Greatest left handed pitcher of all time
1970s
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in Sports Talk
Whitey Ford - Very good
Randy Johnson - Very good
Warren Spahn - Very good
Tom Glavine - Very good
Eddie Plank - Very good
Steve Carlton - Very, very good
Sandy Koufax - Very, very, very, very good (for a short time)
Lefty Grove - The best
End of discussion. Everyone have a pleasant day.
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Sandy Koufax or Whitey Ford gets my vote.
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Honorable mention for Clayton Kershaw, pending career finish.
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Yes, but who is the flat-out greatest pitcher of all time?
I’d vote for Greg Maddox
Being a lifelong Braves fan, I love "Mad Dog". He could also defend like no other pitcher I've ever seen. He was intense on the mound, hence the nickname "Mad Dog".
I'd vote for Greg Maddux as goat if he didn't look like an accountant dressed up for Halloween as a pitcher.
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"Greatest" isn't defined, but by putting Koufax in essentially second place, it must be the case that peak performance is being valued much more than career performance. But since Glavine is also on there it must also be the case that career performance has a significant secondary role. Accepting that as the framework, that's a pretty good list, except I don't see how Randy Johnson got grouped with the very good pitchers and not the multiple-very group. He's got a peak that is better than Carlton's and virtually indistinguishable from Koufax's, and a very long career. I think he deserves at least two more "very"s.
Dallas is Maddox acceptable for you as candidate for GOAT pitcher?
Dallas has finally made a good post, the one concerning Randy Johnson. I was starting to worry about the boy.
Randy best lefty of all time.
Walter Johnson best righty of all time, sorry perkdog.
Warren Spahn gets my vote. He won more games than any of them, and did it after he was 25 years old.
Grove was not a team player, and had a nasty personality like Rogers Hornsby.
I don't look at Wins or W-L records much when evaluating pitchers. Strikeouts are impressive, but really don't mean that much. I like ERA and WHIP better.
Even though Koufax and Ford were tremendous pitchers, they had too few innings pitched to be considered best all-time for me.
I also eliminated Plank because he pitched 1901-1917, and because when looking at his top 10 finishes in ERA and WHIP he didn't seem too impressive.
Glavine's ERA/WHIP was too high for me.
Spahn, Grove, Johnson and Carlton all pitched at least 3900 innings, I put them in my top 4.
I chose Spahn because he was 1st in innings pitched, and second in both ERA at 3.09 and WHIP at 1.195. He had 14 top 10 finishes in ERA and 15 top 10 finishes in WHIP. He was a top 5 pitcher in BOTH categories year in and year out from 1947-1962. He started at least 32 games for 17 straight years and COMPLETED about 22 per year during that stretch!
Grove was certainly impressive and I can't really argue with anyone picking him 1st Lifetime he had a 3.06 ERA and 1.278 WHIP. He simply dominated for about 12 years. No one was even close. His "peak" was higher than Spahn's but Warren's was longer.
I also have a hard time deciding between Carlton and Johnson. Carlton pitched quite a few more innings with a slightly better ERA 3.22-3.29. I was surprised that Johnson had a lower WHIP 1.171 to 1.247, Randy had better control than I had thought, and of course he struck out more than one guy an inning.
Spahn 1a
Grove 1b
Carlton 3a
Johnson3b
No big deal to me, I dont have enough baseball knowledge to back up the argument anyways. I just thought Maddox would be part of the conversation is all
I'm sort of partial to Bob Feller who gave up some prime years, like a lot of MLB players did, for service during WWII. also over looked is CY Young who pitched in a different era but did things that are really special. he pitched during a time when he had an advantage, most people didn't believe pitchers could make a ball curve.
statistics aren't always the best measure. for instance, if you looked at the stats of Randy Johnson and Bob Feller you would, of course, say that Johnson was the better pitcher. he may have been, but in games started there was a better chance that Feller's Team would win. and then there's those War years.
I only know one thing: I would not want to be standing in the batter's box when either man was on the mound!!!
I think legitimate cases can be made for:
Cy Young
Walter Johnson
Lefty Grove
Tom Seaver
Greg Maddux
Pedro Martinez
And Roger Clemens is on the list, too, if you are in the camp that ignores cheating.
There's a big hole from Grove to Seaver, and you can maybe thank WWII for that. I don't think Spahn has a legitimate GOAT case, but Feller might, depending on what assumptions you make about his missing years. Personally, I would put Feller in the next group down, along with Kid Nichols, Christy Mathewson, Pete Alexander, Spahn, Gibson, and Randy Johnson.
Poor ol' Nolan. He never gets any GOAT votes.
Koufax.
Case closed.
Koufax had a 12 year career. In the first 6 years, we was 36-40 on a winning team with an ERA+ of 100 over 692 innings. That 6-year stretch is probably not in the top 1,000 6-year stretches in history, and Koufax's HOF case is neither helped nor hurt by it. In a GOAT conversation, I think we can agree to simply ignore it.
So the GOAT case for Koufax must be made entirely based on his other 6-year stretch, in which he was 129-47 (.733; team was .526 with other pitchers) with an ERA+ of 156 over 1,633 innings. And that is one hell of a 6-year stretch.
How about Randy Johnson? In Johnson's best 6 years, he was 119-33 (.783; team was .529 with other pitchers), with an ERA+ of 189 over 1,457 innings. Koufax has Johnson on innings pitched by about 30 innings a season, but if you credit Johnson with those extra 30 innings a season, and assume he was the worst pitcher in MLB history for those innings, he still has a better 6-year peak than Koufax. And where we agreed to ignore the rest of Koufax's career, Johnson has seasons outside of his 6-year peak where he led the league in ERA+. seasons with 19-8 and 17-8 records, etc.
If we want to throw out the 99% of their careers spent trying to get to the postseason, and just look at the 1% of their careers spent in the postseason, we've got Koufax at 4-3 with a WPA of 1.51, and Johnson at 7-9 with a WPA of 1.43. If you have the strength and determination to will yourself to see a significant difference - significant enough to wipe out the enormous gap in their regular season records - then I can't stop you. But I don't; they were essentially postseason equals, and Johnson's better peak and thousands of additional innings pitched create a wide gap that I see no way to close.
And I used Johnson just because everyone is more familiar with him. Had I used Lefty Grove, it would have looked even worse for Koufax. There is no legitimate case for Koufax as the GOAT.
You have to be a mathematician to keep up with these baseball threads. Damn, my head hurts.
perk- Maddux definitely one of the greats.
The two guys I most enjoyed watching pitch during my life have been Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux.
Of course I remember watching Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Jim Palmer, Steve Carlton etc. but in my younger
days I just didn't appreciate how good they were. I wanted to see home runs back then. LOL.
Accepting for the sake of argument that this is all true, it still isn't helpful for comparing players unless you put numbers to it. For an average player who spends 99% of his career in the regular season and 1% in the postseason, what are the correct weights? Surely you're not saying that regular season records get thrown out (100% postseason), so what is the proper weight? And what is the measurement(s) that you're using to evaluate postseason performance? Batting average? Slugging average? WPA? What you seem to be doing is checking the postseason records of the players you like, seeing what those players did well in the postseason, and declaring that those are the metrics that matter. Whether you're doing that or not, what you have never done is lay out objective criteria for evaluating postseason performance, or how much weight we're supposed to put on it. Is hitting a lot of singles for the losing team more important than hitting a late-inning homer to win the game? If so, why? Does booting an easy grounder that costs your team a game detract from a player's offensive contributions? If not, why not? Is the World Series worth more than a CS, and a CS more than a DS? How much more? I'm thinking I can just back into the numbers that make George Brett come out the highest for the answers to all of the above, but if there's more to it than that, please let me know. You have to understand that when you characterize a WS MVP as a bedcrapper, it will not be immediately obvious to anyone what standards you're using.
Same here about the HR’s! I always thought Johnson, Maddox and Clemens were the best, I didn’t mention Clemens due to the PEDS though... I would say without question the most feared would be Randy Johnson lol
Yogi Berra said it was the most fun part of the season!
No!!! He was great when he was great, but his great career was way too short. In his youth, he was wild and unreliable. In his prime, he was too fragile.
Great? No question. GOAT? No way.
He did not win 200 games. He won 165 games, not even close. Four great seasons and one good season do not make you a GOAT.
Has anyone ever noticed when Stevek says 'case closed' the case gets reopened very quickly? LOL.
Only by those who do not know or do not understand.
I don't understand how ANYONE who knows baseball can call Koufax the GOAT.
Case re-opened and now really closed. ;-)
I don't think post season pressure got to many of these guys. They were the best of the best.
You could make the argument that the regular season could get boring, playing every day in sometimes what must have seemed like meaningless games.
I'm sure it's bad for the guys who suck, they don't want to be the one to lose a game. The guys mentioned here probably wanted the ball!
LET"S GO!
Some of you here may have heard of Mickey Mantle. If you haven't, allow me to inform you that his baseball cards are worth a lot of money. Especially his rookie card. In PSA 10 condition, it's one of the top valued cards out there.
Okay, now that you are informed a little bit about Mickey Mantle cards, now follow me here if you can...what all this means is that Mickey Mantle was a great ballplayer. And he happened to play in the 1963 World Series with Sandy Koufax as an opposing pitcher.
From a book on Sandy Koufax...Mickey Mantle after being struck out by Koufax stated to the Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro, "How the f* is anybody supposed to hit that s*?"
When a pitcher totally flusters a great hitter such as Mantle in that sort of way, well what else do you need to know about Koufax the GOAT?
BTW as far as Koufax's number of wins. I don't think the Dodgers of his time were the worst hitting team ever, but for sure they were pathetic. Can you imagine how many more games that Koufax would have won if he played for a team that had some decent run production? I'm not saying he would have surpassed Cy Young, but Koufax would have had a lot more wins, and that's also not debatable.
Also it's plausible that Koufax's arm would have held up better over time, allowing him to accumulate even more wins, if he didn't have to pitch so hard in so many close games because the Dodgers hitters usually had trouble producing runs.
The baffling thing about any debate on Koufax is some dopes out there believe that Koufax shouldn't even be in the Hall of Fame. Of course the reason for that isn't based on anything other than being a hater, and we all know it.
Debate if you wish the merits of Koufax being the GOAT, that's fine. But a debate on Koufax being in the Hall of Fame? Bullfeathers!
It’s even better when he adds “And it’s not even debatable” 😂😂😂
I would put Randy Johnson higher and put Sandy Koufax up along side Lefty Grove. It’s tough when you haven’t seen Grove, plank, Spahn, and Ford pitch, basing it on historians.
Sandy Koufax in Dodger Stadium has a case for GOAT (1.37 ERA). Everywhere else, career 3.37 ERA. When your splits are that ridiculous, you aren't in the discussion for greatest ever.
Now you're learning.
Sandy Koufax --- GFAST.
just for the heck of it and since everyone is focused on Sandy Koufax and his really good six years, I thought I would do a comparison of Sandy Koufax vs. Bob Feller for their initial first six years in MLB.
Bob Feller, Age 17-22.
107-54/.664 winning percentage.
3.23 era.
117 complete games.
1,233 k's.
Sandy Koufax, Age 19-24.
36-40/.473 winning percentage.
4.04 era.
22 complete games.
683 k's.
now, certainly Koufax had a rebirth or some type of conversion starting with the 1961 season because he flipped things around in one of the most amazing ways in all of MLB. Feller lost three years to Military Service but still maintained a winning percentage and era over his career close to this six year window though it seems clear that he "lost something" during those three years. what amazes me is the difference between the two in complete games.
each member can do the same for their "hero" but I think one thing is clear, to me at least. Sandy Koufax should be out of any GOAT conversation. he was a combination over his career of a below average pitcher and perhaps the best of his era. maybe we can agree that both offered a glimpse of what the best can look like for a brief time from either side of the hill.
I knew that, but didn't need to go farther that his 2324 innings pitched. That's simply not enough for a starting pitcher to REMOTELY be considered as a GOAT.
Anyone look at Spahn's complete games? He finished about 2/3 of the games he started for 15 years!
Let’s tell it the way it is, Koufax is a hero since he played for the Dodgers