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So which is better: a consistent starting pitcher like Milt Pappas, or a hot-and-cold pitcher who has some big seasons, like Drysdale?
I designed a simple study to test this issue: Is there a difference between the two types of career profiles in terms of their effect on the pennant chances of their teams? Suppose that you had an average team, as good as the next team, might win the pennant once in a while by dumb luck but not very often. Suppose that you added to that team a Milt Pappas/Don Sutton type pitcher -- consistently good over a long period of time, but never brilliant or overpowering. This pitcher has very few twenty-win seasons or seasons as a Cy Young candidate. How many pennants would he win for them?
Suppose that you took him away and added a pitcher of the exact same overall quality, but with a different profile -- a shorter career, a slower beginning, but a more brilliant middle phase. We'll call this a Don Drysdale/Steve Carlton type of pitcher. How many pennants would he win for them? Would there be a difference between the two? Would the Drysdale/Carlton type pitcher push his team to more championships when he had the Cy Young-type seasons? Or would the steady, consistent Pappas/Sutton type pitcher help his team to just as many championships, or even more, but without your necessarily being able to identify which seasons those were?
Well, as you probably have guessed if you know me, I wrote a computer program to do exactly that. To begin with, I wrote a program to represent a .500 team playing season after season, 162 games per year. As I'm sure you know, a .500 team winning and losing games at random for a year won't often go 81-81, nor even necessarily stay close to 81-81; they will routinely win anywhere from 71 to 91 games, and occasionally will win (or lose) as many as a hundred or even more, just by luck.
What I wanted to see here is how often they would win a "pennant," represented in the initial study as winning 93 games or more. I ran that team, the "control" team, through 3,000 simulated seasons.
Then I added to the team first a pitcher representing a Milt Pappas/Don Sutton type career. This pitcher pitched for 20 years, started out as about a .500 pitcher (actually .470) and rose gradually to a peak of .655, then descended back to .490. Then he retired, and, this being a computer, started over again, again and again for 3,000 simulated seasons. He had an overall expected winning percentage of .584.
In the third phase, I added to the team a pitcher with a Drysdale/Koufax/Carlton type of career -- shorter, but more brilliant in the middle. This pitcher started out as a .400 pitcher, rose to a peak of .700, then faded back to .500, posted an expected winning percentage of about .380 in his 16th and final season, and retired. This team then was without a key pitcher for four simulated seasons, and in the 21st season they started over, with the pitcher back at .400. He also had an overall expected winning percentage of .584, with the same number of expected decisions in his career.
A second difference between the two pitchers, in addition to the fact that the Pappas/Sutton type pitcher reached a peak of .655 and the Drysdale/Carlton type pitcher reached a peak of .700, was that the Drysdale/Carlton pitcher had more decisions per season at the peak of his career, so that in a typical career he would have as many decisions as the Pappas/Sutton type, but would get them over with more quickly. The Pappas/Sutton type pitcher would start out with 6 to 18 decisions in his first year (this also randomly determined), then would increase his workload in the middle of his career, winding up with somewhere around 30 decisions in his peak years. The Drysdale/Carlton type pitcher would start out in a similar range -- 7 to 17 decisions as a rookie -- then would increase until, at his peak, he would have 30 to 39 decisions per season, as Drysdale and Carlton did.
In a reasonably typical 20-year cycle, the two pitchers would produce won-lost records like this.
The aggregate totals, as you can see, are the same. The first pitcher probably wouldn't be a Hall of Famer; the second pitcher certainly would. In a typical 20-year cycle or "career," the Pappas/Sutton-type pitcher might or might not win 20 games once. In the 3,000-year simulation, 150 cycles, this pitcher won twenty games in a season 73 times, or 49 times per career. This is almost the same as the actual data for Pappas and Sutton: Sutton won twenty games once, Pappas didn't. The other pitcher, the Drysdale/Carlton model, won twenty games in a season 600 times in 150 cycles, or 4.00 times per career -- again consistent with the actual data for those two pitchers (Drysdale won twenty games twice, Carlton six times.)
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