By Limey
Editor’s note – This article originally appeared on AstrosConnection.com on February 23, 2000.
Ray Lopez made one of the most crass comments I’ve heard about a pitcher. He said that Mike Hampton was much better than Jose Lima, as T2 was the ace and so faced the other team’s #1 starter. Lima, he maintained, was the #3 pitcher and so faced only the other team’s #3 guy. I’ve heard this repeated in the TZ, although it’s usually jumped on with gusto by those of us that know better. In addition to getting the rotation wrong (Shane Reynolds was the opening day pitcher and thus the Astros #1), Knight conveniently ignored the fact that off days, injuries and rain outs quickly make a mockery of the #1 vs #1 theory.
“So,” I thought to myself, “what was the relative quality of mound opposition faced by the Astros starters?” And my first Bleacher Rap was conceived.
Polarized shades and vomit bag at the ready, I braved the Astros website and picked off the starting match-ups for every regular season game. From this information I created a matrix. “What is the matrix?” I hear you ask. Well Neo, it is a list of which Astros starters faced what opposing starters, and how many times. Then I added each opposing pitchers’ 1999 ERA, and used this to generate some very innuresting stats…
So you’re dying to know which starting pitcher had the easiest ride, right?
Here’s the average ERA for opposing pitchers faced by each Astros starter:
4.47 Elarton 4.57 Miller W. 4.67 Reynolds 4.69 Bergman 4.81 Lima 5.10 Holt 5.21 Hampton
OK, admit it. How many of you were wishing hard for T2 to be at the bottom of that list? Well there it is – Mike Hampton got the gravy train starts. But that’s not the whole story. These are just averages. How do we know that Mike didn’t get all aces and all scrubs, making these averages meaningless? Well here’s some other things that come out (revisionist spin alert):
– Lima started four games against pitchers with sub-3.50 ERA’s. Hampton? One. (Reynolds – 3; Sean Bergman, Chris Holt and Scott Elarton – 2 each). Yep, the fewest tough match-ups on the staff for Hampy.
– Lima only started seven times against pitchers with ERA’s over 5.50. Hampton? Ten. (Reynolds – 8; Bergman – 5; Holt – 11 and Elarton 2). Only Tabu went up against more crap starters than Hampton, by one.
“Yeah”, I hear you say in NYC, “but Hampton saw off the studs” Really? Well guess who Mikey’s sub-3.50 guy was? Brian Boehringer! He ducked the following random sample of pitchers that the Astros saw in 1999: Ashby, Bottenfield, Brown, Colon, Glavine, Harnisch, Maddux, Millwood, Ritchie, Rogers, Smoltz, Stottlemeyer, Tomko and Valdes. OK, so he did out-pitch Curt Schilling (in Curt’s first start after coming off the DL, if I recall correctly).
Look at it another way. The ten best starters the Astros saw last year were (in order ranked by 1999 ERA) Gagne, Millwood, Thompson, Brown, Smoltz, Boehringer, Wickman, Burnett, Ritchie and Parris. Mike faced two of them, Boehringer and Parris (ranked 6th and 10th respectively). Lima saw Boehringer too, as well as Millwood (2nd) and Ritchie (9th) twice. That’s four! Reynolds got Gagne, Brown (as did Holt) and Ritchie.
So what does all this mean? Probably not a whole helluva lot. There’s no allowance for the quality of the relief pitching that may have been faced. There’s no home-road split. And we all know that a sub-3.50 ERA pitcher can give up 5 runs in 4 innings just as a 5.50 plus ERA pitcher can shut you down for 8 (especially if he’s a rookie that we’ve never seen before).
Mike Hampton is a very good pitcher, and will likely continue to be so for many years. His personal 2.90 ERA in 1999 speaks to this. However, very good pitchers don’t win 20 games very often, that’s what makes them so special. Something like that takes some luck, and maybe the combination of easier match-ups and superior run support. But then, didn’t El Loco win 20 games too? He had three more tough opponents and three fewer scrubs to face than T2 – a six game swing – as well as less run support!
So if Hampton’s season was special, how more special was Jose’s?