38 Responses to “4+ Post-Season Games With GS = 65+”

1. bob Says:
   February 5th, 2011 at 11:22 pm

   holy crap cliff lee, 1 BB 59 K

   but there's no such thing as 'clutch,' right, saber nazis?

2. Jerome S. Says:
   February 5th, 2011 at 11:26 pm

   @ 1
   There is, no one knows precisely how to quantify it though so we'll just say "postseason starts > regular season starts" and call it a day.

3. Joe Garrison Says:
   February 5th, 2011 at 11:54 pm

   Schilling... 100 strikeouts over 100 innings... just the way he planed it.

   I know those aren't ALL of his post season starts, but still...

4. Johnny Twisto Says:
   February 6th, 2011 at 12:14 am

   but there's no such thing as 'clutch,' right, saber nazis?

   Oh yes, and as soon as everyone decided Cliff Lee was a Clutch God, he spurted out this brilliant clutch performance. http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SFN/SFN201010270.shtml

   At least he kept his K/BB ratio intact for you, though.

5. Bryan W. Says:
   February 6th, 2011 at 1:04 am

   This is a list of exceptionally pitched games. It shouldn't be surprising to find some outlandishly good stats like 1bb/59so. The list's purpose predisposes it to show those kinds of performances.

6. DavidRF Says:
   February 6th, 2011 at 2:10 am

   4+ Postseason Games with a GameScore <= 30
   Andy Pettitte - 7
   Tom Glavine - 5
   Greg Maddux - 4
   Bret Saberhagen - 4
   Jaret Wright - 4

7. Gerry Says:
   February 6th, 2011 at 6:13 am

   Babe Ruth only had 2 postseason games with a Game Score of 65 or better, good thing he gave pitching up.

8. SW Says:
   February 6th, 2011 at 8:47 am

   All of these "postseason" lists are garbage, since modern players have SO many more postseason opportunities. Thanks, DavidRF, for highlighting that.....

9. Alan Says:
   February 6th, 2011 at 9:06 am

   @1, absolutely. And by a similar method, look how clutch Ed Whitson was for the Yankees!

   http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/share.cgi?id=EVFOc

10. Frank Clingenpeel Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 11:28 am

    Johnny Twisto #5:

    Sure there's such a thing as clutch. I should know; I had to replace the one on my pickup every time I taught one of my kids to drive.

    Seriously, though, there is no doubt that post-season pressure can be the spring to send a pitcher to stardom. Just ask Don Larsen, Floyd Bevins... well, you get the idea.

11. birtelcom Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 12:39 pm

    The problem with taking great post-season performances and using them as evidence that the pitchers involved were demonstrating a particular "clutch" ability (as opposed to just happening to have a good game at a luckily place moment), is the following: If you picked any arbitrary two weeks in the regular season, say May 9 through May 23 every season, and you looked at the history of pitching performances in those two weeks, you will find some guys who have played especially well over that period most years, including some spectacular performances in individual games. Is that proof that some guys have a special talent to perform in those particular two weeks in the middle of May? Probably not -- more likely it's just an inevitable, random phenomenon in which over any two-week period that you pick, some guys will have much better records than others, and there will also be a few spectacular games. In order to prove there is a special ability that some guys have to pitch well in the post-season, one would have to show that such performance goes beyond what will normally occur randomly.

12. John Q Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 1:12 pm

    The problem with post-season stats is that they are skewed towards modern era players especially post 1994. Also there's the problem of opportunity. Sometime a team may sweep the series so that limits the amounts of starts. Sometimes Very Good/Great pitchers simply never had the chance to make more than 1 or 2 post season starts some never even had one.

    Fergie Jenkins, Jim Bunning, Dazzy Vance, Wilber Wood, Jack Powell, Milt Pappas, Larry Jackson and Mark Langston never had a post-season start.

    Vic Willis only started one post-season game.

    Bob Feller, Kid Nichols, Gaylord Perry, Phil Niekro, Juan Marichal, Ed Walsh, Billy Pierce and Frank Tanana each only had 2 post season starts.

13. A Closer Look at Post Season Pitching | Warning Track Power Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 1:29 pm

    [...] I came across a baseball-reference blog entry which highlighted every pitcher 7 days until Pitchers & Catchers [...]

14. barkie Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 1:49 pm

    "sabre nazis"... even barkfart would call that one harsh (though he would chuckle)

15. John Autin Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 5:05 pm

    Calling this list "garbage" seems small-minded, lazy course of action. This person could take the time to provide the data that would put the list into a better context, but chooses not to; instead, he just rags on the work that someone else has done.

    Here's the sort of context our garbage-man might have provided:

    1. Curt Schilling -- 13 out of 19 -- Amazing. (But then, most of us know that Schilling was one of the greatest postseason performers ever.)

    2. Tom Glavine -- 11 out of 35, 31% -- Nothing special.

    3. John Smoltz -- 10 out of 27, 37% -- I would have thought Smoltzie had more such games, given his 15-4 record and 2.67 ERA.

    4. Andy Pettitte -- 10 out of 42, 24% -- But of course, we know how Pettitte always eased up once he had a comfortable lead....

    5. Roger Clemens -- 10 out of 34, 29% -- Every aspect of Clemens's postseason performance is noticeably worse than his regular-season marks. Which is probably the norm; I'm just gratuitously pointing it out because I think Clemens is a fat-headed jerk (and thought so long before the PED charges).

16. ArnieP Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 6:07 pm

    One of Life's little ironies - Eddie Cicotte had two starts in the list above in a series which he was trying to loose.

17. DavidRF Says:
    February 6th, 2011 at 11:55 pm

    @16
    Cicotte himself committed two errors on back-to-back plays to let two unearned runs score in game 4. One of those errors was on a single to LF (?). Those two runs were the difference. Game Score doesn't account for your-own-errors.

    Cicotte was actually trying to win game 7... and he did. He was mad at the gamblers because they hadn't paid him yet.

18. James Smyth Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 1:30 am

    @ 8 and 12:
    It's true that these kinds of postseason lists are skewed toward recent pitchers. That said, let's give it up for Big Six and Whitey Ford!
    Given Mathewson's numbers, it's tough luck that he only went 5-3.
    Also, look at the tough losses for the only two pitchers on this list with losing records in these games, Eddie Plank and Doug Drabek.

19. Mike Felber Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 2:04 am

    Clutch just rarely does exist when separated from random factors, as immense evidence shows. Not never, but you are more likely to find "chokes": but even what appears to be that, may well be limited sample size. Mays was not a choker in the PS & great in the AS games, that is random chance.

    Unless used light heartedly, instead of to denigrate, using Nazi as a prefix or suffix is mean, petty & immature. Like Limbaugh & "Femi-Nazi".

20. John Autin Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 2:15 am

    I'll note my standard quarrel with Game Score: There is no adjustment for league context. Every factor in Game Score has a fixed value -- innings, hits, runs, strikeouts, etc. But most of these factors have varied significantly during the course of MLB history.

    Number of World Series starts with Game Score of 70 or higher, by decade:
    (with emphasis on the 2 highest and lowest decades)

    1900s: 29
    1910s: 41
    1920s: 31
    1930s: 30
    1940s: 30
    1950s: 26
    1960s: 39
    1970s: 15
    1980s: 22
    1990s: 13
    2000s: 22

    I maintain that Game Score is not a good tool to compare pitchers of different eras.

21. John Autin Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 2:25 am

    And I'll strongly second Mike Felber's comment @21 -- Casually applying the term "Nazi" to someone with whom you disagree about baseball analysis is offensive and inappropriate. At best, it is thoughtless. At worst, it reflects the knee-jerk resentment of one who cannot bear having to defend a position of unearned privilege when it is challenged by free thinkers who question the status quo.

22. John Autin Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 2:26 am

    (Er, I meant to reference Mike Felber's comment @19.)

23. Joe C Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 9:08 am

    I love the game score stat so, heres a little bit of a spin I took on this after reading this blog post by Steve.

    http://wtpbaseball.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/more-on-andy-pettitte-in-the-post-season/

24. John Autin Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 11:30 am

    @23, Joe C -- Thanks for posting that table of percentages on WordPress.

    Steve -- I always enjoy your lists, but I think this is the rare case where you've imputed too much meaning into the data. I normally would not nitpick the choice of 65+, specifically, as a Game Score that reliably reflects a good performance -- but when you said at the end, "When Andy Pettitte pitched well in the post-season, he was usually rewarded with a win," my reaction was, Whoa, there! Check out these Pettitte postseason lines with a Game Score below 65:

    -- 2010 ALCS, game 3: 7 IP, 2 runs, 5 Ks, no walks; GSc=64; Yanks lost, 8-0.
    -- 2003 WS, game 6: 7 IP, 2 runs (1 ER), 7 Ks, 3 walks; GSc=63; Yanks lost, 2-0.
    -- 2010 ALDS, game 2: 7 IP, 2 runs, 4 Ks, 1 walk; GSc=62; Yanks & Pettitte won, 5-2.
    -- 2007 ALDS, game 2: 6.1 IP, 0 runs, 5 Ks, 2 walks; GSc=62; Yanks lost, 2-1 (no-D for Pettitte).
    -- Pettitte had 7 more postseason Game Scores in the range of 49-59 in which he went at least 6 IP and allowed no more than 2 runs.

    That's 11 postseason starts that didn't reach a 65 Game Score, but of which any reasonable person would say that Pettitte pitched well, sometimes very well.

25. John Autin Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 11:42 am

    Self-correction re: #24 -- I undercounted Andy by one game. In addition to the 4 games I listed individually, Pettitte had eight other postseason starts of at least 6 IP and no more than 2 runs, with Game Scores ranging from 49 to 60.

    Pettitte got 5 wins in those 12 games.

26. illdonk Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 12:16 pm

    I don't know the overall totals, but five wins in 12 49-60 games sounds like it should be pretty close to standard, if not better.

27. Tmckelv Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 1:10 pm

    This list is obviously one of the biggest reasons why Yankee fans love Pettitte. We tend to remember his great starts more than the bad (and he had several of those, pointed out by David RF above @6).

    But even more reason is the 10-0 record (in his 10 >65GS games). He won (as opposed to an L or ND) every time he pitched one of these games and it wasn't always because of big Offense by the Yanks.

    Also, the fact that he had (perhaps) his best game early in his career (1996 WS Game 5 against Smoltz) started the reputation of a big game pitcher and he always pitched well enough after that to "live up to it".

28. DavidRF Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 1:20 pm

    @24
    I normally would not nitpick the choice of 65+

    In my opinion, you should *always* nitpick such a choice. I mean, its a bit of an odd number. Whenever an odd number is chosen for a cutoff, I always wonder what's on the other end of the line. A quick sort of Pettitte's postseason game log by game score shows his 10th-best score at 65 with all wins above. #11 and #12 on the list are *right* behind at 63 and 64 but those were both losses.

    So the endpoint was obviously custom-chosen for Pettitte. Fair enough, he just retired after all. Its natural to see a few Pettitte-centric blogposts after that news. It doesn't really change the point of the post too much to move the end point so Pettite's line is 8-0 or 10-2... those are also good lines. 🙂

29. Lawrence Azrin Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 2:31 pm

    I'm surprised that it took 18 posts to refute post #1 ('...clutch...") with the precise term "limited sample size". Thank you, Mike Felber!

    The more a pitcher pitches in the post-season, the more his post-season stats will resemble his regular-season stats - look at Andy Petit, who has an entire (regular) season of post-season starts, as Exhibit A. Both Josh Beckett and Cliff Lee looked like post-season "clutch gods" until they had mediocre starts in their most recent post-season outings - did both of them all of sudden lose their clutchy-ness? No - their performances just "evened out" with more post-season starts.

    I think that clutch situations exist in sports, but not clutch performers - what we call "clutch" is usually just good players performing up to their ability. Conversely, I think the "choke" label is just applied by fans to players they don't like. If good players couldn't handle pressure, I doubt they would even play regularly in the MLB in the first place.

30. John Autin Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 4:01 pm

    @28, DavidRF -- Two points:

    1. I meant that I normally would not nitpick the selection point for one of Steve's lists, because he usually runs them "just for fun," not to derive any big meaning from them. In general, of course I would subject any chosen standard to my own smell test. But I have to say, a cutoff of 65 for a postseason Game Score didn't ring alarm bells in my head. It seemed to me that such a number would select something like the top 20%-25% of all postseason starts. I checked the figures on the 2010 regular season and the 1991-2010 postseason, and whaddaya know, in each case, a 65+ Game Score selected the top 23% of all starts. That seems OK with me as a starting point. Any cutoff line is going to be more or less arbitrary.

    2. I don't agree that "the endpoint was obviously custom-chosen for Pettitte." Steve's initial post didn't strike me as being specifically about Pettitte. If anyone put the focus on Pettitte, it was probably me, by quoting Steve's one sentence about Pettitte. So perhaps I've made a mountain out of a molehill.

31. DavidRF Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 6:40 pm

    @30
    Off course the original post was about Pettitte. So was the "Winning More Than Losing" post from the day or two before. Its the off-season, and a 240-game winner just announced his retirement, there have been Pettitte stories all over the internet. Its to be expected.

    I'm not making a mountain out of a molehill (so you shouldn't either), I'm just pointing out that it helps to check the endpoint or cutoff to see why it was chosen. Often an endpoint is chosen for pragmatic reasons (live-ball, divisional play), but sometimes it is chosen to fit a particular player as was done here. Here, it didn't make too much difference (Pettitte is 7-0 when GSc >= 70 and 13-2 when GSc > 60) so I let it go until someone else brought it up.

32. Whiz Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 1:25 pm

    @16 and 17,

    I noticed Cicotte right away, too. Actually, Game Score does account for the unearned runs from any errors, though the penalty is not as much as for earned runs.

33. obsessivegiantscompulsive Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 5:47 pm

    Wow, Lincecum almost made the list with one trip to the playoffs, with three (but did not come close to #4; should get it this coming season), and Matt Cain nearly had three, falling short by recording a 62 in his second game.

34. Fireworks Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 9:40 pm

    @29

    I agree that clutch ability is a myth; either a player, especially in a sport like baseball, is giving his full attention and effort and engaging in optimal strategy or he isn't. There is no special separate ability that allows one to transcend one's talent level.

    But, I do believe choking exists. Not that every player labeled a choker actually choked--as you mentioned, a person's dislike for a player can certainly lead them to label him a choker when his performance is below his normal standard, and a similar player that is well-liked is more likely to have his bad performance rationalized.

    Still, all that is required to choke is pressure getting to the performer. I believe that a person can fail with a large part of the failure attributed to their succumbing to that pressure. I've defended A-Rod, mostly because people forget that he has performed well in the postseason as well as performing poorly (and that after 2009, his career regular season stats and career postseason stats are roughly the same for rate stats), however, I've seen him a lot, and he is someone that can let pressure get to him and over-think things and press in situations, and, well... choke.

35. John Autin Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 11:55 pm

    Fireworks @34 -- Nicely put.

36. Frank Clingenpeel Says:
    February 9th, 2011 at 12:29 am

    Fireworks #34:

    I very RESPECTFULLY disagree with that postiton. Psychologically speaking, a person who maintain optimal motivation over a 162 game season is just asking for a quick trip to the laughing academy; it is much more likely that a player will rise {or fall, as you so aptly put it} to the occaision during a short period. And there can be little doubt that, with the glory {not to mention some pretty significant green} on the line, post-season contests present an optimal opportunity for such occurances.

    I also agrtee, hpwever, that both "choking" and "clutch performing" can easily be matters of interpretation. And, I also believe in luck; being in the right place at the right time sometimes is the prime ingredient in both clutch performances, and choke spasms.

37. Fireworks Says:
    February 9th, 2011 at 8:06 am

    @ 36

    Frank, an automobile race with cars of a certain specification may have many sections where the driver may go flat out. However, there often exists the risk, at the highest levels of racing, of blowing the engine. So a minimally-qualified driver learns how much to let off so he can save 100% effort from the engine for the times when it 'counts', though, often that difference is mostly negligible though measurable.

    I harbor no illusions regarding a player's ability to exert 100% mental effort over the course of a long season, though there are players to whom we ascribe such strength of will (because they seem to always be flat-out, see: Hustle, Charlie), and there are players to whom we ascribe a lack of focus or effort to a degree to that we consider to be detrimental to team solidarity/morale and certainly to the reputation of the accused player (see: Ramirez, Hanley, and a booted baseball rolling into the left-field corner). Even so, while we don't quantify that focus/preparation/utilization of skills with a number, there is a general minimum sort of effort and preparation that must be exerted before which a player will acquire negative labels. A 'normal' effort. My contention is that this normal effort is firstly directly related to maximum effort; the presence of maximum effort is a change in a degree of effort--it is not a new skill--at best it is an intelligent strategy if applied in a useful and productive manner--and secondly, the difference between normal effort and if-I-get-a-hit-we-win-the-championship effort is mostly negligible, and a wash because in most clutch situations the opposition is not apathetic; they too can reach for that extra 1, 2, 5 or whatever percent that separates normal effort from max effort, whether to earn the same accolades, or for pride, or ego. Most of the 'clutchiest' moments in baseball history were against a decidedly not apathetic opponent--"Shot Heard Round the World", "Touch 'em all, Joe!", "Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!", Aaron Bleepin' Boone, Bucky Bleepin' Dent, "In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!" ... and so on.

    If, when you say that both choking and clutch-performing can easily be matters of interpretation, I am not sure what you mean. I wish to engage in a bit of semantics and note that I discussed not clutch performance, but clutch ability. It is difficult, sometimes, to know whether someone is talking about clutch ability or clutch performance (I do not mean you specifically, but in general when listening to baseball people talk or reading their articles), especially when a player is merely described as clutch, though on occasion context may enlighten you about the speaker's feeling about the concept of clutch ability.

    However, given that you said clutch performance I really don't have much to say about that since clutch performance does, of course, exist. As to choking, I absolutely believe a player can choke, but if your agreement with me is that it is something we mostly interpret rather than have actual knowledge of, then yes, I agree.

38. Lawrence Azrin Says:
    February 9th, 2011 at 11:28 am

    As for the "clutch performer" and "chocker" labels that get tossed around so readily by sportswriters, I believe that it's mostly writers reaching into that giant grey area known as "intangibles". They cannot find a factual basis to call a player better or worse than than their statistical record, so they reach into what Bill James once called the "BS dump". As James said, when you you reach into that dump,you're not always going to pull out diamonds...

    As #34 (Fireworks) mentioned, A-Rod is a great example of this - because of his overall perception of unlikeability, after several bad post-season performances in a row, A-Rod got labeled with the "chocker" label, big-time. Then, he had a great 2009 post-season, so he was "clutch" again. I don't believe _either_ of these labels applies; his post-season performance just regressed to his regular-season performance.

    In the same way that both Kirk Gibson and Joe Carter had great, memorable "clutch" moments, but are not great "clutch" performers, I believe most any player in MLB can have a great "clutch" moment, but that doesn't make them a "clutch" performer.