Best lefty off all time? My vote is Koufax!

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Tabe

So a 20% jump in FIP is "ever so slightly"?

His home runs were up 40%. OPS was up 20%. Line drive% was up 33%. All that stuff says guys were hitting the ball hard off of him A LOT more than the previous year - and the rest of 1998 and the next four years.

Please specify the EXACT number of starts and/or innings to qualify as NOT a sample size. Just for grins.

p.s. Name-calling reflects poorly on you. Do better.

Irrelevant man. Once the ball leaves the bat, it has nothing to do with the pitcher, it's just dumb luck and coincidence, or a function of other factors beyond the pitcher's control such as fielding. BABIP is binary -- either it's a hit or it's not -- and the rest is meaningless. Besides, every number you cite suffers from small sample size and confidence interval issues -- only numbers that support the thesis that his first half was just random are reliable.

All pitchers are essentially fungible beyond their ability to strike batters out. Maddux is the same as any other 6K/9 pitcher you can name. Johnson's K's stayed up, so all the rest is noise.