Eighty-three days until pitchers and catchers report … and here’s your daily splash of joy. |
Why do you love baseball?
Brilliant Reader Allen: “The sun coming out, allowing you to play a Little League game when the weatherman had predicted 100% chance of rain.”
Brilliant Reader Joe: “Coaches dressing up in full uniform. Still cracks me up. Imagine NBA coaches in jerseys and shorts or NFL coaches in helmets and pads.”
Brilliant Reader Doug: “Ozzie Smith — and how he ruined my concept of what was a base hit off the bat on balls hit to the left or up the middle.”
If you would like to send in the reason why you love baseball, we’d love to hear it. Send it along to [email protected].
In 1973, Tom Seaver became the first pitcher to win the Cy Young without winning 20 games. Seaver won 19 games because the Mets couldn’t score any runs for him. Just three of many examples:
On April 17 against the Cubs, he pitched a one-run complete game but got outdueled by Fergie Jenkins.
On August 20 against the Reds, he gave up two early runs and then shut things down — he ended up pitching 12 gritty innings. The Reds won in the 16th.
On August 30 in St. Louis, he pitched 9 shutout innings, the Mets couldn’t score, and the Cardinals won in the 10th on a Lou Brock double and a José Cruz RBI single.
People were well aware of the erratic nature of the win in 1973, which is why Seaver did win the Cy Young even though there was a 20-game winner in the league — in fact, San Francisco’s Ron Bryant won 24 games.
We look back at it now — and it’s abundantly clear, by today’s measures, that Seaver was a much better pitcher than Bryant. Seaver’s bWAR was 10.6. Bryant’s was 3.5. Seaver’s ERA was 2.08 — to Bryant’s 3.53. Seaver’s FIP was 2.57. Bryant’s was 3.99.
But of these stats, only ERA existed in 1973.
And wins ruled the day.
And Seaver’s Cy Young choice was both close (he nudged Dodgers super-reliever Mike Marshall) and controversial. Unsurprisingly, the choice was most controversial in San Francisco, where Giants fans couldn’t understand how a 19-game winner could beat out a 24-game winner, ERA be damned.
“I have felt, and said so in print, that Seaver is the best pitcher in baseball,” Glenn Dickey wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “But he didn’t prove it this year, despite his many strikeouts and flossy earned run average … ERA is one of those figures that should be considered only when winning totals are relatively equal. They were not this time.”
“Winning is no longer everything in baseball. In fact, it doesn’t seem to count at all.”
I love this little story because it reminds us: People were JUST AS SURE in 1973 that they understood baseball as we are now. In 50 years, they just might look back at our reliance on WAR and FIP and various other advanced stats and laugh hysterically at how little we really knew.
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