Final game of the World Series. Johnson, Mathewson, Cy Young?

[darwinbulldog]

Originally Posted by rats60

Who would ever have enough WS innings to satisfy you? Ford has 146. Matty is 2nd at 101 and he has an ERA under 1. Wajo has 50. That is only 14 less than Jim Palmer for 10th all time. I am not surprised that many want Wajo. He is the greatest regular season pitcher. If he had pitched in the WS in his prime, would he be the greatest WS pitcher too? We don't know. I am just taking what I see as a sure thing. If I couldn't have Matty or Koufax, I would definitely take Wajo for a game 7.

You'd want, ballpark (see what I did there), a sample of 100 games to assess how good the pitcher is likely to be in games outside of that sample. Obviously you can't get that just from World Series games, so you should look at how they do in the regular season over their career rather than how they did in the postseason over their career. The differences between pitching in the regular season and pitching in the post-season are essentially negligible, whereas the difference in predictive validity between a sample of say 6 games versus 600 games of data are enormous.

Don't believe me? Pick a number between 100 and 500. 220 let's say. Then look up how the pitcher performed in games 220 through 225 of his career. See if you can tell which numbers belong to Greg Maddux versus Jamie Moyer versus Dennis Martinez vs. Randy Johnson. You could probably match Randy Johnson with the right K total, but with W/L%, WHIP, ERA+? You can't tell much from 6 games.