When Lima & Lamp Were Lousy
Posted by Steve Lombardi on November 13, 2009
When folks talk about "20-game losers," it's often said that they must be pretty good pitchers - or else a team would not keep running them out there to the point where they pitch enough to lose twenty games. This got me wondering about which pitchers were given lots of chances to start games in a season - even though they were not picthing a lot of great games that year. Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitching Game Finder, it's easy to come up with a list to find an answer to questions like these. In this case, I looked for SP who had the most games in a season with a Game Score of 40 or less. Here's the leaderboard for the result of that query:
Yikes! Look at those lines for Jose Lima and Dennis Lamp. What were their managers thinking, giving them so many turns those seasons?
November 13th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Lima was coming off a decent season with the Dodgers and the Royals didn't have a lot of other options.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Welcome back Steve!
November 13th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
wow, carlos silva gave up 29 bombs in less than 85 ip'd in those 17 games, that is a hr every 3 innings!!! coincidentally, he also had the best control of the group with only 19 bb.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
not coincidentally....you throw lots of pitches in the zone, you give up a lot of bombs.
November 13th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
@Andy:
LOL. Thanks. Just needed to recover from the post-season!
November 14th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Re: Dennis Lamp and your search criteria. First, I don't understand what "gamescore-40" or whatever that is means. BTAIM, Lamp was removed early in several games his team eventually won, so a "1-10" W/L stat is a bit misleading. But as to why his manager used him so frequently, it was because the Cubs were paying big bucks (for the era) to several relief pitchers who were quite effective more often than not: Sutter, Tidrow, Caudill, and Willie Hernandez, and SOMEBODY had to start a game in order to justify bringing those guys in by the 6th or 7th inning (remember, "9th-inning Closer" was a job that didn't exist yet). But the real reason Lamp was used so much, however, was that he was one of several Cubs who had mustaches, and they looked reallllllly tough from the neck up, to offset the less-than-intimidating image projected by those powder-blue-with-white-pinstripe pajamas they wore instead of actual road uniforms. It is a documented fact that nearly 10 percent of opposing team home runs were hit by guys who were actually laughing in the batter's box while the Cubs pitcher was still in his windup -- or, more frequently, in the stretch.
November 15th, 2009 at 10:24 am
cubbyphil69 - Game Score is a measure of pitching performance for starting pitchers. It was developed by Bill James. The formula consists of eight parts:
1. Start with 50.
2. Add 1 point for each out recorded.
3. Add 2 points for each inning the pitcher completes after the fourth inning.
4. Add 1 point for each strikeout.
5. Subtract 2 points for each hit allowed.
6. Subtract 4 points for each earned run allowed.
7. Subtract 2 points for each unearned run allowed.
8. Subtract 1 point for each walk.
Consider this pitching line:
IP H R ER BB K
8.1 5 2 1 2 7
The game score for the performance shown would be 72 (50+25+8+7-10-4-2-2).
An average start would score 50. And, an all-time great performance would reach 100.
November 15th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
The list is a little misleading, as the cumulative stats include only the bad games, and not all the games in that particular season. Some of these guys actually had decent years. For instance, Ross Grimsley was 14-10, 3.96, and his ERA never got above 4.10! Even with all those stinkers.