.... but can he grow a sweet stash ?

My co-workers must have been sick of hearing about my new blog by the end of the day. I was like a 5 year old on Christmas morning showing all his relatives the new toy he just ferociously unwrapped. I showed it to literally any one who would listen. Friends who used to play and enjoy watching baseball. Friends who didn't like baseball and wouldn't even know what an RBI was. One buddy expressed his disdain for ERA+ and suggested Gossage was a HOF'er simply because of his bad ass facial hair. But mostly everyone was receptive and I thank them for that. I also received a lot of valuable feedback and some interesting (and random) topics suggestions for future post.

Speaking of sweet facial hair, one friend brought up Catfish Hunter, apparently just to test my knowledge of the player. I have to admit I didn't know much. Besides his bristly upper lip and funky nickname, I didn't know much about the quality of his playing career. So just who was Jim "Catfish" Hunter ?

Anecdotally Awesome

A quick read through of his Wikipedia page reveals some interesting tid bits:

• only the 4th (and last) American League pitcher to win 20 games in a season for 5 consecutive seasons (1971-1975).


• Held Thurman Munson plus Hall of Famers Hank Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, Harmon Killebrew, Mickey Mantle, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Carl Yastrzemski to a .211 collective batting average (107-for-506)


• Music legend Bob Dylan penned an ode to him with "Catfish" (which was unreleased until 1991 and ironically Hunter hated the song)

I hadn't nary a clue about any of the above and began to get more curious on exactly how good he was when evaluated by some of the more advanced metrics.

Gone Fish'in

To try to determine how good Hall of Famer Catfish really was, we need to dig deeper. Lets compare him to pitcher A.

Catfish: Career ERA + 104 with two seasons ERA+ above 140, three seasons above ERA+ 130 and his next best was two seasons of ERA+ 114. In 7 of his 15 seasons he actually had an ERA worse than league average

Pitcher A: Career ERA+ of 118 with two seasons ERA+ above 150, six seasons with ERA+ above 140, and a total of 14 seasons of ERA+ above 120. In only 4 of his 22 year major league career did he register an ERA worse than average.

Catfish: WARP3 of 71.5

Pitcher A: WARP3 of 146.1

Catfish: Runs above average (RAA) of -51 (that's right over the course of his career he was 51 runs worse than the average pitcher)

Pitcher A: RAA of 169

Catfish: 3449.3 innings pitched

Pitcher A: 4970.0 innings pitched

It seems very clear that pitcher A was vastly superior to Catfish Hunter. He pitched many more innings that were of much higher quality. In fact it's not even close. As mentioned earlier Catfish is a Hall of Fame member (though he barely squeaked in with 76.27% of the required 75% vote in 1987). While Hunter was very "famous" (even the most casual fan has heard of Catfish Hunter) the numbers show he is a border line Hall of Fame player at best. I personally would not have voted for him. His reputation, aided by the cool nickname, and intimidating glare certainly trumped his playing ability. While it would seem unfathomable that player A would not also have a bronze bust of him in Cooperstown NY, that is precisely the case.

Maybe Player A needed a cool mustache.