Happy Pedro Day!

Status
Not open for further replies.

seantoo

toots his own horn award winner
Jul 16, 2005
1,308
Southern NH, from Watertown, MA
Tyrone Biggums said:
Wow! Look at the murderers row the Sox were trotting out. I have done an effective job of removing Buford and Husky from my memory bank..:but you sir...you brought them back! Stunned they scored 3 runs that game with that offense. But yeah good times all around. Pedro was the best I've ever seen pitch and I saw Ryan at Fenway quite a bit growing up.

I'm also pretty sure that was the only multi hit game in the career of Wilton Veras
8 that season with 3 three games included in that total.
And in 2000 he had 13 that season with 2 three hit games included in that total.
 

IdiotKicker

Member
SoSH Member
Nov 21, 2005
10,784
Somerville, MA
timlinin8th said:
This is true, but you have to also wonder if rivalry fatigue exists because these two teams play each other too much with the current scheduling? That level of passion and excitement over 19+ games is exhausting... and it became harder and harder to get "amped up" for those series.
 
At least for me, that's not the case.  We play Tampa 19 times a year and each time I get this feeling where I just want to throw a chair through my TV.
 

crystalline

Member
SoSH Member
Oct 12, 2009
5,771
JP
kieckeredinthehead said:
I don't, but I am just as certain as folks saying this was/wasn't the best game ever pitched, and I was hoping somebody would dig up good evidence for my statement :/
My intuition agrees with you but someone would need to run numbers.

30 games is 100+ PAs and - here's the kicker - you're summing over 9 players to predict the performance of the lineup. Not every player plays every day so I'd guess the sample size is increased by a factor of 7. 700 PAs should be a good estimate of the mean performance of a lineup. And the 30 day sample has the advantage of less susceptibility to hidden temporal variation that might occur over 3 years but wash out in the three year mean.

It's a testable question but I lean slightly toward you.
 

HriniakPosterChild

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 6, 2006
14,841
500 feet above Lake Sammammish
timlinin8th said:
This is true, but you have to also wonder if rivalry fatigue exists because these two teams play each other too much with the current scheduling? That level of passion and excitement over 19+ games is exhausting... and it became harder and harder to get "amped up" for those series.
 
Bud likes it this way. Reminds him of the old days when you had 8 teams in each league and rivals played each other 21 times. (Of course, they played the St. Louis Browns 21 times, too.)
 

kieckeredinthehead

Member
SoSH Member
Jun 26, 2006
8,635
crystalline said:
My intuition agrees with you but someone would need to run numbers.

30 games is 100+ PAs and - here's the kicker - you're summing over 9 players to predict the performance of the lineup. Not every player plays every day so I'd guess the sample size is increased by a factor of 7. 700 PAs should be a good estimate of the mean performance of a lineup. And the 30 day sample has the advantage of less susceptibility to hidden temporal variation that might occur over 3 years but wash out in the three year mean.

It's a testable question but I lean slightly toward you.
 
Unfortunately, a single game really is a tiny sample and has much more to do with the day's starting pitcher than anything else - as Woods and Pedro both showed. If you look at monthly splits, though, at least for the 1998 Houston Astros, 3 year averages do a much better job than April performance at predicting May performance. Like, R2  of 0.28 vs. 0.75. So, unless somebody wants to dig up a clever way to test this on single game performance, I withdraw my statement. Astros were a pretty good lineup.
 

OCST

Sunny von Bulow
SoSH Member
Jan 10, 2004
24,483
The 718
bosockboy said:
Man I miss that intensity of the rivalry.
The piss has really been taken out of the Yankee fans. 2004 was the first nail in the coffin, having to root for ARod did a lot of damage, and the new stadium finished the job. That stadium is like a Trump building - gaudy, tacky, way too expensive, and completely soulless. Yankee fans are nowhere near as raucous on the new park.

I had just moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn the day of the Pedro game. I didn't have cable yet so I listened to it on the radio surrounded by boxes of my stuff, going nuts the whole time.
 

absintheofmalaise

too many flowers
Dope
SoSH Member
Mar 16, 2005
23,331
The gran facenda
Ben Lindbergh wrote a nice letter from Pedro's 2000 season to Kershaw on Grantland
 
 
Dear Clayton,
Pedro Martinez’s 2000 season here. I heard you were having a pretty good year, so I took a look at the stats, and wow: We have so much in common. We’re almost identical ERA brothers! Me at 1.74, you at 1.70. Both of us leading our leagues in most of the major categories. It’s only natural that people keep comparing us. For instance, I saw this thing on the Washington Post’s website where someone used some “fancy stats” to say you were having the best season of any pitcher since 1995. Actually, that article didn’t exactly compare us, so much as it implied that you’ve been pitching better than I did at any point during pretty much my whole career. But it did briefly mention me once, so that was nice to see.
There are so many parallels between us, like that we both spent our special seasons in such historic, beautiful ballparks. My season was so magical in part because it was set against the backdrop of beloved Fenway Park, with its distinctive 302-foot distance down the right-field foul line and its equally iconic 310-foot line in left, where, as you’ve probably noticed, there’s a giant wall that turns routine fly balls into doubles and homers. And you, dealing in Dodger Stadium, with its dense, homer-suppressing seaside air and its perfectly symmetrical outfield walls that yield such predictable bounces. Just gems of baseball, both of them.
 

ivanvamp

captain obvious
Jul 18, 2005
6,104
Kershaw 2013-2014:  1.77 era, 202 era+, 2.15 fip, 0.88 whip, 9.6 k/9
 
Incredible.  Tremendous.  Impressive.
 
Now...
 
Pedro 1999-2000:  1.90 era, 265 era+, 1.79 fip, 0.83 whip, 12.5 k/9
 
So…..yeah.  
 

Soxfan in Fla

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 30, 2001
7,187
Kershaw's awesomeness, as mentioned in that article, has been in Chavez Ravine and some of the other canyons of the NL West. Of course Kershaw had the benefit of the NL with pitchers batting and is doing it in a suddenly pitcher friendly era. Pedro did it in one of the most hitter friendly eras in baseball history in the toughest hitting division, the AL East.
 

redsahx

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 26, 2007
1,455
LF Pavillion
absintheofmalaise said:
Ben Lindbergh wrote a nice letter from Pedro's 2000 season to Kershaw on Grantland
 
I've been out of the loop this past week. Was that Josh Planos piece for the Washington Post part of a joke? Someone actually wrote a piece talking about how Kershaw was having the best season since Maddux in 95? Like just skipped right over 1999 and 2000?
 

iayork

Member
SoSH Member
Apr 6, 2006
639
ivanvamp said:
Pedro 1999-2000:  1.90 era, 265 era+, 1.79 fip, 0.83 whip, 12.5 k/9
I wondered (actually, I didn't really wonder, but I wanted to prove it) which pitcher had the best season, relative to their peers. I just used ERA, so whatever, and I looked at all pitchers from 1900 to the end of 2013 who pitched more than 150 innings in a season.  Here's what the box plots look like:
 
There were 8540 pitcher-seasons that qualified, and the  top ten are:
[tablegrid= Top ten pitcher seasons by standard deviation from league aveage ] Name Year Team ERA MLB season avg ERA ERA StDev Diff from avg ERA StDevs from avg ERA 1 Pedro Martinez 2000 BOS 1.74 4.468 0.863 -2.728 -3.16 2 Greg Maddux 1995 ATL 1.63 3.949 0.768 -2.319 -3.02 3 Dolf Luque 1923 CIN 1.93 3.732 0.625 -1.802 -2.883 4 Dutch Leonard 1914 BOS 0.96 2.812 0.647 -1.852 -2.861 5 Pedro Martinez 1999 BOS 2.07 4.484 0.846 -2.414 -2.855 6 Kevin Brown 1996 FLO 1.89 4.268 0.842 -2.378 -2.824 7 Mark Eichhorn 1986 TOR 1.72 3.855 0.759 -2.135 -2.814 8 Greg Maddux 1994 ATL 1.56 3.784 0.798 -2.224 -2.788 9 Billy Pierce 1955 CHA 1.97 3.72 0.631 -1.75 -2.772 10 Carl Hubbell 1933 NY1 1.66 3.528 0.675 -1.868 -2.766 [/tablegrid] 
 
 
So, unsurprisingly, Pedro has the best season (by this measure, whatever) since 1900, being 3.16 standard deviations better than the average that year.  The only surprise to me was that his 1999 season ranked 5th, not second.  Maddux in 1995 was an absolute monster, and the only pitcher who comes close to Pedro's 2000.
 
Top 50 list here; Pedro is there 4 times (his 2000, 1999, 1997, and 2003 years), Maddux twice.  Koufax in 1966 ranks 30th by this measure.
 
How many of you remembered Kevin Brown's 1996? I sure didn't.  
 
(Tables, damn it, OK, thank you Phrenile )
 
Status
Not open for further replies.