age of The Closer.
I wonder how much psychology is involved here. I've heard of some former ballplayers (certainly not all) who believe that a team's offense tends to "play to the level"of their own starting pitcher. For example, when a team has its own ace pitching, once it scores a couple of runs, it tends to relax, figuring that the pitcher will handle the rest. Obviously, this hurts the ace pitcher, who isn't going to pitch a shutout every time. Blyleven was already playing for below-average teams most of the time. Perhaps his offense routinely shut down on him. Or perhaps the psychology theory is bunk. I am not sure.
August 11th, 2007 at 6:50 am
In his Complete Sabermetric Encyclopedia (a nice supplement to the Play Index, BTW, for those in the market), Lee Sinins includes something called Neutral Wins, which he descries as the projection of the Wins number a pitcher would have reached given average run support applied to the number of decisions he actually had. Blyleven gets 313 Neutral Wins (16th all-time), Fergie Jenkins 291, Tommy John 284, Jim Kaat 282 and Randy Johnson around 277 (I only have the Encyclopedia updated through the end of 2006, at which point the Unit had 272).
August 11th, 2007 at 7:09 am
I have to believe that Blyleven's Neutral Wins are so much higher than his actual total because he was on a number of poor teams. While it's true he was a member of the Pirates' 1979 championship, as well as the Twins' 1987 championship, he also played for the Twins and Rangers in the 1970s (when they were at best average teams), and the Indians in the early 1980s (anybody seen the movie Major League?)
August 11th, 2007 at 8:03 am
How did you do the most CG losses one?
August 11th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Chris:
PI Pitching Game Finder
Role: Starter, CG
On the left, Team: L
Sorted by: players with games in career
That's it...actually a pretty simple search once you figure it out.
August 13th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Bert Blyleven has 339 Bill James win shares. The following pitchers already in the Hall of Fame have fewer: Nolan Ryan, 334; Ferguson Jenkins, 323; Red Ruffing, 322; Don Sutton, 319; Bob Gibson, 317; Eppa Rixey, 315; Ted Lyons and Jim Palmer, 312; Early Wynn, 308; Carl Hubbell, 306, Dennis Eckersley, 301. And that doesn't include the 25 HofF pitchers whose totals are less than 300! Blyleven outranks 36 pitchers who are in the Hall of Fame, and no other pitcher not in the Hall does that (except Clemens and Maddux). D'uh!
August 19th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
[...] How about my man Bert Blyleven! [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 7:34 am
[...] of pitchers already in the HOF, and there are many sites out there with more info on it (including my previous post on this blog about him.) We’re not talking about someone like Jim Rice or Tony Perez here, whose numbers [...]
March 30th, 2008 at 10:19 am
[...] written tons about Blyleven over at the Stat of the Day blog. Check it out here, here, here, here, and [...]