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Posted By: Rhett Yeakley

Don't be too hard on ole' Joe. He was basically Sandy Koufax without Sandy's "crappy years" attached to his statistics. Sandy was an incrediblly dominant pitcher for 4 years, a pretty good pitcher for 2, and a pretty crappy pitcher for 6. Of course I listed them in reverse order of when they happened. His first 6 years he had a 36-40 record. You take away those years and you have something close to Woods' career numbers. Woods was also a good hitter and lengthened his career playing in the field.

Peter, players that don't have lengthy careers get killed when we overanalyze the #'s, but players like Billy Williams, Tony Perez, Don Sutton and Phil Neikro somehow are made to look good. Longevity is great but it isn't everything, especially when pitchers of Wood's era were asked to do things that their body just couldn't withstand (the innings pitched by those guys are rediculous compared to modern players) and there was no such thing as Tommy John surgery.

-Rhett