The Sports Stats Guy

The 1970s saw many fantastic, HOF pitchers at the height of their powers. Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Jim Palmer, Bert Blyleven, Steve Carlton, Fergie Jenkins, Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton, all were in their primes and had their best seasons during the decade. Seaver was the leader in ERA+ with 138 (the statistic basically adjusts for the run-scoring environment of the year and the pitcher's ballpark, similar to OPS+), followed by Palmer with a mark of 137 and Blyleven at 130. Ryan was never the greatest at preventing runs, with an ERA+ of 113 for the decade (primarily because he walked more batters than anyone, and second place's Mike Torrez was 563 behind Ryan's mark of 1515), but when you talk about pure domination, I'm not so sure anyone was all that close to Nolan. From 1970-1979, Ryan struck out an astonishing 2,678, led the majors in Strikeouts per 9 innings with 9.8, and allowed the fewest hits per 9 with a minuscule mark of 6.32. It was the decade of the Ryan Expres...

Joe Morgan hates sabermetrics. I mean, he really, really, really hates sabermetrics . He has made clear his absolute disdain for them, so much so that several analytically-inclined guys actually started a blog called "FireJoeMorgan.com" (the site wasn't really designed to fire Morgan, and it's no longer active, but a history of the site can be found here ). He doesn't like WAR, FIP, wRC+, or really any "new-fangled" statistic. If Morgan sounds like one of those old-school types who decry how the modern game is played and accounted for, that's a pretty accurate assessment. With how much invective he's hurled against sabermetrics and their use in baseball, one would think that a reason, perhaps the primary reason, that Morgan loathes them so much is that their backward-looking nature undermine his own career accomplishments (we'll come back to this in a little). Morgan wasn't thought of some random ballplayer back in his day: he won back...

Disclaimer: I got the idea from this blog post here, as I thought it was a neat breakdown and wanted to expand on the topic: http://tylersthinktank.blogspot.com/2014/06/williams-vs-dimaggio.html Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams are two absolute titans in the history of baseball. They shared the stage for 10 seasons, from 1939-1951, with three missed years in the primes due to World War II. There is no denying that both of them were superstars, and they each won multiple MVPs in their careers. DiMaggio may have been the most popular and recognized sports figure in the entire country during his peak, and while Williams was more of a loner, he definitely commanded any room he stepped foot in. They put up amazing numbers during a time when baseball was by far the most popular sport in the United States, so it would make sense that these two would have a rivalry of sorts. Debates about sports are as old as sports itself, and the battle between DiMaggio and Williams was no differen...