Pinch Hit: Rotational History

Monday, November 01 2010 @ 10:07 PM EDT

Contributed by: Matthew E

Jonny German lays it all out for us. I love looking at stuff like this.

A recent thread asked Bauxites for their wild visions of the future, Starting Pitching Division. This struck me as a fool’s errand into the unknowable, but it inspired me to trawl through the things we do know, the history of starting pitching in Toronto. I wanted to visualize it so I made a nifty chart.

The general rule for inclusion in the chart is that a pitcher has to have been one of the top 6 Blue Jay starters (by games started) in a single season. Once a pitcher is in on the basis of one qualifying year, the rest of his Blue Jay career is generally included as well. There is a common exception of not including seasons spent entirely in the bullpen or with less than 50 innings pitched. There are various exceptions where I've included pitchers who wouldn't have merited it if they only spent a single season in Toronto, i.e. Stieb and Hentgen's swan-song returns.

To help convey how big of a role each pitcher played in each season, I formatted their names according to how many innings they pitched. While I was at it I embedded info about how good the team was overall.

100 or fewer innings    76 or fewer wins    8 point font
100 to 150 innings        77 to 81 wins    10 point font
150 to 200 innings        82 to 86 wins    12 point font
More than 200 innings     87 or more wins    12 point font, bolded

I pro-rated the shortened 1981, 1994, and 1995 seasons so that the formatting remains consistent throughout.

A few thoughts / notes:

I specifically kept Stieb, Hentgen, and Halladay in the leftmost column even though it meant a hiccup in the general formatting (more on that later), but otherwise the columns should NOT be interpreted as “#2 starter, #3 starter,” etc.
Rather, the priority was for a pitcher to appear in one column only for his entire Blue Jay career.
David Wells is the only starter to have 2 significant runs in Toronto, though David Cone also appears twice and was a part of a championship team. It’d be fun to see how Tony Fernandez would look in a chart like this
No two “top 6” Blue Jay starters have ever had the same surname. Could Zach Stewart be the one to break that up?
Look for Roy Halladay to return to Toronto in 2015. Hopefully he’ll stick around for more than a single year and be more than a shadow of his former self

The most interesting part of the chart is how clearly it shows that the pitching history of the Blue Jays can be quickly described as 3 eras: Stieb, Hentgen, and Halladay. "Wait a second", you'll say, "That clearly doesn't include the present day". True enough. And the geezers will no doubt remind us that there was A Time Before Stieb. So let's also name the Pre-Competitive Era and the Future. How do those look if we draw lines through the chart?

To my thinking Stottlemyre is the most problematic pitcher in this scenario; he's something of a poor answer to "How do you transition from Stieb to Hentgen?"
Carpenter also straddles a line, but in my mind he clearly belongs in the more recent era as he'll forever be linked to Halladay and Escobar from their days as prospects
History may eventually tell us that Marcum and Litsch belong in the Halladay era. I'm hopeful that it's not true for Shaun, less confident about Litsch. I like Purcey's chances of having a decent career, but the line reflects that his starting days are behind him

The burning question, naturally, is "What shall we call the next great era of Blue Jay hurlers?". Romero may be the safest bet, but it could conceivably be Morrow, or Cecil, or even Drabek (which has a nice angle to it given the trade that brought him to Toronto). Marcum is another possibility, but it seems more likely that in this sort of discussion he’ll go down as a good transitional guy.

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Thanks to Jonny!

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