Roger Clemens

[VHdamaco]

all this talk about pitchers and no love for john rocker?

for shame...

[Bob_R]

Is Clemens really baseball's best pitcher ever?


Going into Tuesday's start, Astros ace Roger Clemens, age 43, boasts an improbably low ERA of 1.53 on the season. If that mark holds, it will tie Dwight Gooden in '85 for the lowest qualifying ERA since Bob Gibson's unthinkable mark of 1.12, set back in 1968.

If justice prevails, Clemens will lay claim to his eighth Cy Young Award (although, to be fair, Clemens last season won what should've been Randy Johnson's trophy). Clemens is also only 11 wins shy of becoming only the eighth pitcher in baseball history to win at least 350 games, and the first since Warren Spahn in 1964. In other words, it's reasonable to ponder at this juncture whether Clemens is in fact the greatest pitcher in the history of the game. Let's do just that.
There are two way to assess whether a ballplayer is the "greatest." We can do this in terms of career value — i.e., how great he was over the totality of his career — and in terms of peak value — i.e., how great he was during his handful of best seasons.

For example, someone like Don Sutton, who was good, but not great, over a span of 23 seasons and more than 5,000 innings, has more career value than someone like Sandy Koufax. Of course, as peak value goes, Koufax easily bests Sutton. The concern for this piece, however, is career value — how the totality of Clemens' body of work measures up against other great hurlers throughout history. (For those curious about peak value, I'd give the nod to Pedro Martinez, followed by Greg Maddux and Walter Johnson.)

To determine this, we'll compare pitchers by using innings pitched and a statistic called "ERA+". ERA+ differs from ERA in that it's adjusted to reflect the effects of a pitcher's home park and the era in which he toiled. For instance, a run scored in Coors Field isn't the same as one scored in, say, Petco Park. By the same token, a run given up in 1968, when the pitcher's mound was higher and the strike zone, hyperbolically speaking, ranged from the batter's shoe tops to his neck isn't the same as one given up in 2000, when offensive levels were roundly stratospheric.

ERA+ also looks different from ERA, but don't let that confuse you. It's scaled to "100," which means that an ERA+ of 100 signifies an adjusted ERA of exactly league average. An ERA+ of 110 means a score 10 percent better than league average, while one of 90 means 10 percent worse than league average. So with ERA+, unlike traditional ERA, the higher the number is, the better the performance. So here's the top 10 list for career ERA+, minimum 2,000 innings:


Top ERA+, Career
Pitcher ERA+ Innings
1. Pedro Martinez 165 2,466.0
2. Lefty Grove 148 3,940.2
3. Walter Johnson 147 5,914.2
T4. Rog. Clemens 146 4,663.1
T4. Hoyt Wilhelm 146 2,254.1
6. Ed Walsh 145 2,964.1
T7. Randy Johnson 142 3,434.1
T7. Al Spalding 142 2,890.2
T7. Addie Joss 142 2,327.0
T10. Kid Nichols 139 5,056.1
T10. Greg Maddux 139 4,345.0

As you can see, Clemens' contemporary, Pedro Martinez, has the best career ERA+ of all time. However, take innings into account, which must be done, and Clemens fares even better. Clemens' advantage in workload pushes him past Martinez and Grove in the final analysis, but it's difficult to argue — at least in terms of ERA+ and innings — that Walter Johnson isn't the greatest ever.

So while Clemens' career dossier might be "only" the second-best ever, how will his work in 2005, if he maintains this level of performance, rank among the all-time single-season performances?

Let's once again use ERA+ to rank them:


Best ERA+, Single Season
Pitcher, Year ERA+ Innings
1. Tim Keefe, 1880 294 105
2. Pedro Martinez, 2000 285 217.0
3. Roger Clemens, 2005 280* 224*
4. Dutch Leonard, 1914 279 224.2
5. Greg Maddux, 1994 273 202.0
T6. Walter Johnson, 1913 259 346.0
T6. Greg Maddux, 1995 259 209.2
8. Bob Gibson, 1968 258 304.2
9. Mordecai Brown, 1906 253 277.1
10. Pedro Martinez, 1999 245 213.1

If Clemens keeps it up, he'll post the third-best single-season ERA+ in the history of the game. (Surprised to see no Sandy Koufax iterations on the above list? His best season in terms of ERA+, 1966, ranks only 55th all time. That's because Koufax played in an era in which runs were ridiculously hard to come by and in a home park that played even stingier. So relative to park and league, Koufax, even at his best, doesn't quite measure up.)

So while it's still difficult to argue for Clemens as the greatest pitcher ever, he is crafting one of the greatest seasons anyone's ever seen.