midsummer coast

by lboros on Jul 19, 2005 8:27 AM EDT in St. Louis Cardinals News

quick follow-up to yesterday's post re chris carpenter's dominance: a couple of people wanted to know how carp stacked up against johan santana, whose remarkable 2d-half run last season was downright gibsonesque: 18-2 with a 1.36 era over his last 22 starts, totaling 159.1 innings. in that span santana fanned 204 men (11.5 per 9 innings) while yielding just 80 hits (4.5 hits per 9).

carp hasn't done anything like that -- yet. but as miklasz noted today, carp's era over his last 12 starts is 1.37, nearly identical to santana's 1.36. if he keeps it up for another 10 starts, then we can talk. for now, let's simply add santana to the chart i ran yesterday -- and while we're at it, let's toss dwight gooden '85 into the mix:

	ip	h	r	er	bb	so	cg	sho	w-l	era
hershiser 88	55	30	0	0	9	34	5	5	5-0	0.00
drysdale 68	54	27	0	0	9	42	6	6	6-0	0.00
gibson 68	54	30	1	1	7	39	6	5	6-0	0.16
gooden 85	53	33	3	2	13	49	3	2	4-0	0.34
carpenter 05	50.2	20	2	2	7	54	3	3	6-0	0.36
santana 04	44	23	2	2	4	58	0	0	6-0	0.41
tudor 85	51.1	33	5	5	6	29	4	3	6-0	0.88

santana's right there in the mix; he loses points for not having pitched a single complete game, but the walk-strikeout and hit-strikeout ratios are phenomenal. as for gooden -- well, there's a benchmark that speaks volumes to guys my age: carpenter over the last couple of months has been pitching like the 1985 version of doc freaking gooden.

but let's not get too carried away with all this talk of carp's all-time greatness. here's a reality check that somebody posted at the p-d's cardinal forum:

For what it's worth (and obviously, this would never happen in a million years), if Carpenter were to make, say, 15 more starts, and throw complete game shutouts in every single one, his ERA still wouldn't be quite as good as Gibson's - 1.18 to Gibson's 1.12.

in other words: 10 dominating starts do not a gibson make.

more nice stuff about our pitchers: stl hurlers are all over the unorthodox pitching leaderboards posted a few days ago Beyond the Boxscore -- off-brand statistics with names like OPS Against, DIPS ERA, and Raw Efficiency. the post explains what they all mean, and they're interesting numbers. carp ranks about 5th in the league on most of these lists, not surprising -- but matt morris rates top-10 in several categories, as does al reyes on the relief side. definitely a worthwhile post, and the author doesn't have an agenda to push -- just presenting data.

re last night's game: walker stays hot, grud'k stays hot, the rookie gets a hit, and jim+albert score four runs per. morris shakes off a little rust, and the bullpen gets some work; trade deadline one day nigher and nothing shaking. milwaukee's got a nice young player in rickie weeks: .815 ops, 7 steals without a cs, only 22 years old . . . . but 8 errors in 30+ games at 2b? ah, youth. it's midsummer and life is good.