Jack Morris
markj111
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in Sports Talk
Joe Posnanski on Jack Morris:
Pitching to the Score
Posted: September 12th, 2009
Every so often, I will think that if only I just can prove one seemingly meaningless thing — ONE THING — it could unlock doors and click the tumblers into place and bring peace to the cosmos. For a long while, that one thing I wanted to prove was that Dan Quisenberry was every bit as good a pitcher as Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter. I wanted to prove them because I liked Quiz, but more I wanted to prove something larger — that a pitcher with great command, enough sink to avoid home runs and induce double plays, and the baseball intelligence to almost never make a mental mistake can be legendary in this game. I have reams and reams of numbers and thoughts and essays about the subject of Quiz vs. Sutter — I could, within a month, put out a “Why Quiz Was A Hall of Famer” book that would sell roughly 26 copies.
Yeah … almost nobody cared.
Well, there’s something else like this … something else that I think about way too much. I believe if I (and others who have studied this and seem as obsessed about it) could just prove this point, this one point, could just make people see this single point, then maybe they would look at baseball in a whole different way. And maybe if they looked at baseball in a whole different way they would vote Zack Greinke the Cy Young, and put Bert Blyleven in the Hall of Fame, and love each other as people, and cross party lines to bring out nation closer, and so on and so on forth.
The thing I would like to prove: Jack Morris did not pitch to the score.
The trouble with writing about this (again and again) is that it sounds like a vendetta against Jack Morris himself, and I don’t mean it that way. Jack Morris was a fine pitcher. He was remarkable in that awesome Game 7, and he pitched a ton of innings through pain, and he was as reliable as a Volkswagen Bug. I have mentioned before that Morris never had a sub-3.00 ERA in his career — this in a pitcher’s era — and it’s true. But it’s also true that from 1979-88 his ERA was always between 3.05 and 4.18 — you knew precisely what you were going to get from Jack Morris year after year after year.
But he didn’t pitch to the score. He didn’t. He DID NOT. Pitching to the score, you already know, is a phrase about a pitcher who (almost mystically) will allow 1 run to a team which his own team scores 2, but will give up 7 runs when his team scores 8. This is the pitching version of “clutch hitting” — only it’s even more intense. Clutch hitting, after all, simply suggests that certain batters placed in key situations (late inning — tying run on second, winning run on third, tie score, whatever) will bear down and battle and hit the ball hard somewhere*. The clutching concept fits our mind so neatly — who doesn’t want to believe in the ability to be your best when the situation calls for it? — that even a futile 25-year search for clutch hitting in the numbers does not leave people discouraged. “Oh, clutch hitting exists, believe me. You just can’t see if with your head buried in those stats. Wake up and appreciate the beauty of Jeter!”
*This has nothing much to do with clutch hitting … but the other day I saw 22-year-old Cardinals rookie Colby Rasmus come up with the bases loaded in Milwaukee. He battled through an eight-pitch at bat — at one point he sliced a near double down the left-field line, and then he pulled a near-double down the right field line. Both were just foul, and Rasmus eventually struck out on a high fastball. But I walked away from that at-bat thinking: “That guy is going to be a big star.”
The point here is not clutch hitting, but pitching to the score — which if you think about for any length of time is a ludicrous concept. much more ludicrous than clutch hitting. How can someone really pitch to the score? You don’t KNOW THE SCORE when the game starts. You have NO IDEA if your team is going to score runs that day. To pitch to the score, you would have to basically never give up a run in the first or second inning, right? I mean, you would need those innings to find out if your team was going to go on a run-scoring rampage or if their bats would go silent.
To pitch to the score, you would need to have your team score the runs FIRST before you gave them up, right? I mean, if you give up seven runs, and your team scores three in the ninth to win, you didn’t pitch to the score did you? No, your team saved your butt. In order to pitch to the score, your team would have to score eight runs and then you would be thinking, “Well, la la la, I can give up some runs now.” Does this make any sense to anyone?
Well, of course it does. Apparently — according to a couple of brilliant readers — Al Leiter the other day was the latest in a line of a million people to talk about how Jack Morris pitched to the score. Morris — perhaps through no fault of his own — has become the Patron Saint of Pitching to the Score, and even smart guys and excellent pitchers like Al Leiter want to believe. There’s something about the long season of baseball that encourages players to believe in jinxes and superstitions and breaks evening out, something about the days turning to weeks turning to months that inspires this closely held belief that players don’t succeed because of talent or luck or even hard practice but because of character, because of a certain courage or gallantry or substance of the soul. Bob didn’t win the game because he’s a good pitcher. Bob won the game because he’s a winner.
So, there’s Jack Morris — he won 254 games with an untidy 3.90 ERA. It’s simply not enough for people to say: “Wow, to win that many games with that high an ERA (in a low-scoring era) he must have played one a lot of high-scoring and good teams.” No, many people need to believe there’s something about Morris — something that goes beyond durability and good offenses and a manager who kept calling him an ace — that allowed him to win so many games. He was mean. He was a competitor. He was ferocious. And he pitched to the score.
Only, he did not. He didn’t. He DID NOT pitch to the score. I mean, we live in a time when you can SEE THE NUMBERS. You can see them. You can go to Baseball Reference or retrosheet and put every one of Jack Morris’ starts into a spread sheet, and you can search those numbers, and you can see it …
When Jack Morris’ team scored 1 run, he was 5-49. OK? He won five times, 1-0, and lost 49 other times by scores ranging from 2-1 to 13-1. That’s an .093 winning percentage. Is this good? Is this pitching to the score? I can only go by Bert Blyleven, who is not yet in the Hall of Fame despite eye-popping career numbers. Blyleven’s flaw in the eyes of the voters seems to be that he wasn’t a winner, that statistics like ERA (3.31 — more than a half run better than Morris) and strikeouts (3,701 — fifth all-time) do not reflect his true self — his true self being a good but not great pitcher who could not raise his game when his teammates struggled and pull back and enjoy the ride when his teammates scored big.
Blyleven’s record when his team scored 1 run? You betcha: 15-65. That’s a .188 winning percentage — quite a bit better than Morris’. Blyleven won 10 more 1-0 games than Jack Morris.
How about when the team scores 2 runs? That is after all the essence of the pitch to the score cliche — “He’ll beat you 2-1, and he’s beat you 8-7.”
Morris’ record when his team scored two runs: 12-37 (.244 winning percentage)
Blyleven’s record when his team scored two runs: 24-57 (.296 winning percentage)
You will notice a couple of things here. One is the obvious — that Blyleven won a higher percentage of games when his team scores two runs or less. But two is that Blyleven’s teams quite scored two runs or less quite a bit more often. This is in part because Blyleven had a longer career. It’s also in part because he played on more teams that had trouble scoring runs.
What about the other end? Maybe Morris wasn’t as good as people say at winning low-scoring games, but is it true that his relatively high ERA is, in fact, just an indication that Morris would give up meaningless runs when his team scored a bunch. Did Morris have a huge number of 8-7 victories?
Of course not. When Morris’ teams scored eight runs, he went a gaudy 21-1. But that’s expected — Blyleven went 25-2 in his eight-run games. Thing is he only won one game 8-7 — that was Toronto against Detroit in 1992, when Morris was at the end of his career.*
*His teams won 8-7 seven other times when Morris pitched, but he did not pitch long enough in those games to get the decision.
In case you are wondering, Morris only won one 7-6 game. He only won one 9-8 game. These sorts of games just don’t happen very much, even if people bring them up in imaginary ways all the time.
Pitching to the score is such an opaque concept that it’s hard to find much clarity in it. Does it happen that a pitcher realizes “Hey, it looks like the guys are going to have a tough time scoring runs today” and then adjusts his strategies (goes for more strikeouts or challenges hitters early in that at-bat to avoid walks or whatever)? I’m sure it does happen. I’m sure there are times when a manager tells a pitcher “We really need a scoreless inning here,” and the pitcher delivers that scoreless inning, and everyone marvels at the inner fortitude of that pitcher? Sure. Jack Morris in Game 7 of the World Series shut out the Atlanta Braves for 10 innings, one of the great World Series performances. It so happened that John Smoltz also threw a shutout for eight innings … would Morris have given up runs had his Twins scored 13?*
*And what does it say about him if he did?
But at the end of the day, inner fortitude doesn’t win baseball game. Scoring more runs than your opponent wins baseball games. By giving Jack Morris these mythical superpowers, it seems to me, people are not adding joy to the game. They are subtracting reality. Pitchers ALWAYS try to keep the other team from scoring. That’s their job. And Zack Greinke isn’t 13-8 because he lacks the ability to pitch to the score. He’s 13-8 because his team sucks. Bert Blyleven didn’t have a .534 career winning percentage because he found cryptic ways to position his strikeouts and shutouts and brilliant performances so that that they didn’t help his teams win. He had a .534 winning percentage because very often his teammates didn’t score many runs. Jack Morris does not have a 3.90 ERA in a low-scoring era because he pitched to the score. He had a 3.90 ERA because he gave up a lot of walks, threw a lot of wild pitches and gave up a lot of home runs.
I have heard from many of you who insist that I’m wrong about Zack Greinke, that I’m wrong saying he will win the Cy Young Award with a low number of wins, that I’m wrong to insist that because Greinke is so clearly the best pitcher in the American League* the (now enlightened) Baseball Writers will give him the Cy Young Award, which (after all) is supposed to go to the best pitcher in the American League.
*His ERA is a now almost a half run better than anyone else’s, he still leads the league in WHIP, home runs per nine and shutouts and is second in strikeouts, complete games and strikeout-to-walk ratio.
Maybe I am wrong. But I don’t want to believe that. If it was close — if there was another pitcher with a great record who was pitching ABOUT AS WELL as Greinke, well, yeah, I could see giving the other guy the award. If there was another guy with a great record who was pitching ALMOST AS WELL as Greinke, well, yeah, I could see it even then. But there is nobody close. The only case to be made is that some other pitcher with a significantly higher ERA and more baserunners allowed and more home runs given up, that one of these other pitchers had some sort of supernatural ability that Greinke lacks, some sort of moral fiber that Greinke lacks (and that only the human eye can observe). And that’s my whole point. Forget moral fiber. Consider baseball. Jack Morris did not pitch to the score.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pitching to the Score
Posted: September 12th, 2009
Every so often, I will think that if only I just can prove one seemingly meaningless thing — ONE THING — it could unlock doors and click the tumblers into place and bring peace to the cosmos. For a long while, that one thing I wanted to prove was that Dan Quisenberry was every bit as good a pitcher as Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter. I wanted to prove them because I liked Quiz, but more I wanted to prove something larger — that a pitcher with great command, enough sink to avoid home runs and induce double plays, and the baseball intelligence to almost never make a mental mistake can be legendary in this game. I have reams and reams of numbers and thoughts and essays about the subject of Quiz vs. Sutter — I could, within a month, put out a “Why Quiz Was A Hall of Famer” book that would sell roughly 26 copies.
Yeah … almost nobody cared.
Well, there’s something else like this … something else that I think about way too much. I believe if I (and others who have studied this and seem as obsessed about it) could just prove this point, this one point, could just make people see this single point, then maybe they would look at baseball in a whole different way. And maybe if they looked at baseball in a whole different way they would vote Zack Greinke the Cy Young, and put Bert Blyleven in the Hall of Fame, and love each other as people, and cross party lines to bring out nation closer, and so on and so on forth.
The thing I would like to prove: Jack Morris did not pitch to the score.
The trouble with writing about this (again and again) is that it sounds like a vendetta against Jack Morris himself, and I don’t mean it that way. Jack Morris was a fine pitcher. He was remarkable in that awesome Game 7, and he pitched a ton of innings through pain, and he was as reliable as a Volkswagen Bug. I have mentioned before that Morris never had a sub-3.00 ERA in his career — this in a pitcher’s era — and it’s true. But it’s also true that from 1979-88 his ERA was always between 3.05 and 4.18 — you knew precisely what you were going to get from Jack Morris year after year after year.
But he didn’t pitch to the score. He didn’t. He DID NOT. Pitching to the score, you already know, is a phrase about a pitcher who (almost mystically) will allow 1 run to a team which his own team scores 2, but will give up 7 runs when his team scores 8. This is the pitching version of “clutch hitting” — only it’s even more intense. Clutch hitting, after all, simply suggests that certain batters placed in key situations (late inning — tying run on second, winning run on third, tie score, whatever) will bear down and battle and hit the ball hard somewhere*. The clutching concept fits our mind so neatly — who doesn’t want to believe in the ability to be your best when the situation calls for it? — that even a futile 25-year search for clutch hitting in the numbers does not leave people discouraged. “Oh, clutch hitting exists, believe me. You just can’t see if with your head buried in those stats. Wake up and appreciate the beauty of Jeter!”
*This has nothing much to do with clutch hitting … but the other day I saw 22-year-old Cardinals rookie Colby Rasmus come up with the bases loaded in Milwaukee. He battled through an eight-pitch at bat — at one point he sliced a near double down the left-field line, and then he pulled a near-double down the right field line. Both were just foul, and Rasmus eventually struck out on a high fastball. But I walked away from that at-bat thinking: “That guy is going to be a big star.”
The point here is not clutch hitting, but pitching to the score — which if you think about for any length of time is a ludicrous concept. much more ludicrous than clutch hitting. How can someone really pitch to the score? You don’t KNOW THE SCORE when the game starts. You have NO IDEA if your team is going to score runs that day. To pitch to the score, you would have to basically never give up a run in the first or second inning, right? I mean, you would need those innings to find out if your team was going to go on a run-scoring rampage or if their bats would go silent.
To pitch to the score, you would need to have your team score the runs FIRST before you gave them up, right? I mean, if you give up seven runs, and your team scores three in the ninth to win, you didn’t pitch to the score did you? No, your team saved your butt. In order to pitch to the score, your team would have to score eight runs and then you would be thinking, “Well, la la la, I can give up some runs now.” Does this make any sense to anyone?
Well, of course it does. Apparently — according to a couple of brilliant readers — Al Leiter the other day was the latest in a line of a million people to talk about how Jack Morris pitched to the score. Morris — perhaps through no fault of his own — has become the Patron Saint of Pitching to the Score, and even smart guys and excellent pitchers like Al Leiter want to believe. There’s something about the long season of baseball that encourages players to believe in jinxes and superstitions and breaks evening out, something about the days turning to weeks turning to months that inspires this closely held belief that players don’t succeed because of talent or luck or even hard practice but because of character, because of a certain courage or gallantry or substance of the soul. Bob didn’t win the game because he’s a good pitcher. Bob won the game because he’s a winner.
So, there’s Jack Morris — he won 254 games with an untidy 3.90 ERA. It’s simply not enough for people to say: “Wow, to win that many games with that high an ERA (in a low-scoring era) he must have played one a lot of high-scoring and good teams.” No, many people need to believe there’s something about Morris — something that goes beyond durability and good offenses and a manager who kept calling him an ace — that allowed him to win so many games. He was mean. He was a competitor. He was ferocious. And he pitched to the score.
Only, he did not. He didn’t. He DID NOT pitch to the score. I mean, we live in a time when you can SEE THE NUMBERS. You can see them. You can go to Baseball Reference or retrosheet and put every one of Jack Morris’ starts into a spread sheet, and you can search those numbers, and you can see it …
When Jack Morris’ team scored 1 run, he was 5-49. OK? He won five times, 1-0, and lost 49 other times by scores ranging from 2-1 to 13-1. That’s an .093 winning percentage. Is this good? Is this pitching to the score? I can only go by Bert Blyleven, who is not yet in the Hall of Fame despite eye-popping career numbers. Blyleven’s flaw in the eyes of the voters seems to be that he wasn’t a winner, that statistics like ERA (3.31 — more than a half run better than Morris) and strikeouts (3,701 — fifth all-time) do not reflect his true self — his true self being a good but not great pitcher who could not raise his game when his teammates struggled and pull back and enjoy the ride when his teammates scored big.
Blyleven’s record when his team scored 1 run? You betcha: 15-65. That’s a .188 winning percentage — quite a bit better than Morris’. Blyleven won 10 more 1-0 games than Jack Morris.
How about when the team scores 2 runs? That is after all the essence of the pitch to the score cliche — “He’ll beat you 2-1, and he’s beat you 8-7.”
Morris’ record when his team scored two runs: 12-37 (.244 winning percentage)
Blyleven’s record when his team scored two runs: 24-57 (.296 winning percentage)
You will notice a couple of things here. One is the obvious — that Blyleven won a higher percentage of games when his team scores two runs or less. But two is that Blyleven’s teams quite scored two runs or less quite a bit more often. This is in part because Blyleven had a longer career. It’s also in part because he played on more teams that had trouble scoring runs.
What about the other end? Maybe Morris wasn’t as good as people say at winning low-scoring games, but is it true that his relatively high ERA is, in fact, just an indication that Morris would give up meaningless runs when his team scored a bunch. Did Morris have a huge number of 8-7 victories?
Of course not. When Morris’ teams scored eight runs, he went a gaudy 21-1. But that’s expected — Blyleven went 25-2 in his eight-run games. Thing is he only won one game 8-7 — that was Toronto against Detroit in 1992, when Morris was at the end of his career.*
*His teams won 8-7 seven other times when Morris pitched, but he did not pitch long enough in those games to get the decision.
In case you are wondering, Morris only won one 7-6 game. He only won one 9-8 game. These sorts of games just don’t happen very much, even if people bring them up in imaginary ways all the time.
Pitching to the score is such an opaque concept that it’s hard to find much clarity in it. Does it happen that a pitcher realizes “Hey, it looks like the guys are going to have a tough time scoring runs today” and then adjusts his strategies (goes for more strikeouts or challenges hitters early in that at-bat to avoid walks or whatever)? I’m sure it does happen. I’m sure there are times when a manager tells a pitcher “We really need a scoreless inning here,” and the pitcher delivers that scoreless inning, and everyone marvels at the inner fortitude of that pitcher? Sure. Jack Morris in Game 7 of the World Series shut out the Atlanta Braves for 10 innings, one of the great World Series performances. It so happened that John Smoltz also threw a shutout for eight innings … would Morris have given up runs had his Twins scored 13?*
*And what does it say about him if he did?
But at the end of the day, inner fortitude doesn’t win baseball game. Scoring more runs than your opponent wins baseball games. By giving Jack Morris these mythical superpowers, it seems to me, people are not adding joy to the game. They are subtracting reality. Pitchers ALWAYS try to keep the other team from scoring. That’s their job. And Zack Greinke isn’t 13-8 because he lacks the ability to pitch to the score. He’s 13-8 because his team sucks. Bert Blyleven didn’t have a .534 career winning percentage because he found cryptic ways to position his strikeouts and shutouts and brilliant performances so that that they didn’t help his teams win. He had a .534 winning percentage because very often his teammates didn’t score many runs. Jack Morris does not have a 3.90 ERA in a low-scoring era because he pitched to the score. He had a 3.90 ERA because he gave up a lot of walks, threw a lot of wild pitches and gave up a lot of home runs.
I have heard from many of you who insist that I’m wrong about Zack Greinke, that I’m wrong saying he will win the Cy Young Award with a low number of wins, that I’m wrong to insist that because Greinke is so clearly the best pitcher in the American League* the (now enlightened) Baseball Writers will give him the Cy Young Award, which (after all) is supposed to go to the best pitcher in the American League.
*His ERA is a now almost a half run better than anyone else’s, he still leads the league in WHIP, home runs per nine and shutouts and is second in strikeouts, complete games and strikeout-to-walk ratio.
Maybe I am wrong. But I don’t want to believe that. If it was close — if there was another pitcher with a great record who was pitching ABOUT AS WELL as Greinke, well, yeah, I could see giving the other guy the award. If there was another guy with a great record who was pitching ALMOST AS WELL as Greinke, well, yeah, I could see it even then. But there is nobody close. The only case to be made is that some other pitcher with a significantly higher ERA and more baserunners allowed and more home runs given up, that one of these other pitchers had some sort of supernatural ability that Greinke lacks, some sort of moral fiber that Greinke lacks (and that only the human eye can observe). And that’s my whole point. Forget moral fiber. Consider baseball. Jack Morris did not pitch to the score.
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Comments
Jack Morris did not pitch to the score.
His ERA was on the high side because he gave up a lot of runs...regardless of the score.
He had better records than pitchers superior to him, because he played for a team that routinely scored more runs.
Jack Morris did not 'let up' when he was up by a lot of runs. This so called 'letting up' is NOT a valid reason for his high ERA totals. Yet many STILL believe it is!
If people would just recognize him for what he was...a VERY GOOD pitcher who pitched a lot of innings, instead of creating some myth of 'pitching to the score' to explain why he gave up so many runs, it would make the writers head stop banging so much, and actually create more joy out of the beauty of baseball(instead of creating meat-headedness).
If somebody really believed that pitching to the score was possible, then buy a cheap terrible offensive team that scores two runs a game, and then spend all your money on your staff on guys like Jack Morris's reputation, and they will only give up one run or less in their games, and you will almost always win, because after all...They know how to pitch to the score. BUT....
When Jack Morris's team only scored one run, his record was 5-49.
When Jack Morris's team only scored two runs, his record was 12-37.
When Blyleven's team only scored two runs, his record was 24-57.
Oh, and Zack Greinke is the best pither in the AL despite having less wins than others. But the knuckle draggers still insist that he is no worthy of being voted the best pitcher because he doesn't have enough wins. They don't care to look at why he has less wins....his team's offense doesn't score enough runs for him. They would rather walk around being stupid their whole life.
Clifff notes of the Cliff notes...
Jack Morris did NOT pitch to the score. That is a myth. He simply was bailed out by a good offense, more so than other pitchers around the league. This is why he had more wins than superior pitchers.
Jack Morris did not, he DID NOT, did NOT pitch to the score.
When Jack Morris's team only scored one run, his record was 5-49.
When Jack Morris's team only scored two runs, his record was 12-37.
When Blyleven's team only scored two runs, his record was 24-57.
Morris, Koosman, Bob Friend, all good pitchers no matter what the score was. The somewhat significant differences in win totals caused mostly because the teams the were on scored significantly different amounts of runs
<< <i>Twenty-seven paragraphs to tell us something we already knew?
Morris, Koosman, Bob Friend, all good pitchers no matter what the score was. The somewhat significant differences in win totals caused mostly because the teams the were on scored significantly different amounts of runs >>
At least Morris is not on jail.
He's 100% correct on Greinke!
<< <i>Can we get some Jack Morris Cliff Notes? That post is hurting my eyeballs. >>
LMAO Bill, You must have been reading my mind. +1 for LSU Bill
brian
<< <i>And Zack Greinke isn’t 13-8 because he lacks the ability to pitch to the score. He’s 13-8 because his team sucks. >>
'Tis true. Grienke should win the Cy Young, and I think CC is in second place by a wide margin. Besides, CC already has a Cy that could have gone to Beckett, so to hell with him!