How Far They Have To Go...

Jayson Stark at ESPN.com posted an article this morning about how dominant Phillies' pitcher Cole Hamels has been this entire post-season, including a seven inning, five strikeout performance last night to win game one of the World Series.  By winning his fourth start in a single post season, Hamels joined the likes of Orel Hershisher, Randy Johnson, John Smoltz, David Wells and a few others (who will remain unnamed for purely spiteful reasons) to accomplish that feat.  Though Randy Johnson and Francisco Rodriguez have each earned five wins in a single post season, neither won five post season starts, and if the World Series goes to a game five, where Hamels would pitch, he could become the first pitcher in Major League Baseball history to do just that.

So many baseball writers and pundits (whatever pundits really are) use wins as a statistical measuring point, but then quickly downplay it's significance in light of ERA (earned run average), BAA (batting average against) and WHIP (walks and hits per inning).  You often see this argument during discussions about who should win the Cy Young when a pitcher who went 20-7 with a 4.10 ERA is taken out of consideration because of the high ERA, which is (apprently) grossly more important than the fact that in twenty games over the course of a season he pitched well enough to allow his team to win.

No, this is in no way a look back at the belief that Chien-Ming Wang was robbed of a Cy Young award in 2006 and 2007 because he won 19 games in each of them (the most of any pitcher in baseball over that time).  While I do agree that using wins as a statistical measuring point for a single season is a silly exercise, I think it is vitally important when measuring a player's career.  One of the great aspects of baseball is that single-season and career records that were made almost a century ago are still being chased today.  Babe Ruth hit 60 homeruns in 1927; Roger Maris one-upped him in 1961; Mark McGwire hit 70 in 1998; and Barry Bonds reached 73 in 2001.  In no other professional sport are these records as sacred and in no other sport are they still chased after with such fanfare and zeal.

There are perhaps three career milestones that are celebrated in baseball like no other in sports:

3,000 hits
500 homeruns
300 wins

The homerun mark may be increased in time, but 3,000 hits will always remain.  There are a number of current players who are in site of 3,000 (with high powered binoculars), including Yankee teammates Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, and those marks will be followed and celebrated when/if they occur.  No one doubts that we will see another player with 3,000 career hits.

300 career wins?  That's another story.  I have previously written about how I do believe there will be another pitcher who finishes his career with 300 wins, although I explain that it's highly unlikely and it certainly won't be multiple pitchers going after the mark.  My post itself was in response to an article by ESPN's Tim Kurkjian, who argued that Tom Glavine (who had just reached 300) could be the last pitcher in Major League history to accomplish that feat.  I used a bunch of VERY basic statistics comparing win totals and age of current young pitchers to their older contemporaries.  One note to make is that Randy Johnson finished this season with 295 wins and is fully expected to return until he reaches 300, so we'll consider everyone except the Giant Mullet.

The point of this post is not to try again to guess who might reach 300; quite the opposite actually.  I wanted to (kind of ) agree with Kurkjian and highlight some of baseball's best pitchers and note just how far away from 300 they are.  I am picking and choosing, obviously, but I wanted to show a list of pitchers who many (here it is again) writers and pundits consider to be at the top of the game right now:

Roy Halladay - 131
Roy Oswalt - 129
CC Sabathia - 117
Johan Santana - 109
Carlos Zambrano - 96
Josh Beckett - 89
Brandon Webb - 87
Jake Peavy - 86
Ben Sheets - 86
Scott Kazmir - 47
Victor Zambrano - 45 (sorry, I had to after Kazmir)
Cole Hamels - 38

Many could argue that this list contains (other than Victor Zambrano, of course) the best pitchers in Major League Baseball right now; and none of them are even half-way to 300.  Now it should also be noted that some of these guys are very young and have long careers ahead of them.  Depending on their teams, they can theoretically compete for another decade at least, with 15 wins in each season (the Mike Mussina method, if you will).  That gets most of them at least over 200 and some extremely close to 300.  Like I said, it's difficult, but not impossible.

In the end, this is simply a friendly reminder than when we're talking about the best pitchers in baseball today, it hardly means they are automatically destined for Cooperstown.