The following guest post was written by Brendan Bingham

With Felix Hernandez having won the AL Cy Young Award and Bert Blyleven’s recent election to the Hall of Fame, it seems that wins and losses have fallen out of favor as the primary measures of a pitcher’s success.  However, we remain a long way from ignoring these stats altogether.

Vulture is a term applied to a relief pitcher who collects victories, often not so much through his own pitching prowess, but opportunistically, thanks to the timely late-inning hitting of teammates.  There is an air of deprecation in the use of this term.  In one scenario, the relief pitcher enters the game with his team losing.  This vulture is in a relatively invulnerable position.  If he pitches poorly, perhaps his ERA suffers, but he cannot be charged with the loss.  But if his team scores enough runs to take the lead, he stands to be credited with the win, sometimes after only a short and unspectacular time on the mound.  In a second – perhaps more sinister – scenario, the relief pitcher enters the game with the lead, but fails to hold it.  At least this vulture is at risk of taking the loss.  However, with his team’s rallying to retake the lead, he “earns” the victory, an unsavory accomplishment worthy of its being named for the large carrion-eating bird.

How common are vulture wins?

With the expansion and increasing specialization of relief pitching, we’re hearing more and more about vultures.  Modern day 25-player rosters are typically composed of no less than 11 pitchers, more often 12, sometimes 13.  In contrast, having 10 pitchers on the roster was the norm in the 60s and 70s.  The 4-man starting rotation has become a thing of the past.  Starters are pitching fewer innings and very few complete games.  Relief pitching has been broken down into three or four distinct sub-disciplines, and relievers as a group are pitching more innings.

The table below shows the number of wins collected by starters and relievers since 2000.  Please note that “% Starter Wins” is not a traditional winning percentage.  For the purpose of this analysis, losses and losing pitchers are ignored.  For each game played, we’re simply asking – was the winning pitcher a starter or a reliever

These percentages are remarkable in their lack of variation.  With only minor year-to-year changes, the win in about 70% of MLB games in the past decade was credited to the winning team’s starting pitcher.

It is reasonable to expect that the frequency of vulture wins has increased over time, given the transformation that has taken place in the bullpen, or at least that was my expectation going into this analysis.  However, a quick survey of every tenth year from 1920 to 1990 shows evidence of change, but not where I had expected it.  Indeed, wins by relief pitchers were once less common, but you have to go back to 1950 to see a noteworthy departure from the 70/30 split of recent years.  Before looking at these numbers, I had expected the percentage of wins by starters to have been higher in 1960, if not also in 1970.  Bear in mind that I am not including all years from these earlier decades; rather I am trusting that one year in ten is representative of the decade, always a dangerous assumption.

Traditionally, pitchers were expected to finish what they started.  Relief pitchers were often called upon only when the game was out of reach.  That’s an admittedly simple-minded view of relief pitching, but perhaps close enough to accurate for the 20s, 30s and 40s.  While it is only in the past two decades that our recognition of relievers’ contributions has included election to Cooperstown, it was during the 1950s that some well-known relievers emerged.  Two examples are Clem Lebine, who had double-digit relief wins for the ’55 and ’56 Brooklyn Dodgers, and Elroy Face, who performed the same feat for the ’59 and ’60 Pirates.

How important are vulture wins to team success?

We need look no further than the past season to see that vulture victories are sometimes key to team success, but more often not.

In the NL, Cincinnati’s league-leading relief wins were important to their making the post-season.  Based on starting pitcher wins, St Louis would have won the Central division.  The Giants also beat out the Padres due in part to their posting more relief victories.  Meanwhile, the Phillies, who finished the season with the most total wins, had 27 wins by relief pitchers, a good but not outstanding total.  Many teams, including the division-trailing Washington Nationals, posted vulture win totals similar to Philadelphia’s.

In the AL, the Texas Rangers benefited from posting a league-leading 32 relief wins.  They would have finished third in their division based on starter wins alone.  However, the other three post-season teams put up unspectacular numbers of vulture wins.  Moreover, the Baltimore Orioles, with the second-worst record in the league, had more relief wins than the division-leading Tampa Bay Rays or the wildcard Yankees.

In general, the number of wins by starters is a better predictor of team success than wins by relief pitcher.  Poor teams and good teams often have similar numbers of relief pitcher wins.

Bottom Line

Although modern-day relief pitching has become very specialized, its primary purpose is to preserve starting pitchers’ wins, not to generate wins from the bullpen.  Closers are the most highly respected (and best paid) relievers, and the key stat by which they are judged is saves, not wins.  Wins from the bullpen are great, but they’re unpredictable, and when a team generates lots of them, the accomplishment speaks more to the team’s clutch hitting than its pitching.  If you had to summarize the Texas Rangers’ pennant-winning season with one phrase, I suspect you would more likely choose “timely late-inning hitting” than “dominant relief pitching.”

Post Script

It was my interest in the distribution of starter and relief pitcher wins that prompted my prediction about Denny McLain (see Graham’s Jan 27^th post).  On the reasoning that 1) the percentage of wins by starters doesn’t change much between eras and 2) in any era, there is only one winning pitcher per ballgame, I asserted that McLain’s 30-win season should survive his being transported to another era, provided he winds up on a winning team and is given the opportunity to pitch as much as he did in 1968.  Sound reasoning, or so I thought, but stat converter says otherwise.  1968 remains a special year for pitchers, particularly Denny McLain.

This guest post was written by Brendan Bingham. Email him at Brendan@calibertherapeutics.com

I’m pleased to present another first guest post, this time from Brendan Bingham, a regular reader and fellow member of the Society for American Baseball Research. Brendan recently offered to write something here, and I had no idea his approach would be so analytical, research-driven, or thorough. Enjoy.

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Trades in baseball are made looking forward but judged looking backward.  The MLB Network recently broadcast a program listing the 40 most memorable trades in major league history. Brock-for-Broglio, Robinson-for-Pappas, and the multi-player deal that sent Joe Morgan to Cincinnati were among the famous trades profiled. Absent from the top-40 list was a transaction that has always fascinated me, the February 1972 trade between the Cardinals and Phillies that sent Steve Carlton to Philadelphia in exchange for Rick Wise. That deal featured two solid starting pitchers at a time when both were involved in contract negotiations. The trade greatly affected the fortunes of both men and both teams.

Carlton had better career numbers at the time. As a result, perhaps the deal looked a bit one-sided, although not nearly as one-sided as it turned out to be. Carlton, having posted one 20-win campaign in his five full seasons with St. Louis, was a very good pitcher, but did not have the look of someone on the fast track to Cooperstown. Everything changed when he got to Philly, where he thrived, earned the nickname Lefty, and anchored the pitching staff of the team that became frequent NL East winners in the late 70s and early 80s and World Series champions in 1980.

Evaluating this trade from Philadelphia’s point of view is simple. Carlton accumulated 63.5 WAR with Philadelphia from 1972 to 1986 before a late-career shuffle among four teams for which he mostly underperformed. Meanwhile, Wise accumulated 21.5 WAR after being traded for Carlton. Not bad career numbers when coupled with Wise’s pre-1972 WAR, but as far as the trade goes, it’s big advantage to Philly at +42 WAR. Viewing the trade from the Cardinals’ side of the fence, the picture is more complicated. The numbers are not merely reversed. No, they’re much worse than that; the post-trade WAR discrepancy between Carlton and Wise greatly underestimates just how badly things turned out for St. Louis.

The Cards saw a limited benefit from Wise (8.4 WAR), as he spent only two seasons in St. Louis before being packaged with Bernie Carbo in a trade with the Boston Red Sox for Ken Tatum and Reggie Smith. Tatum did not play for St. Louis before being traded early in the ’74 season, and Smith played only three years in St. Louis, contributing 8.1 WAR to the team, before being traded to the LA Dodgers for Joe Ferguson and two other players. Much like Wise, both Carbo and Smith still had some productive years ahead of them when they left St. Louis.

In the mid-70s, the Cardinals forged a total of nine transactions involving Wise, Smith, and the players acquired for them (15 players in all, collectively the “progeny” of the Carlton trade). In the end, however, Wise and Smith were the only acquisitions from whom St. Louis derived any measurable benefit. All others either never played for the Cardinals or played only briefly and contributed only fractional (and mostly negative) WAR values.

The Cardinals’ cost-benefit summary is shown in the table below. Please note that the positive post-St. Louis WAR of Carbo and Mike Vail are included in the calculation as costs, because these players were St. Louis property traded away in multi-player deals, bundled with Carlton progeny. However, this calculation still provides a conservative estimate of the cost of the trade to St. Louis, because the post-Cardinal WAR values of Wise, Smith and the other Carlton progeny do not figure in the analysis, since these players were traded for players of equal value (at least in the eyes of the Cardinal front office) whose St. Louis WAR values do figure in the analysis, grouped under “Others.”

For those who prefer a more qualitative and less sabermetric recap, the Cardinals’ situation can be summed up like this: future Hall of Famer Carlton was traded for a significantly lesser player in Wise. Wise was traded for Smith, which might have been okay if it had been a 1-for-1 deal, but it wasn’t; St. Louis gave up a valuable player in Carbo. Smith was then given away in exchange for players that on balance were no better than the ones that could have been called up from the minor leagues.

The WAR stats suggest that the Cardinals missed out on 56 team wins as a result of having traded Carlton. Squandering not only Carlton’s future value, but also that of Wise, Carbo, Smith, and Vail provides a negative, if narrow, view of the Cardinal organization’s ability to evaluate talent during the 1970s. I would hope that there must have been other deals that turned out better. However, it is perhaps no coincidence that the late 70s were an uncharacteristically low period for the Cardinals, an organization that typically experiences more success than failure.

As the table below indicates, though, missing out on Carlton’s contributions did not cost the Cardinals any championships during the late 70s, since they finished far enough off the pace each year from ’75 through ‘80 that even Lefty’s pitching talents would not have been enough to land them in the NLCS.

The 1980s tell a different story. The Cardinals (with one WS championship and two other NL pennants) rebounded to become one of the two dominant MLB teams of that decade (along with the Dodgers and their 1981 and 1988 World Series championships). If St. Louis had not made the Carlton-Wise deal, they might have seen even greater success during the 80s. In both ’85 and ’87, the Red Birds lost seven-game World Series. At that late point in his career it is questionable whether Carlton could have improved the Cardinals’ chances, but perhaps even a few well-timed late-inning outs from an aging Lefty might have tipped the balance in one or both of those series.

Somewhat less speculative, however, is the value that Carlton could have brought to the 1981 Cardinals. In that strike-altered season, the Cards failed to make the playoffs despite their having the best combined record in the NL East. St. Louis finished a game and a half back in the first part of that quirky split season and a half game back in the post-strike session. Carlton’s 5.4 WAR in 1981 would have served the Cardinals very well indeed. Looking backward, had St. Louis (with Steve Carlton on board) made the playoffs in 1981, they might have had the opportunity to knock off the Dodgers, something that would only have cemented their later claim on team of the decade.

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This was a guest post written by Brendan Bingham. Email Brendan at Brendan@calibertherapeutics.com