Was Yu Darvish’s competition really much worse than that of previous perfect game tossers?
On Tuesday night, Texas Rangers starter Yu Darvish nearly became the 24th pitcher in Major League Baseball history to throw a perfect game, pitching 8 2/3 innings before allowing a slow creeper up the middle for his first hit. Since that night, Darvish has been recognized for his amazing outing to kick off the 2013 campaign, and now the baseball pundits believe he is showing the stuff that made the Rangers invest so much money into him in the first place.
But in the minds of the experts, The Whirling Darvish’s performance comes with one caveat: that game, after all, was against the Houston Astros.
In other words, credit Darvish all you want, for throwing a perfect game is quite a feat. But also understand that it shouldn’t be that big a deal when it comes against whom many believe is baseball’s most inferior team. It’s quite the backhanded compliment — “Good pitching, Darvish. Now let’s see you do it against somebody good!”
By now you’ve read the article posted Wednesday about Darvish’s near-perfect game (and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it). There’s no sense in rehashing anything here that has already been said there. But all of this talk about strong pitching and weak opposition makes a blogger wonder about the 23 guys who did throw a perfecto. Can we truly make an argument that the value of a pitcher’s perfect game can be reduced based on the capabilities of the competition he defeated? Let’s find out:
For the purposes of this argument, I considered not the pitcher who threw the perfect game, but the team who was defeated. Thanks to the good folks at Baseball Reference and Fangraphs, I am comparing the offensive merits of the losing team to all others in the majors. I want to see if those defeated were considered among the worst in the majors at four main statistics — batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging (or “the slashes,” as I prefer to call them) and team WAR. This may be a flawed study, but I believe it will prove a valid point.
And since I want to be thorough and diligent in my research (and it’s 11 p.m., my wife is at work, and both of my daughters are asleep), I’m going to look at the offensive statistics of all 23 losing teams. I’ll throw out the two perfect games thrown in 1880 — there were only eight teams then, so … you know … small sample size. This should be fun.
After calculating the results, here’s what we can glean about the 21 teams on the bad side of perfect games:
- Four teams were in the lower half of the majors in all four measured categories. Another six of them were in the lower half of at least three of the categories.
- Six teams were in the lower third of the majors in at least three categories.
- Three teams were in the bottom five in the major leagues in all four categories, including two of the teams defeated in perfect games last season! Philip Humber threw a perfect game for the White Sox against the Mariners. Seattle was dead last in the majors in the three slashes, but somehow finished 26th in WAR. Matt Cain‘s game against the Astros was not much better. The ‘Stros finished 28th in OBP, 29th in average and slugging, and last in WAR.
- Most baseball fans know that the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays are the team who has had the most perfect games against them with three (more on that in a minute). An interesting fact, however, is that Tampa was one of the better teams in the Major Leagues in these respective seasons. Their loss against Felix Hernandez last year was not great; they finished 10th in WAR, but 20th in slugging and 27th in average. But in 2009, when they were defeated by Mark Buehrle, they ranked in the top 10 in three of the measurable categories, and they ranked top ten in two categories again in 2010 when Dallas Braden defeated them.
- The Dodgers are an interesting story themselves. They too have had three perfect games against them (two as Los Angeles, and one as Brooklyn). The loss in Brooklyn is perhaps the most memorable, as it took place during the 1956 World Series. That year, they were third in WAR, and top five in OBP and slugging. They took another perfect loss against Tom Browning of the Cincinnati Reds in 1988, which happens to be the last time they won a World Series. However, their offense was in the bottom half of the slash stats.
- Perhaps the best teams to be perfected were the 1968 Minnesota Twins and the 1922 Detroit Tigers. The ’68 Twins were bested by Catfish Hunter and the Oakland Athletics. That year, the Twinkies were in the top ten in all three slashes. In 1922, the Tigers ranked top five in all four measured stats (granted, there were only 16 teams in the majors, but that’s still quite a feat).
If you’d like, I’m happy to show my work in an Excel spreadsheet. Just email me at losstangeles@gmail.com, and I’ll happily share (or follow me on Twitter @losstangeles; I’m up to six followers now, so it’s getting real). But the overall point in this exercise is that the majority of teams who were victims of perfect games were at best mediocre, and in some cases the worst of the worst.
So should we discredit Yu Darvish’s most recent accomplishment? That didn’t happen to Cain or Humber last year — they were tremendously recognized for their success. But the media’s focus on the dismantling and rebuilding of the Houston franchise has pointed a spotlight on the weaknesses of that team. As a result, any pitcher with remarkable success will lose some of the glimmer and shine on the feat. Sadly, that’s a disappointing — and frankly unfair — view to take toward the greatest individual accomplishment a Major League pitcher can earn.