From: mjw@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Michael Wolverton)
Subject: Re: Henderson vs. Ryan
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University.
Distribution: usa
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1992 19:14:08 GMT


In a couple different articles, Greg "Sarcasm Is A Way Of Life" Spira writes:

>First, presenting Ryan's stats last year tells us nothing about his career.
>You see, Ryan has been a better pitcher the last 2 years than he has been
>at any other point in his career.  

I just don't see how you can support this. According to Total Baseball,
Ryan has been the best pitcher in his league in three separate years,
and, needless to say, none of them have been in the past two (they were
'77, '81, and '87). And just about any measure you can come up with would
indicate that Ryan was better in '72-74 than he was the past two years.

>If he had pitched this way throughout his
>career, you'd be right about how good he's been.  But he hasn't.

The past two years have been just slightly above average for Ryan's career.


>When you look at Ryan's lifetime ERA, his lifetime W-L (career W-Ls are
>somewhat meaningful, unlike single year W-L), etc., its pretty clear that
>Ryan just hasn't helped his teams all that much. 
>...
>I'm not arguing that Ryan doesn't belong in the Hall, by the way.  I am
>arguing that Ryan isn't one of the best 5 pitchers of his generation, 

Well, if you're going to consider lifetime W-L records as meaningful,
then Ryan probably is one of the best 5 of his generation. Elias did a
study in their 1991 _Analyst_ which compared pitchers lifetime records
with what a replacement level pitcher would've put up with the same
number of decisions on the same teams. The results: Ryan was 15th best
all time, and 6th among his contemporaries (behind Seaver, Niekro,
Carlton, Perry, and Jenkins). With last year's performance, Ryan moved
ahead of Jenkins and Perry to 13th all time and 4th among his
contemporaries.

I don't agree with you about the meaningfulness of W-L records (even
lifetime), but I do think that this study reflected the approximate value
of Ryan's longevity.

>Well, we can measure this with Wins Above Team, which measures a pitcher's
>won-loss record relative to the pitcher's teams' w-l records. The formula
>is Pitcher Decisions X ([Pitcher Pct. - Team Pct.]/[2 - 2 X Team Pct.]) when
>a pitchers' W-L percentage is higher than his teams'.  When a pitchers'
>W-L percentage is lower than his teams', the last clause of the equation is
>changed to [2 X Team pct.]   
>
> [numbers which show Ryan not to be in the top 100 in all time WAT]

I'm glad you posted the formula here, Greg. Maybe you can answer a
question about it for me (not being sarcastic here -- I'm really
curious): Is there any meaningfulness to the denominator there, besides
being a stupid arbitrary unjustified fudge factor? From what I can tell
from looking at the formula and reading TB's "justification" of it, Thorn
and Palmer didn't like the results of "real" WAT since it rewarded
pitchers on bad teams (duh), so they just decided to divide by a
more-or-less arbitrary number to mitigate that effect. If there's
anything more to it, please let me know.

If you use the formula for "real" WAT (which is just decisions times the
difference between pitcher pct. and team pct.), Ryan comes out 40th all
time.
 
>As you can see, Ryan's teams were over .500 more often than they were under
>.500, and he was only on a couple of bad teams.  Ryan's career W-L        
>percentage is not (relatively)unimpressive because he played for bad teams;
>its unimpressive because he didn't pitch great.

The thing that matters to a pitcher's W/L record is not his team's
overall record, but how well they hit. And, as many posters have pointed
out, Ryan has played on some lousy hitting teams. Here's how his teams
ranked -- pun intended -- in their league in runs scored on the road, up
until his Ranger years (the numbers in parentheses are the number of
teams in the league that year):

68: 8th(T) (out of 10)
69: 7th(T) (12)
70: 11th   (12)
71: 7th    (12)
72: 9th    (12)
73: 9th(T) (12)
74: 4th    (12)
75: 7th    (12)
76: 9th    (12)
77: 8th    (14)
78: 7th(T) (14)
79: 1st    (14)
80: 7th    (12)
81: 3rd    (12)
82: 11th   (12)
83: 2nd    (12)
84: 1st    (12)
85: 2nd    (12)
86: 6th    (12)
87: 12th   (12)
88: 4th*   (12)      * - estimated from team road RBI totals

The Astros had a nice (but brief) run there from 83-85, and certainly the
Rangers (who I don't have numbers for) have been good the past three
years. But almost all the rest of the teams Ryan has pitched for have
been mediocre-to-abysmal offensively. As a result, WAT (and the Elias
study cited above) probably underestimates Ryan's true contribution.

Of course, another problem with WAT is that it relies on W-L records,
so unlucky pitchers like Ryan have to have 8-16 ERA title years included
in their records.

>Also, the Ryan attendance factor has only really been major during his last
>3 or four years; I doubt he was all that much of a pull before that.

I think you're right here, but I think he was a *little* bit of a
pull even before his Ranger days.  Even if he didn't draw in too
many more fans for an average game, he would have a game or two
every once in a while when he was approaching a milestone (Koufax's
record, 3,000 K's, Johnson's record, 4,000 K's) when he'd pull in
an extra 20-30,000 per game.  I'd guess he probably pulled in an
extra 1-2,000 fans on average from 1973 to his last Astro year.

>Oh, and I doubt he'd be as powerful a fan attraction these days if he played
>out of Texas.

Good point, and as evidence of that you can point to the lack of his
national commercials :-). Pitching in his home state may add a little bit
to the "Ryan mystique", but I think that most of his popularity stems
from his performance combined with his age, and his personality. He'd be
a big national fan attraction no matter where he pitched.

-Michael

-- 
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Michael Wolverton                       "Is that clear?"
mjw@cs.stanford.edu                     "No, but it's consistent!"
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