Something For Sabathia To Shoot For
Playing around with Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index Pitching Season Finder, I set the controls for “Playing for the NYY, For single seasons, From 1901 to 2008, Throws LH, (requiring GS>=30, ERAp>=120, WLperc>=.600, and SO>=150), sorted by greatest ERAp” in an attempt to find some of the most dominant seasons by a Yankees’ left-handed starting pitcher. Here are the results:
Cnt Player ERA+ GS W-L% SO Year Age Tm +----+-----------------+----+---+-----+---+----+---+---+ 1 Ron Guidry 208 35 .893 248 1978 27 NYY 2 Lefty Gomez 191 34 .656 194 1937 28 NYY 3 Lefty Gomez 175 33 .839 158 1934 25 NYY 4 Whitey Ford 170 36 .739 172 1964 35 NYY 5 Andy Pettitte 155 35 .720 166 1997 25 NYY 6 Ron Guidry 146 30 .692 201 1979 28 NYY 7 Jimmy Key 139 34 .750 173 1993 32 NYY 8 Whitey Ford 130 37 .680 160 1962 33 NYY 9 Andy Pettitte 129 34 .724 162 1996 24 NYY 10 Whitey Ford 128 37 .774 189 1963 34 NYY 11 David Wells 127 30 .818 163 1998 35 NYY 12 Lefty Gomez 122 30 .615 163 1933 24 NYY Seasons/Careers found: 12.
What’s interesting here, at least to me, is that Lefty Gomez (1933-34), Ron Guidry (1978-79), and Andy Pettitte (1996-97) did this in back-to-back seasons and Whitey Ford (1962-64) did it in back-to-back-to-back seasons.
CC Sabathia will be a Yankee, at least he should be, for the next three seasons – at a minimum. Can he fashion two “great” seasons in a row, during this time, and join this list? Time will tell…
[...] Gordon, Overlooked Yankee, Gets His Due Something For Sabathia To Shoot For [...]
It will be intriguing. Sabathia brings the best pitching package the Yankees have had since Guidry. If he can approach Guidry’s performancesin 1977, 78 and 79 I think we will be very happy. A sideline to this will be to see how Wang performs with the glare on CC and AJ. He has performed well the past three years as the ‘ace’ of the staff but there isn’t much doubt that he will be overshadowed by the media in the coming year. Wang’s situation reminds me of a former Yankee who toiled in the shadow of greatness: Ed Figueroa. While Guidry threw lasers and won the Cy Young, steady Eddie went 20-9 with an era of 2.99. From 1976-78 he went 55-30! Tell me, how many remember big Ed today? Wang is like that. He gets very little respect. All he does is get people out and out perform the opposing pitcher day after day. It says here that he stands shoulder to shoulder with CC the entire year. If we could only figure out how to keep him from running the bases!!