For baseball fans, the end of the year is about more than the holidays. No, for those of us devoted to the sport, it also represents Hall of Fame argument season. Baseball being baseball, stats for players will always come up in these heated debates. But for all the great tools we have to support our arguments these days, sabermetrics hasn't done a whole lot with the playoffs.
One of the most heated debates has been around the merits of Curt Schilling's case for the Hall of Fame, where there is a wide gulf from the stat-friendly crowd that believes he's a slam-dunk for Cooperstown and some of the more veteran writers into traditional statistics. And the playoffs factor in.
On a basic level, Schilling's case doesn't look all that compelling, as 216 wins is a low number for a Hall of Fame pitcher. HIs 3.46 ERA doesn't look very shiny when compared with the fact that every full-time starter in the Hall of Fame with fewer wins, with the exception of Jesse Haines, has a lower ERA.
The thing about stats, however, is that they have no meaning by themselves. Context is crucial. If you just say that a player has 55 ZORK or something, that has no meaning unless you know what ZORK means or what the ZORK of other great players is. A pitcher's win total is very different simply because of the realities of the game at the time it was played. For instance: Wouldn't it seem odd to declare that Sandy Koufax stunk because he didn't have a single season in which he won as many games as Old Hoss Radbourn did in his average season? Top pitchers simply win fewer games today because the usage is different.
ERA, while a better stat than pitcher wins, suffers a great deal in many cases when context is added. Schilling played almost entirely in a high-offense era and retired before that era ended. In the parks and leagues Schilling pitched in, a league-average ERA over his career would have been 4.39. Contrast that with a pitcher like Don Drysdale
So even if the seasons all end in September, Schilling would have a strong argument for Hall of Fame induction. However, the postseason is an important part of Schilling's career highlight, and for all the great tools we have to support arguments these days, sabermetrics hasn't done a whole lot with playoff performance. Yet the story of Schilling's career is woefully incomplete without it.
From a statistical standpoint, the playoffs have always been kind of the awkward cousin at the family dinner. Whether you're a hard-core sabermetrics guy or more old-school, the postseason never seems to fully count in the ledger. We all want our favorite teams to win the World Series, love the high drama of October, and all can think of dozens of historical moments, but we don't really evaluate the overall performances on the same plane as we do regular=season statistics. We all grew up memorizing the fact that Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. That leaves 15 postseason Ruth home runs floating in the ether, never really "counting" in the same way as the 714 regular-season dingers, despite those 41 games in which he hit them being the most important.
When we talk about a Hall of Famer, for players with a lot of playoff performance, the postseason inevitably figures into our arguments. So when we're arguing who goes to Cooperstown and using the best stats we have available, it only makes sense to objectively integrate that information somehow. After all, Reggie Jackson wasn't called Mr. October because he carved a bunch of sweet jack-o'-lanterns.
There are a lot of philosophical ways to go about integrating playoff stats in with a player's overall record. Given that these are very short series in which each game is far more crucial than a regular season game (and that there are no playoff WAR currently calculated), I like to use Win Probability Added for playoff performance for this purpose, especially considering that we're talking a lot about that abstract concept of greatness. Here's a primer on the concept from the indispensable baseball-reference.com.
WPA captures big moments fairly well. The top 3 WPA games (for hitters) in baseball history feature David Freese's walk-off homer in Game 6 of the 2011 Series, the Kirk Gibson home run -- you know which one -- and Steve Garvey crushing the Cubs in the 1984 NLCS Game 4 (he still hears about it from Cubs fans). The bottom of the WPA list includes such epic meltdowns as Jose Valverde in 2012 and (sadly) Donnie Moore during the 1986 ALCS. When looking at the career numbers, it's a who's who of playoff excellence. Here are the top 10 pitchers and hitters, with some explanation below:
Top 10 Hitters by Playoff WPA
David Ortiz 3.3
Albert Pujols 2.9
Carlos Beltran 2.8
Lance Berkman 2.7
Pete Rose 2.6
Lou Gehrig 2.3
Miguel Cabrera 1.9
Charlie Keller 1.9
David Freese 1.9
Dave Henderson 1.8
Top 10 Pitchers by Playoff WPA
Mariano Rivera 11.7
Curt Schilling 4.1
John Smoltz 3.6
Andy Pettitte 3.5
Orel Hershiser 2.8
Art Nehf 2.7
Orlando Hernandez 2.6
Red Ruffing 2.5
Roger Clemens 2.5
Rollie Fingers 2.4
Since wins is the "currency" of WPA, it combines nicely as a measure with the more general WAR that you see used to evaluate regular season performance. But before I add in the numbers, there are two adjustments to make. First, there are far more playoff games than there were through most of baseball history. A team today can play up to 20 games if the team has a wild card game, but before 1969, the most postseason games a team could possibly play was seven, with the exception of nine in 1903 and 1919-1921. So I added in a simple adjustment factor to attempt to put the eras on a more even field.
Now, before we add WPA to career WAR, there's another big question to answer. How important is a playoff game relative to a regular season game? There's no obvious answer to this question as it's more of a philosophical thing. I crowd-sourced this question on Twitter a few years ago to get a wide range of answers, from a mixed audience of journalists, analysts, and fans. While there wasn't anything approaching unanimity, the median response was that it was roughly three times as important as a regular season game.
Going with the wisdom of crowds here, adding the adjusted playoff WPA with the added weight to career lines moves up a lot of playoff heroes in the WAR rankings (I'm using baseball-reference's WAR here). For some players, the changes are quite large. Mariano Rivera improves from a ho-hum 72nd in WAR to 17th, the only reliever in the top 100. Bob Gibson, Reggie Jackson and Johnny Bench all move up a dozen places in the all-time rankings.
Integrating playoff stats also has a large effect on some of the players on the ballot this year. By career playoff WPA, six of the top 25 postseason pitchers of all-time are on this year's ballot: Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Curt Schilling, John Smoltz, Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina. From early tallies of writers who have shared their ballots, it appears that Smoltz, Johnson, and Martinez all have excellent odds of comfortably eclipsing the 75 percent threshold and being inducted. Clemens will not be elected this year, but it's not due to anything in his playing record but for, well, "other" reasons. That leaves Schilling and Mussina, two candidates with excellent overall résumés that are languishing in the middle.
But how do they look with playoff performance being factored in?
Adding in playoff performance using the methodology I outline above, Schilling and Mussina, already excellent candidates from their overall stats, 26th and 24th in WAR respectively all-time, climb even higher up the ladder against incredibly difficult competition, as you can see here in a list of pitcher WAR if you add playoffs:
1. Cy Young 172.8
2. Walter Johnson 157.8
3. Roger Clemens 148.0
4. Lefty Grove 123.1
5. Pete Alexander 121.8
6. Kid Nichols 116.6
7. Christy Mathewson 112.5
8. Randy Johnson 108.8
9. Tom Seaver 107.7
10. Greg Maddux 107.6
11. Bret Blyleven 100.5
12. Eddie Plank 96.1
13. Bob Gibson 95.9
14. Warren Spahn 94.9
15. Curt Schilling 94.6
16. Phil Niekro 93.8
17. Mariano Rivera 93.5
18. Gaylord Perry 92.4
19. Pedro Martinez 89.9
20. Tim Keefe 88.9
21. Mike Mussina 88.2
22. John Clarkson 85.7
23. Steve Carlton 85.6
24. Robin Roberts 85.4
25. Nolan Ryan 85.2
Schilling takes the biggest leap of any pitcher on this year's ballot, with integrating playoff performance giving him an argument as the 15th-most valuable pitcher in baseball history. While he'll always be remembered for the bloody sock game, in which he threw 7 innings of one-run ball in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS with his ankle barely patched together, that game almost overshadows one of the longest records of playoff excellence for any pitcher in history. Despite playing the entirety of his career in a high-offense era, Schilling sported an immaculate 2.23 ERA in 19 playoff starts over 133.1 innings, good enough for an 11-2 record. He was consistent too, with two runs or fewer allowed in 16 of those 19 starts.
Schilling will almost certainly not be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2015, but the voters will still have seven more chances to not make a giant mistake and fail to induct one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history. If Schilling's playoff performance isn't enough to get him over the hump and into Cooperstown, then playoff performance isn't enough to get anyone not named Mariano Rivera over the line.
If playoffs don't count, we'd might as well start crowning our yearly champion at the end of September.