Quote:
Originally Posted by Déjà Bru
Wow, this is getting ridiculous with deGrom. ERA now down to 0.62. They're talking about Bob Gibson's record 1.12 ERA in 1968, the lowest mark of the live-ball era (since 1920). 
Here's a bit of a dampener, though. Through June 5, deGrom has started 9 games and pitched 58 innings. He has one complete game, a shutout. Using simple math, that projects to about 28 starts and 180 innings.
In 1968, Gibson started 34 games, completed 28 of them (13 shutouts) and pitched 304.2 innings.
Even if deGrom finishes with a lower ERA than Gibson (what qualifiers to they use for IP?), I have a feeling that comparing deGrom in 2021 to Gibson in 1968 is going to be apples and oranges because of the way the game has changed in the last 50 years. |
I mean when you get that length of time, it always is. We like to pretend that we can normalize the data in such a way that we can say with some certainty that "this player from today" would "perform like this 100 years ago" or vice versa, but we really can't.
We normalize in the way of hard numbers and stats.
Bob Gibson didn't have to deal with the current professionalism of the sport. By professionalism, I don't mean player conduct, more the amount of time and money that goes into player conditioning and analysis. You just can't really tease out what that means.
Take any player from the 1960s and they may just not work within the current culture of the game. We have actually seen this happen - back in the 1960s and 1970s when major leaguers went to Japan. Major Leaguers with a lot of talent would go there and last a few months. Not because they couldn't play baseball, but because they just really couldn't work within the vastly different climate. We like to think that these things are "gimmes" and that a Hall of Fame player would without a doubt rise to the occasion and adapt and still be a Hall of Fame player, but be honest, this gets down to very human qualities and we really don't know.
Put deGrom into 1910, and he or any current day pitcher just might not be able to contend with baseballs that would stay in the game for dozens of pitches, the cover loosening or even flying off the ball. Sure they might adapt. But it isn't hard to imagine that the skillset that makes them great today just couldn't work within the conditions of a different era of the game.
Probably even more so with today's players, as the drive for specialization will by its nature pigeon-hole them so that their value is driven by 3 or 4 things where they truly exceed. If the change in how the game is played knocks one of those things off the list because it just doesn't work with the way the game is played in 1910, you might have a radically different outcome.