The Decline Of 20-Game Winners: A Lack Of Quality Not Quantity

Last week, Padres’ Greg Maddux registered his 350 ^th win.  There’s a good chance we won’t see that again in our lifetime.  While I still hold to my earlier posts that 300-game winners are not dead yet , there is serious cause for concern with the disappearance of consistent, high quality starting pitching.

The timing of this post might be odd, with 13 major league pitchers already in the book with 6 wins but a Sunday afternoon watching Adam Eaton, the day after watching Maddux win #350, got me to thinking about the lack of pitchers in the game capable of winning 20 games.

First, I thought about the two major arguments put forth whenever talking about the lack of 20-game winners in the game today.  The first is the five-man rotation which limits the number of starts a pitcher will get during the year and the second being the restrictions put on pitchers with managers enforcing pitch counts more frequently to determine when to take starters out of the game and a willingness to turn the game over to the bullpen.

Obviously, reducing a pitcher’s starts will reduce opportunities so it’s hard to refute that argument.  Although when you take a look at this graph, a case can be made that there still should be a consistent number of 20-game winners.

The graph shows that since 1961, 42 of the 267 20-game winners had 35 games started and 121 had 35 or fewer games started, that’s almost half of the 20-game winners.  Today’s healthy top tier starters, thanks to a few days off mixed in, should start between 34-35 times in a season, which puts 20 wins as a reasonable target.  Granted, seeing 15 pitchers reach the magic number of 20 (like in 1969) doesn’t seem plausible, there were 7 20-game winners in 2001 and not one of them started more than 35 games. 

But what about pitch counts?  Surely, the trigger-happy manager who is quick to turn the game over to the bullpen has to be reducing a pitcher’s wins, right?  Not if you believe the Elias Sports Bureau.  They did a study, cited in a New York Times article last year , which showed the percentage of wins by starters had not changed much in the last 25 years.  From 2003-2007, starters were responsible for 70 percent of all wins in baseball.  Going back five years at a time, they were responsible for 70%, 70%, 69%, 69% and 70% of the wins.  So, even with pitchers throwing less innings and having to rely on bullpens to win the game for them, the starting pitchers were still getting the credit the same amount of time as they were 25 years ago.

If it’s not the drop-off in starts and it’s not the implementation of the pitch count, what’s the problem?  That’s where Adam Eaton comes into play.  Eaton had a special year last season.  He became the 7 ^th pitcher since 1901 to win 10 games with an ERA over 6.25.  Eaton failed to register a Quality Start (at least 6 innings and 3 or less earned runs) in his last 13 outings of the season.  Over the course of 30 starts, Eaton only had 8 Quality Starts and only twice put together streaks of consecutive Quality Starts (both 3 games long).  Compare that to Maddux whose longest streak in his entire career was 7 games without a Quality Start. 

And while the number of Quality Starts in baseball has not diminished drastically, a pitcher putting together long streaks of Quality Starts has.  From 1961-2007, there were a total of 221 streaks of 11 Quality Starts in a row by a starting pitcher.  While achieving a Quality Start in 11 consecutive games did not guarantee a pitcher 20 wins, a look at this graph indicates that as the streaks of Quality Starts went, so did the number of 20-game winners. 

A harder look at the past two seasons shows that only 5 pitchers achieved streaks of 11 or more Quality Starts although none of them achieved 20 wins and only one pitcher achieved the feat.  While this would seem to refute the argument, a look at those 5 pitchers performances, further helps it.

Danny Haren had the longest streak at 14 games early in the ’06 season but posted a 6-7 record and an ERA of 4.37 after starting off 9-2.  Mike Mussina posted a 7-1 record during his 12 Quality Start streak in ’06 but faltered and finished up 8-6 with a plus-4.00 ERA and Roy Oswalt’s streak of 12 spanned two seasons.

There were two players with streaks of 11 – C. C. Sabathia in ’07 who came close with 19 and Chris Capuano in ’06 who was 6-9 with a 4.61 ERA after starting off the season with 11 Quality Starts.

Other than Sabathia, none of the five were able to muster up the consistency needed to win 20 games and Sabathia fell just one short of the mark and he started 34 games and threw more than 100 pitches in 27 of them (and actually went 3-1 in the 7 games where he didn’t). 

By these numbers, it’s obvious Quality Starts and, in effect, quality pitching is down.  Quality Starts shouldn’t be affected by pitch counts or the number of games a pitcher starts yet the number is obviously trending down.  Going back the last five seasons, there were just 16 streaks of 11 Quality Starts.  Going back in increments of 5 complete seasons, it is the lowest group of 5 seasons.  Those five seasons also produced the lowest number of 20-game winners – 13.

While more research is necessary as there are some weak points in the argument and there may be a higher or lower streak number to look at, there is one thing that is certain; there is a deficiency in consistent quality pitching in the majors.  While you may not agree that it is not the sole factor in the reduction of 20-game winners, the data shows that this is a bigger factor than pitch counts and the effect that it has on a pitcher’s ability to reach 20 wins when combined with the research done by Elias Sports Bureau.

Look for more research on this in the future.  (Data accumulated through the use of the Play Index at www.baseball-reference.com )