Rank these ten pitchers (all time)

[DrungoHazewood]

4 minutes ago, Frobby said:

That’s why I started this thread.    They’re all really good.    They all have pluses and minuses and it’s partly just a matter of what type of things are important to you.   Longevity and durability vs. a high peak, post-season performance, whether wins carry any weight, and lots of other factors.  

I often think about how Sandy Koufax retired right at the top of his game because he thought his arm wouldn’t take much more.    If he’d chosen to keep pitching and saw a drastic 3-4 year decline in performance the way King Felix and some others have, would we look at him the same way we do now?  At 48.9 rWAR, he’s behind every pitcher on this list.   But he left the indelible impression of being one of the greatest pitchers of all time.   
 

I think that Koufax had a very fortunate coincidence of era, park, and his peak.  If you put him in a context of a five-man rotation and the '97 Orioles park/league he probably peaks out at just over 20 wins and an ERA in the mid-2.00s.  So... somewhat better than Mike Mussina but with 2/3rds the career length.  Although maybe he sticks around longer because of modern medicine and less overuse.

Or... his teams look at him walking 5-6 per nine and throwing in the mid 90s and turn him into a closer and he ends up somewhere between Randy Myers and Billy Wagner.

[Moose Milligan]

Does anyone give Chuck Finley bonus points for Tawny Kitaen?

I dunno, I mean, look at this f'ing guy:

 

[Sports Guy]

21 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:

Does anyone give Chuck Finley bonus points for Tawny Kitaen?

I dunno, I mean, look at this f'ing guy:

 

The amount of skiing him and Langston must have done has to be legendary.

[Can_of_corn]

1 hour ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Saberhagen, Pettitte, Oswalt, Hudson, Hershiser, Hernandez, Hamels, Finley, Cone, Buerhle.

I almost ranked them the exact opposite.

[Can_of_corn]

56 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:

Does anyone give Chuck Finley bonus points for Tawny Kitaen?

I dunno, I mean, look at this f'ing guy:

 

No.  She was too high on the crazy/hot index.

[DrungoHazewood]

1 minute ago, Can_of_corn said:

I almost ranked them the exact opposite.

So, alphabetical?

[DrungoHazewood]

1 hour ago, Moose Milligan said:

Does anyone give Chuck Finley bonus points for Tawny Kitaen?

I dunno, I mean, look at this f'ing guy:

 

Yes, and no.  Yes, Tawny Kitaen was super hot. 

But also, she was arrested for spousal abuse of Mr. Finley in 2002, and she really didn't age well.

[Can_of_corn]

4 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

So, alphabetical?

Yes

[Frobby]

16 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

So, alphabetical?

I missed that.    You are a clever one, aren’t you?

On Koufax, the one thing I’ll say is rarely did one pitcher carry his team the way Koufax did several times.   Alston absolutely abused the guy.   The Jane Leavy biography of him is spectacular and really shows what he went through in order to get the Dodgers to the World Series.

[DrungoHazewood]

22 minutes ago, Frobby said:

I missed that.    You are a clever one, aren’t you?

On Koufax, the one thing I’ll say is rarely did one pitcher carry his team the way Koufax did several times.   Alston absolutely abused the guy.   The Jane Leavy biography of him is spectacular and really shows what he went through in order to get the Dodgers to the World Series.

It's probably a good thing that society has mostly backed off from physically destroying people for sport. MMA excluded...

But we do miss out on some epic performances.  I'm sure there are still a handful of pitchers from each generation who could start 40+ games and go 300+ innings, but we'll never know, since that workload obliterates the arms of almost all the pitchers who try it.  Especially in a max-effort context.

It might also be fun to see race cars going 300 mph with huge jet blowers providing downforce and the drivers always on the edge of blacking out.  The NFL Films' Greatest Spinal Cord Injuries of the 1980s had its charms.

[Frobby]

32 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

It's probably a good thing that society has mostly backed off from physically destroying people for sport. MMA excluded...

But we do miss out on some epic performances.  I'm sure there are still a handful of pitchers from each generation who could start 40+ games and go 300+ innings, but we'll never know, since that workload obliterates the arms of almost all the pitchers who try it.  Especially in a max-effort context.

In the more modern day, the season that comes to mind is 2008, when the Brewers traded for CC Sabathia and had him make 17 starts covering 130 innings in 73 games. That would have been about normal and usage for Jim Palmer in the early 70’s, but by 2008 it was completely unheard of.   Considering that the Brewers went 14-3 in those starts (CC’s record was 11-2), it worked out pretty well for them, and CC didn’t blow out his arm.   

[DrungoHazewood]

2 hours ago, Frobby said:

In the more modern day, the season that comes to mind is 2008, when the Brewers traded for CC Sabathia and had him make 17 starts covering 130 innings in 73 games. That would have been about normal and usage for Jim Palmer in the early 70’s, but by 2008 it was completely unheard of.   Considering that the Brewers went 14-3 in those starts (CC’s record was 11-2), it worked out pretty well for them, and CC didn’t blow out his arm.   

Yea, he might be (have been) someone who could throw 300 innings and not die.

[murph]

3 hours ago, Frobby said:

I missed that.    You are a clever one, aren’t you?

On Koufax, the one thing I’ll say is rarely did one pitcher carry his team the way Koufax did several times.   Alston absolutely abused the guy.   The Jane Leavy biography of him is spectacular and really shows what he went through in order to get the Dodgers to the World Series.

Thanks Frobby.  I have an app associated with our local library which allows for digital delivery of books and just "borrowed" the audio book version of this biography.  Now if I only had an excuse to leave the office and drive around for a few hours....

[Frobby]

2 hours ago, murph said:

Thanks Frobby.  I have an app associated with our local library which allows for digital delivery of books and just "borrowed" the audio book version of this biography.  Now if I only had an excuse to leave the office and drive around for a few hours....

It’s really good.   She’s also written biographies of Ruth (“The Big Fella”) and Mantle (“The Last Boy”), but I’ve never read those.