Consecutive Postseason Starts Without a Win
Posted by Raphy on October 20, 2009
Tonight's mlb Game Notes mentions that Scott Kazmir has not won in his last 5 post-season starts. UPDATE: Make that 6. (Teammate John Lackey snapped a six game streak at the start off this year's playoffs.) This made me wonder who had the longest win-less postseason streak. Here are the results from the PI streak finder.
StreakStart Streak End Games W L GS CG SHO GF SV IP H R ER BB SO HR ERA HBP WP BK Teams +-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Al Leiter 1997-10-01 2000-10-26 11 0 3 11 0 0 0 0 66 60 37 32 31 58 6 4.36 3 2 0 FLA-NYM Dwight Gooden 1986-10-08 1998-10-10 9 0 4 9 0 0 0 0 52 51 24 22 23 46 6 3.81 2 2 1 NYM-NYY-CLE Gary Nolan 1970-10-10 1976-10-12 9 0 2 9 0 0 0 0 43.2 37 20 20 9 24 10 4.12 0 1 0 CIN Randy Johnson 1995-10-13 2001-10-10 8 0 7 8 1 0 0 0 58.2 52 28 25 15 66 9 3.84 0 0 0 SEA-HOU-ARI Charles Nagy 1995-10-13 1997-10-21 8 0 2 8 0 0 0 0 49 53 30 28 21 34 11 5.14 3 0 0 CLE
Clearly to own such a streak, your team has to be winning and to keep pitching you have to be doing pretty well also. However, a combination of inconsistency and bad luck left these players on this undistinguished list. As a group, during these games they made 45 starts and went 0-18 with 27 no decisions. They averaged 5.96 innings per start and had an ERA of 4.26 and a WHIP of 1.31. Yet their teams won a lot of pennants and championships during these streaks. (I'm not putting a number on it because there are too many variables to know what to count). A few more interesting fact come to light when you take a closer look.:
- Al Leiter recorded more postseason wins as a reliever for the Blue Jays and Yankees (1 each) than he did as a starter for the Mets and Marlins (0).
- Doc Gooden never won a postseason game. In the '86 playoffs he went 0-3 with a no decision.
- Gary Nolan won his first postseason game and his last (the '76 clincher), but none in between.
- From when he broke the Yankees hearts in '95 until the LCS before he dominated the Yankees in 2001, Randy Johnson went 0-7 with 1 no decision. The 7 losses were in consecutive starts.
- Charles Nagy pitched in 5 postseasons. In each one he earned a decision in the first game he started. He only earned 1 more decision in any of the other nine postseason game that he started.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:09 am
It's too bad that Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index doesn't have an Umpire Game Finder. I think Tim McClelland tied an all-time record for the most errors tonight.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:44 am
"Charles Nagy pitched in 5 postseasons. In each one he earned a decision in the first game he started. He only earned 1 more decision in any of the other nine postseason game that he started."
Although it wasn't a start he was saddled with the loss in the infamous extra inning game 7 of the '97 WS. Well infamous for me, I guess if you're a Marlins fan it was glorious. Looking at Nagy's game logs it seems he's had mostly mediocre playoff appearances where the offense didn't show up until the late innings. In his NDs, the Indians went 4-4. The only really hard luck game was '97 ALCS game 6. He had 7.1 IP of shoutout baseball (with 9 hits!) but his counterpart Mike Mussina had 8 IP with 1 H 0 R. Nobody scored until a Tony Fernandez solo shot in the 11th won the game and the series for the Indians.