Quote:
Originally Posted by Déjà Bru
Very good post. I can see that if Gibson and deGrom traded eras, both would still be above average pitchers but neither would necessarily dominate.
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I think that the best we could ever do with numbers is to say:
We've determined that Gibson's value to his team in 1968 was X
We've determined that deGrom's value to his team in 2021 was Y
If X and Y are fairly close, we can say with some certainty that Gibson and deGrom had similar value to their teams in winning baseball games.
You could even say something along the lines, that if someone who has the value of deGrom today pitched in 1968, a pitcher of that value
might look like Bob Gibson.
None of those logical statements even come close to saying that if we actually took deGrom out of 2021 and Gibson out of 1968 and swapped them that we have a good indication of what numbers they would produce.
I think we can create something that's good enough for OOTP or good for fun fan-banter, but there's just way too many unknowns within the game and outside.
Without getting too butterfly-effect, I think these are all very plausible situations that wouldn't remotely be covered by statistical analysis.
1. Put deGrom in 1910 and throwing maximum velocity doesn't top out in the high nineties due to the culture of the game dictating that pitchers need to go 9 innings most of the time. With his other skills, he becomes a major league shortstop or third baseman. He might not become a pitcher in that era that strikes out more than the average guy.
2. Put Gibson in 2021 and he plays for the Toronto Raptors because he was also a talented basketball player and the popularity and money in pro basketball has grown considerably since the 1950s when he would have been making a choice.