It's more a metric like tennis rankings, right? It's purpose is to identify and weigh a pitcher's sustained success, then compare that to the rest of the world around them.
In that way, maybe it's part of the mystique surrounding starting pitchers.
On the other hand, how relevant to that are these ranks, really?
How do they compare across a career? Are they as simple as "if you pitch a lot you'll score better?" I didn't think so, but without looking, well, as the esteemed Yogi once said, In Baseball You Don't Know Nothing." So I dusted off some other code and have been having even more fun playing with a few careers.
The Subjects: For this little jaunt I've gathered the careers of five pitchers. They are Alaric Wullenweber (n all-time great at the end of his career), Hector Silva (currently #1 overall), Dirk Bessie (good young pitcher with an injury history), Phil Cole (another great veteran, but with injury history, too), and Paul Worboys (Bikini's second-year pitcher, who with only 35 starts under his belt is obviously just starting his career).
An Aside: I'll be presenting data here as if it is "career" data for the most part. However, my data set starts with 2057, which means for pitchers who debuted from that point on, I've got their entire story. But for a lot of the top guys I'm catching them mid-stream. So therein lies a point of a little controversy within some of the numbers. I'll try to comment on them as I get a reasonable chance. Ultimately, though, this little study has made me itch to take some additional time and compare pitchers for who I have an entire record of their careers to date.
Maybe next time.
35 Starts
Anyway, let's take a couple of looks. First, since Worboys has 35 starts, let's use that as the cutoff. Here are the running GS-Ranking Scores for each of those five pitchers over their first 35 starts on record.
Interesting, right?
Minus a brief stint where Cole catches him, Hector Silva is on top of the list through the whole affair, jumping out of the gate and growing at a furious rate. That dip between start 33 and start 34 is an off-season, is which every pitcher loses 25-40 points, depending on certain factors.
Phil Cole is pretty much right with Silva, but then disaster strikes on start #18. Almost a year and one Tommy John later, he's faded back to almost ground zero. But he gets back on the horse and charges up the curve at essentially the same rate he'd been at before. By Start 35, he's regained third position among these contestants.
Alaric Wullenweber is at the age where everyone suggests he might be ready to retire. It's 2057, though, and he's got four six seasons left in the tank. He's still effective, though, even after struggling in a few starts early in the year. This means that overall, he;s the least effective of the five until start 27, where he catches a stumbling Worboys. He makes his 33 starts, though. Start 34 comes after the off-season break, and in the first game of 2058at which point he's registering just below Cole.
Dirk Bessi has a stronger start than Worboys, and leads both Worboys and Wullenweber early. He's a solid pitcher, and a steady climber through start #33, where Silva comes back to the pack for a bit and Bessi almost catches him.
Paul Worboys has an atrocious first outing in 2062, not even good enough to score higher than the 300 point floor that the system gives starters. He makes steady progress, though, until start 22 or 23 he's looking very much like Bessi. Then Worboys flattens out. He made 30 starts before the team shut him down at the end of the season. We'll where he goes from here.
It's interesting, I think, to step back and just kind of take in the curves. Silva, for example, has a bit of a bump from start 18-20. Was he hurting? Did he just face tough opponents? Did the RNG just RNG him? It could be any and all. But there are stories here. Worboys's curve makes me want to go back and do a run at only guys who have started their careers since 2057, or maybe I should try to group them by cohorts across the board...judge Silva against other starters who debuted with him in 2053.
Full Careers
For a bigger picture, though, let's drop the 35 start criteria, and instead just plot the raw points from the start of each pitcher's recorded career and let them play outif nothing else, just to see hot the system works. Do pitchers just keep rising if they pitch, or do they stabilize out at a level?
The answer is...
Cool, right?
Note again that each sharp downturn is an off-season, where the scores reset to a degree.
From this data, though, it does seem that most pitchers kind of get to a place and they stay around that zone. Silva is a case in point, he's been mostly climbing until he hit about 550 ranking points at roughly start 125, and now, even 70 starts after that, is pretty stable around that level. Wullenweber's chart is a fascinating picture of a pitcher at the tail end of his career.
Bessi's curve shows the impact of a big injury on star young pitcheras does Cole's. We noted in the first 35 starts that he was on track with Silva, but you can see here that while he rose rapidly after his injury, he just never made it back to that ultra level that he appeared to be on pace for.
Summary
I started this by saying I wanted to see if I could find out what this little metric is good for. If nothing else, it was good fun for about an hour and a half ... so there's that. Seriously, though, I think this is a really interesting metric. I think it has valuenot from a predictive, who is going to have a better year, standpoint, but from the viewpoint of assessing relative worth of past performance. And, barring rating lumps or bumps, that's an interesting thing. The problem, of course, is that it's a bit of work to get these together. But I can see real life front offices getting these kinds of reports (in addition to a gazillion others) as they make decisions on who to give the big bucks to.
Ultimately, it would be cool if OOTP did this kind of thing.