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Player Value Posts
To avoid spamming the general blog page with the Player Value posts for each season/team, this blog page will serve as a separate listing of all of the Player Value posts for each season/team. These posts will be less detailed, mainly just listing out the top players each season and including the necessary files.
Well, by "all-time", I really mean from 1912-2021, as that is currently the span of years that I have the data for. As the headline suggests, these rankings are according to my Player Value metric as of the date listed above. You can read my initial Player Value post here and its addendum here. Since then I have used Retrosheet play by play data to better fine tune the run value weights of the various events, but haven't been able to write up a post detailing them yet. Rather than listing them out again in this post, you can view them towards the top of my latest Hall of Fame post here. When we're discussing positional rankings, there's a couple of ways we can decide what a player's primary position was. For pitchers, this is fortunately less complicated than it was for position players. One approach is to do it based on games started: pitchers that started at least 50% of the games they pitched in are considered to be starters, while the rest are considered to be relievers. And that is how the starter/reliever split is determined for each season. The other approach is using the position that a player accumulated the most Player Value at. So if your starter seasons were more valuable than your reliever seasons, you'd be considered a starter, even if your career games started proportion leans toward you being a reliever. An example of this is Firpo Marberry, who started just about 34% of his games, but provided more value as a starter than a reliever. There's also the matter of if we should take a player's total Player Value for their career and then just group them by their main position, or should we only use the Player Value that a player accumulated at this specific position. This choice is a little trickier, so I've gone ahead and listed out the top rankings for each option. For the various defensive positions, I did top 25 lists. For the designated hitters I did top 10 lists due to their smaller quantity. There were only about 150 DHs, and about 1000 players at each defensive position. But we have over 2000 starting pitchers here, so I'm expanding it to a top 50 list. So, without further adieu: Top 50 Starting Pitchers From 1912-2021, Based On Total Player Value At All Positions
Whew?! That was a lot of players. Now to discuss some things before anyone freaks out and trashes the list.
Top 50 Starting Pitchers From 1912-2021, Based On Total Player Value As A SP
Pedro gets passed by Ryan as he was actually mainly a reliever in his rookie season of 1993, though a good one at that; he put 9.4 Player Value and finished 9th in Rookie of the Year voting. Smoltz drops due to his switch to the closer role from 2001-2004, famously leading the league in saves, wining the Rolaids Relief Man Award, and finishing 3rd in Cy Young voting in 2002. Like Pedro, Orel Hersisher also started his career as a Dodger reliever and finished 3rd in Rookie of the Year voting in 1984. Other players that we see drop somewhat due to time as relievers include Carl Mays, Bob Lemon, Bret Saberhagen, Chris Sale, and Derek Lowe. Top 50 Starting Pitchers From 1912-2021, Based On Pitching Value At All Positions
Some of you probably like this ranking better, and that's fine. The main duty of pitchers is pitching, after all (especially with the universal DH now in effect). And I think Pitching Value works pretty well, as does Batting Value. I think pitchers that were better hitters should be justifiably rewarded for that added value. The same should be true for pitchers that were better fielders, though I'm less confident with Fielding Value's current accuracy. I don't think it's blatantly wrong; hell, Maddux has 18 Gold Gloves and rank first. But I wouldn't say it is as reliable as the batting and pitching components currently are. Top 50 Starting Pitchers From 1912-2021, Based On Fielding Value At All Positions
Top 10 Starting Pitchers From 1912-2021, Based On Baserunning Value At All Positions
Burleigh Grimes wasn't much of a pitcher, but he sure could hit, field, and run well for one! Greinke, however, is an all-around ballplayer. He's in the top lists for pitching, fielding, batting, and baserunning. From the span of 1912-2021, I have 2,234 players that contributed most of their value as starting pitchers. If you go based off of games played, however, there are 2,296 starting pitchers in this span. There are a total of 8,394 pitchers in this span. Recall that we had 8,646 total position players in this span. Combining this, we have a total of about 17,040 players from 1912-2021. Baseball Reference says there have been 22,860 players in history, so the remaining guys must have been Negro Leagues players or played before 1912. So to be in the top 1%, a pitcher would have to be among the top 22-23 starters during this span. To be in the top 1.18% (the general Hall of Fame mark), a player would have to be among the top 27-28 starters during this span. There are currently 67 starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame. This includes 15 pre-1912 pitchers and 6 Negro League pitchers, all of whom I listed out earlier. Note that this initial 67 does not include Jim Kaat, Jim Bunning, Chief Bender, Rube Marquard, Waite Hoyt, or Jesse Haines, all of whom we consider as primarily relievers based on value. Tommy Lasorda was primarily a starter during his playing career, but was inducted as a manager. Candy Cummings and Al Spalding were also mainly starters, but were inducted as a pioneer/executive. So after accounting for the Negro League and pre-1912 pitchers, we have 46 Hall of Fame starters to work with. If we look at the top 46 starting pitchers according to Player Value, 26 of them are in Cooperstown. Therefore, we have 20 exceptions of Hall of Famers that aren't in the top 46. However, 8 of the top 46 pitchers are still active or retired and have yet to appear on a ballot (Kershaw, Greinke, Verlander, Wainwright, Herndandez, deGrom, Sale, and Scherzer). So if we want to exclude those players and instead expand our border to the next 8 starters (i.e. the top 54), 3 more Hall of Famers make the cut in Jenkins (48), Ford (49), and Feller (54). Additionally, there are at least 2 starters in the top 54 that are known to have used PEDs in Roger Clemens and Kevin Brown, so we could exclude them and expand to the top 56. That results in Hall of Famer Koufax (55) also making the cut. I will note that Feller and Koufax easily qualify on the basis of Pitching Value alone; Feller has a Ted Williams like case in that he would have been able to provide much more value had he not lost 3 seasons in his prime due to WWII. Koufax also lost time in being able to provide value by retiring at age 30 due to arthritis. With those adjustments aside, we now have 16 exceptions of Hall of Famers that aren't in the top 56. Those exceptions are:
So there's a bit on our Hall of Fame exceptions. 3 guys are easily in if we consider their pre 1912 selves, some guys are on the top 56 cusp already, some guys are on the cusp if we just consider their Pitching Value, and some guys had extraordinary peaks but just broke down afterwards or benefitted from being on World Series winning teams. Of our 46 actual Hall of Famers to work with, we can pretty reasonably say that 26-33 are deserving and maybe even a couple more than that. I've already mentioned the 8 active or yet-to-appear-on-the-ballot starters that rank in the top 46, as well as the 2 steroid users. In terms of Player Value alone, those 10 would be some non-Hall of Famers that should be inducted. Others include Carl Mays, Tim Hudson, Orel Hershiser, Dave Stieb, Johan Santana, Bret Saberhagen, Curt Schilling, Red Lucas, Carlos Zambrano, and Dolf Luque. We've talked about actual Hall of Famers that Player Value thinks should have won some Cy Youngs but that ranked pretty low over their careers, but I wanted to bring up a non-Hall of Famer that fit that role as well. Player Value rates Gary Peters at just 29.83 but thinks he should have won 3 Cy Young Awards in 1963, 1966, and 1967. A few weeks back I had brought up to my wife and 2 of my brothers that Peters appeared to be one of the more underrated pitchers in history by Player Value, and he unfortunately yet eerily died just a couple of days later. Koufax unanimously won the Cy Young in 1963 when it was still a single award for all of MLB. If there was an award for both the AL and NL that season, Peters could have won it, as he had the 2nd highest WAR among AL pitchers that year. Koufax again unanimously won the lone MLB Cy Young in 1966, and again Peters finished with the 2nd highest WAR among AL pitchers that year. Finally in 1967 there were 2 Cy Young awards, but Peters did not receive any votes in the AL. He did finish 9th in the AL MVP voting, with more WAR than the actual AL Cy Young winner Jim Lonborg. So if I had to advocate for someone to get in based off of the findings of Player Value, but not based on their actual Player Value rating, it would be Gary Peters. No pitcher that didn't use steroids has won 3 Cy Youngs and not been inducted. Shoutout to Babe Adams and Billy Pierce, who also fit this criteria of non-Hall of Famers that Player Value thinks should have won 3 Cy Youngs. Of the 2,296 starting pitchers in my dataset based off of games played, 54 are in the Hall of Fame. That's 2.35%, larger than the "top 1%" idea that many people think of the Hall of Fame as, as well as the top 1.18% that the Hall actually operates at. This is a lower induction rate than first basemen, but higher than catchers, second basemen, third basemen, shortstops, leftfielders, centerfielders, rightfielders, and designated hitters. Based on this, there should either be less starters in Cooperstown if we think 2.35% is too lenient (which I don't think it is), or there should be more players inducted at other positions so that this 1.85% rate holds across all positions. At this point, every position I've gone over thus far has had over 1% of the players inducted, so you may be wondering how the overall 1.18% mark can be true. It comes down to the great many relief pitchers that have not been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Below you can graphically see how all of our starters compare in terms of Player Value, along with the black line denoting which players provided positive value, the gold line denoting the Hall of Fame mark, and the blue dots denoting the actual Hall of Fame members: Greg Maddux is the Hall of Famer to the top right, with Walter Johnson below him to the right. Roger Clemens is the non-Hall of Famer to the far right, with the most Pitching Value all-time. The 3 Hall of Famers to the bottom right with high Pitching Value but not much elsewhere are Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez, and Randy Johnson. Carl Mays is the non-Hall of Famer over the gold line with a lot of Fielding/Batting/Baserunning Value but not as much Pitching Value. Clarence Mitchell is the non-Hall of Famer to the top left close to the black line with little Pitching Value but a lot of Fielding/Batting/Baserunning Value. Bill Piercy is the non-Hall of Famer to the far left with the lowest Pitching Value all-time and near 0 value elsewhere. Below you can graphically see how the top 25 starters compare in terms of Player Value: Since we have more than double the starting pitchers than any other position in the field, I'll also graphically show the top 26-50 starters in terms of Player Value: Below is the dataset of primarily starting pitchers from 1912-2021, as determined by which position the player provided the most Player Value at. There are 2,234 players in this dataset.
Below is the dataset of primarily starting pitchers from 1912-2021, as determined by which position the player played the most games at. There are 2,296 players in this dataset.
Thanks for checking out this starter rankings post. I plan to update it whenever I develop new Player Value iterations, and hopefully we'll get closer and closer to some rankings that we can more firmly support. I'd say the main takeaways for now should be:
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