and to you guys who say someone pitched against a “AAAA” team. there’s a reason these hitters are at major league level. no matter if they’re up cause of injury or not. if they wouldn’t make the the team for one club they would most likely make the team for another club. pitching at the major league is the same no matter who you face. you still have to hit your spots and make your pitch otherwise you’re going to get rocked.

so kerry woods game is better then david wells or david cone’s perfect game????? i think not… this is why i disagree with the whole sabermetric thing. throwing a perfect game is the ultimate accomplishment for a pitcher not striking out 20 and giving up a hit. i don’t care if you strike out 27 in a game, the perfect game is the best “game score” you can have. period

@ Evan3457:
Evan: thanks for the great posts.

Koufax was one of the greatest pitchers of his era; but if he were to take the mound today he would be in for a rather rude shock:

The Opposite Field Home Run.

That critter weren’t ’round these parts forty year ago.

Koufax loved to work hitters outside (“I lived on the outside corner,” he stated firmly in a recent interview, decrying how pitchers are instructed to go inside). And consequentially opposite field outfielders played much shallower than today—just in the case a batter smaked one of those outside pitchers—so they could nab the little pop fly before it hit the ground in front of him.

I wonder what Bill James’ metric for inconsistency? He should call that the Burnett curve! All that aside , Burnit has pitched well lately BUT is this the norm or the aberration? All i can say is that AJ has top three stuff in all of baseball ..but not his makeup. I have never been a fan of his but he deserves his due, even though he pitched against a AAAA version of the Mets.

@ Evan: I’ve noticed that some of the calling this year has been atrocious despite the fact that questech is used etc so on. I haven’t seen umpiring this bad in my entire life. A historical footnote should be made in reference to this middling job by the umpire corps in 2009.

Sabermetrics aside, the pitcher’s mound explains a loss of the pitcher’s dominance. Then the advent of a DH and building of new stadiums in a certain way. Koufax was mentioned? I would have loved to have seen him pitch in a relative band box like Fenway Park, with an shortened mound, and a DH! Pedro did it in his heyday and that was why he was so remarkable. I bring this up because of Steve meeting Jason Stark. Stark makes an argument in one of his books that Koufax was overrated. I happen to agree with his assessment BTW……

I’m enlightened!

But seriously, great stuff Evan.

Historical footnote #1: before the creation of the pitcher’s plate (rubber) and mound, pitchers in the 19th century worked from a pitcher’s box, just as the hitters and catchers had their own boxes. This was a 6′ by 4′ rectangle, and the pitcher could deliver from any point in it, provided both feet were inside. So if you’ve ever wondered why a grounder back to the pitcher is “back to the box”, a hard hit up the middle is “back through the box”, and why a pitcher clubbed out of the game is “knocked out (of the box)”, well, now you know.

Historical footnote #2: After the offensives explosion on 1987, the strike zone was redefined in an attempt to re-establish the high strike. The top of the strike zone is now defined as “…that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants…”. The bottom of the strike zone was set at the top of the knees, but after the steroid explosion took hold the strike zone was expanded again in 1996, moving to the bottom of the knees.

Amaze your friends with this new knowledge!

Steve Lombardi wrote:

…FWIW, IMHO, the 1960’s – or any time that was a “Pitcher’s Era” – were a great time for high game scores. That’s one issue with this stat, again, IMO. It doesn’t take into account that some times, albeit due to the ball, mound height, park, strike zone enforcement, whatever – that it’s easier for pitchers to go deeper into games, allows less hits, strikeout more batters, etc.
That’s not fact, again, for the record – just my opinion.

That’s almost right, Steve.

The first great pitcher’s era is the “dead ball” era, 1903-1920. In that era pitchers completed 80% of their starts, and batting averages were very low, so fewer hits were allowed. The dead ball, combined with deep outfield fences, made hitting home runs nearly impossible, so pitchers pounded the strike zone low and made hitters put the ball in play, secure in the knowledge that very few could be hit a long way. So walk totals were extremely low by modern standards as well. However, the “make ‘em hit it” philosophy kept strikeout totals extremely low by modern standards.

For example, in 1910, Walter Johnson led the AL with 313 K’s, the only season over 300 in the entire era. In spite of this, the Senators were only 3rd in the league in K’s per 9 innings at 4.4. The entire league had only 4.2 K/9, and this was fairly typical for the era. (1911 AL 4.2; 1911 NL, 3.9, 1912 NL 3.8).

Without high K totals, very high game scores are impossible; a complete-game 5-hit shutout with 4 K’s and 1 BB is a game score of 80. That sort of start was a lot more common back then, but not very common.

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The 60′s, however, were the culmination of several factors and trends. Bigger ballparks, more home runs, bigger pitchers throwing harder, on average. There was a mini-explosion in offense in 1961-2, probably due to expansion.

(Biggest expansion effect in history, because the league pitching pools expanded by 25% from 1960 to 1962. Nobody ever talks about the effect of expansion in producing the 61 HR by Roger Maris, or the 240 HR hit by “the greatest team of all time” the 1961 Yankees, who really aren’t among the top 40 or 50 teams of all time, if you analyze it, but that’s another long story…)

So the owners panicked, and put changes into effect that made power pitching a lot easier. They changed the strike zone, to go from the top of the shoulders to the knees (It has been from the hitters armpits to the top of his knees). This allowed pitchers to throw their best fastballs up in the zone, and get called strikes if the hitters couldn’t hit them, and most couldn’t hit high fastballs at 95+ at all. There had been a long-standing limit on the height of the pitcher’s mound at 15 inches, but many teams violated it in the 60′s. Especially notorious for this was the mound at Dodger Stadium, rumored to be anywhere from 18 to 20 inches high in the Koufax/Drysdale era. This increased the “leverage advantage in throwing those high fastballs”.

With the changes in the mound, strike zone, ballpark, and pitchers, K’s increased throughout the post-World War II era, and exploded in the 60′s. In addition, HR’s and BAVG decreased sharply. With those two threats limited, pitchers were encouraged to challenge the hitters with fastballs at all times, dropping the BB rate as well. All these things combined to make very high Game Scores much easier to achieve.

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Whew; that was a long way to go to explain why Game Scores were much higher in the 60′s than in any other era. Hope it was worth it to someone. Anyone.

Nice work Evan.

Um, polite way to ask a question BOHAN.

FWIW, IMHO, the 1960′s – or any time that was a “Pitcher’s Era” – were a great time for high game scores. That’s one issue with this stat, again, IMO. It doesn’t take into account that some times, albeit due to the ball, mound height, park, strike zone enforcement, whatever – that it’s easier for pitchers to go deeper into games, allows less hits, strikeout more batters, etc.

That’s not fact, again, for the record – just my opinion.