A Baseball Weblog

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Win distributions for innings pitched and ERA

This article by Dave Allen got me thinking about something really simple.  If you took all games by starters over the past ten years and grouped them by a particular number of innings pitched, how many wins do they end up with?  It gave me an excuse to do a distribution:




Since 2001, there has only been one pitcher to win 20 games in fewer than 200 innings.  That was Pedro Martinez in 2002, and he just barely made it (199 1/3 innings).  The pitchers that won the fewest games with at least 200 innings pitched were Tanyon Sturtze in 2002 and Wayne Franklin in 2004, who both won only 4 games.  


In addition, here is the win distribution for the specific criteria that Allen mentioned in the article, 200 innings pitched with an ERA under 4:




Like Allen mentioned, the average pitcher that meets these requirements wins an average of 15 games.  Randy Johnson won 24 in 2002, which was the same year that both Curt Schilling and Barry Zito won 23.  At the "unlucky" end of the spectrum are Brandon Webb in 2004 and Matt Cain in 2007; they both had only 7 wins.

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