Post by kinsm on Jul 21, 2016 20:30:56 GMT -5
The Big Red Machine Turns 40
JULY 20, 2016
BY: ALEX REMINGTON
www.hardballtimes.com/big-red-machine-turns-50/
Quick: can you name a starting pitcher from the 1976 Big Red Machine?
On the 40th anniversary of one of the most iconic teams ever, it’s pretty remarkable to recall how anonymous the pitching staff was.
The Cincinnati Reds, with just the 11th-best ERA- in baseball that year out of 24 teams, won 102 games in the regular season and swept their way through the playoffs. They make it clear: Sometimes a mediocre pitching staff does not stand in the way of a world championship.
That’s certainly a comforting thought to fans of the currently first-place Orioles, who haven’t won it all since 1983 — the 10th-longest drought in baseball. The 2016 Orioles’ team ERA- of 99 and their FIP- of 101 ranked 15th and 16th in baseball as of Tuesday night.
The Big Red Machine didn’t really need to throw the ball very well because of their offense. And what an offense it was: future Hall of Famers at catcher (Johnny Bench), first base (Tony Perez), and second base (Joe Morgan), All-Stars at shortstop (Dave Concepcion), third base (Pete Rose), left field (George Foster), and right field (Ken Griffey), and a Gold Glover in center (Cesar Geronimo). Bench was the MVP in 1970 and 1972, Rose was MVP in 1973, Morgan was MVP in 1975 and 1976, and Foster would be MVP in 1977.
In that division, they could’ve had Kyle Davies and Braden Looper at the top of their rotation and they’d have won 90 games. That lineup just about guaranteed them a playoff spot. And because there were only 24 teams and two divisions then, there were only two rounds of the playoffs, the League Championship Series and the World Series. It might be harder for such an unbalanced team to march through the playoffs nowadays, when there are three rounds plus the Wild Card game.
(Here’s the answer to that sort-of trivia question. They had a six-man rotation: Gary Nolan, Pat Zachry, Fred Norman, Jack Billingham, Santo Alcala and Don Gullett. Zachry and Nolan were both rookies, and Zachry was the 1976 Rookie of the Year. To younger fans, Gullett may be the best-remembered now, having served as the Reds’ pitching coach from 1993 to 2005.)
I made a list of all 111 World Series-winning teams. Exactly seven of them had an ERA- below the league median:
2014 Giants*
2012 Giants
2011 Cardinals*
2006 Cardinals
2003 Marlins*
1987 Twins
1913 Athletics
* Wild Card
Four of those occurred in the last 10 years. Prior to 2006, only three other championship teams had an ERA- below the league median: the ’03 Marlins, the ’87 Twins and the 1913 Philadelphia Athletics, who were likely the worst-pitching team ever to win it all.
Now, the 1987 Twins are routinely regarded as one of the worst regular-season teams of any stripe to ever win the World Series. As late as Aug. 28, they were a tied with Oakland for the AL West lead with a record of just 67-63, only four games over .500 and 10 games worse than the AL East-leading Blue Jays, who were at 76-52. They finished with 85 wins, the second-lowest win total by a World Series-winning team, and the lowest until the 83-win Cardinals of 2006 managed to win it all.
The 2003 Marlins were so bad out of the gate that they fired skipper Jeff Torborg in early May, when their record was a miserable 16-22, replacing him with 72-year-old Jack McKeon, who hadn’t managed in more than two years.
The 1913 A’s weren’t like that. They were dominant. They just couldn’t pitch.
Those A’s had an ERA- of 112, third-worst in baseball that year. The team’s “ace” was probably 37-year-old Eddie Plank, a future Hall of Famer, and he pitched 242.2 innings with a 91 ERA-, reasonably better than league average. Their best pitcher was their closer and swingman, the future Hall of Famer Albert “Chief” Bender, who started 21 games and saved 13 more and finished the year with an ERA- of 78, 15th-best in baseball.
It’s not like the rest were complete duffers. They were just incredibly young. Rookie Bob Shawkey threw 111 innings and went on to win 195 games, and 19-year-old Herb Pennock twirled 33 innings in the very early stages of what would be Hall of Fame career. But they were far from their primes in 1913.
And most of the rest of the staff was far worse, including 20-year old Bullet Joe Bush, who threw 200 innings with a frightful ERA- of 135. (He got better, to paraphrase Monty Python. He went on to win 196 games in a 17-year career.) The 21-year-old Byron Houck was even more wretched than that, as his 176 innings of a 146 ERA- showed. The workhorse was 24-year-old Boardwalk Brown, who led the team in starts and pitched 235.1 innings with an indifferent ERA- of 104.
But that didn’t stop the Athletics from winning 96 games, finishing six and a half games ahead of the Senators, and taking down the Giants in five games to win the World Series. Those A’s were famous for the “$100,000 Infield”: first baseman Stuffy McInnis, second baseman Eddie Collins, shortstop Jack Barry and third baseman Frank “Home Run” Baker. Collins and Baker are in the Hall of Fame, and McInnis and Barry were quite good in their day. So was rookie Wally Schang, the part-time catcher, who is one of the best backstops not to make the Hall of Fame. The 1913 championship was the A’s third championship in four years, and cemented their legacy as one of the greatest dynasties of all time.
Indeed, in his New Historical Abstract, Bill James made the direct comparison: “Connie Mack’s ‘$100,000 Infield’… dominated baseball from 1910 through 1914 as the Reds did in the mid-seventies.”
Understanding the Athletics’ dominance requires understanding Eddie Collins. From 1909 to 1915, he tallied 61.4 WAR, an average of 8.8 per year. He hit for high average, drew scores of walks, and played fine defense. He also won the 1914 MVP award and finished in the top three in 1911, 1913, 1923 and 1924. Appropriately enough for a paragon of his era, he is also the all-time leader in sacrifice bunts, a record that will almost certainly never be broken. (He had 512 sac bunts, 120 more than the player in second place, Jake Daubert.)
But the Cincinnati infield may even have been even better than the one in Philly. Collins remains the best second baseman in American League history, just as Joe Morgan is probably the best second baseman since World War II. But Perez, now a Hall of Famer, was surely better than Stuffy McInnis, just as Davey Concepcion was clearly a better player than Jack Barry, and Pete Rose — whatever your opinion of his eligibility for the Hall — was at least as good a player in his prime as Home Run Baker, and had a far better and far longer career. And, of course, Wally Schang was a very good ballplayer, but he was no Johnny Bench.
Other than those 1913 A’s, fully half of the poor-pitching regular season teams that have gone on to win it all have been Wild Card teams: the 2014 Giants, the 2011 Cardinals and the 2003 Marlins. Of the World Series champions with the worst regular-season winning percentages, five of the seven worst had team ERAs below the major league median: the 83-win 2006 Cardinals, the 85-win 1987 Twins, the 88-win 2014 Giants, the 90-win 2011 Cardinals and the 91-win 2003 Marlins. In other words, if you don’t have good pitching, then you’d better have one of the greatest lineups and one of the single best players in baseball history, or else your best chance of winning the World Series is to hope for a fluke.
To be fair, the Reds pitching staff wasn’t quite wretched; it was just above the median, 11th out of 24, rather than just below it. And unlike the Wild Card teams that managed to catch fire at the right time, the Big Red Machine won 102 games that year. But that’s still extraordinarily unusual.
Of the 111 teams that have won the World Series, 34 won at least 100 games during the regular season. All but two of them did so with a pitching staff that finished the season with an ERA- in the top 10. Those two outliers were the 2009 Yankees, who won 103 games, and the 1976 Reds. (The ’09 Yankees finished 11th out of 30 teams, a slightly better performance than the Reds, who were 11th out of only 24.)
The Reds had a true six-man rotation. Each of their starters averaged between four and five days of rest, though injuries cost Gullett a total of about six weeks in May, June and July.
The starters certainly weren’t all that effective, and thanks to manager Sparky Anderson, who was known as “Captain Hook” for his quick calls to the bullpen, they didn’t stay in the game all that long. The Reds staff average of 6.27 innings per start was the seventh-lowest in baseball. Unlike the A’s, they didn’t have any future Hall of Famers on that side of the ball.
But they had a pretty good pen, and Anderson didn’t mind letting his firemen work, as was the style of the time. The co-closers were Rawly Eastwick and Pedro Borbon. Eastwick threw 107.2 innings across 71 games, with a terrific ERA- of 59. And Borbon threw 121 innings in 69 games, with a 95 ERA-. Borbon and Eastwick accounted for literally 50 percent of the relief innings on the club. (Borbon threw more than 120 innings in six straight years from 1972 to 1977. Eastwick was over 90 innings in 1975, 1976 and 1977. Both were out of baseball after 1981.)
The Reds displayed their dominance most directly by making quick work of their opponents in October, dispatching the 101-win Phillies in three straight games and the 97-win Yankees in four, one of only two World Series sweeps the Yankees have ever suffered. The Phillies, just four years away from the first championship in franchise history, were probably a better team than those Yankees, who were still a year away from acquiring Reggie Jackson and winning the 1977 and 1978 championships.
The 1976 Phillies had Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton at the height of their powers, along with Hall of Very Gooders Jim Kaat and candlestick Allen and a fine supporting cast that included Tim McCarver, Tug McGraw, Bob Boone, Garry Maddox, Greg Luzinski and the slick-fielding no-hit shortstop Larry Bowa.
And it wasn’t close. The Reds won the first game behind Gullett, who went eight innings, allowing just a first-inning run, while his offense scored six. Eastwick then came in to pitch the ninth inning of a 6-1 game and gave up two runs, but he got the three necessary outs. In the second game, Pat Zachry went five innings and Borbon went the other four, while the Reds offense scored six to the Phillies’ three.
The third game was the Phillies’ best chance. They scored a run off starter Gary Nolan, then two more off Manny Sarmiento, the first and only reliever in the series Anderson called upon other than Eastwick or Borbon. Sarmiento gave up two runs, and that ended Anderson’s open-mindedness. Borbon came in for the final out of the seventh, and the score was Phillies 3, Reds 0. In the bottom of the seventh, the Reds scored four runs, because that’s what they did.
Anderson turned the ball over to Eastwick to nail down the final two innings. But over the course of getting the final six outs, he gave up his third, fourth and fifth runs of the series. The score was Phillies 6, Reds 4. Then George Foster and Johnny Bench opened the ninth by hitting back-to-back homers to tie the game. After a single and two walks, Ken Griffey strode to the plate and ended the series with a walk-off single.
The Reds went on to outscore the Yankees 22-8 and win a World Series in which only one game, Game Two, was decided by a margin of fewer than four runs. Eastwick didn’t throw a pitch in the Series, and Borbon was called on for just an inning and a half of work. Neither man was needed. Series MVP Johnny Bench got eight hits in 15 at-bats, two of them homers, and the Yankees never had a prayer.
That’s why they called them a Machine. And that’s why Sparky Anderson got the name of “Captain Hook.” If you’re going to win the World Series with a shaky starting rotation, you’d better have a truly dread-inspiring offense. The Reds certainly did. That’s why we remember nearly every one of their starting players — except for their starting pitchers.
JULY 20, 2016
BY: ALEX REMINGTON
www.hardballtimes.com/big-red-machine-turns-50/
Quick: can you name a starting pitcher from the 1976 Big Red Machine?
On the 40th anniversary of one of the most iconic teams ever, it’s pretty remarkable to recall how anonymous the pitching staff was.
The Cincinnati Reds, with just the 11th-best ERA- in baseball that year out of 24 teams, won 102 games in the regular season and swept their way through the playoffs. They make it clear: Sometimes a mediocre pitching staff does not stand in the way of a world championship.
That’s certainly a comforting thought to fans of the currently first-place Orioles, who haven’t won it all since 1983 — the 10th-longest drought in baseball. The 2016 Orioles’ team ERA- of 99 and their FIP- of 101 ranked 15th and 16th in baseball as of Tuesday night.
The Big Red Machine didn’t really need to throw the ball very well because of their offense. And what an offense it was: future Hall of Famers at catcher (Johnny Bench), first base (Tony Perez), and second base (Joe Morgan), All-Stars at shortstop (Dave Concepcion), third base (Pete Rose), left field (George Foster), and right field (Ken Griffey), and a Gold Glover in center (Cesar Geronimo). Bench was the MVP in 1970 and 1972, Rose was MVP in 1973, Morgan was MVP in 1975 and 1976, and Foster would be MVP in 1977.
In that division, they could’ve had Kyle Davies and Braden Looper at the top of their rotation and they’d have won 90 games. That lineup just about guaranteed them a playoff spot. And because there were only 24 teams and two divisions then, there were only two rounds of the playoffs, the League Championship Series and the World Series. It might be harder for such an unbalanced team to march through the playoffs nowadays, when there are three rounds plus the Wild Card game.
(Here’s the answer to that sort-of trivia question. They had a six-man rotation: Gary Nolan, Pat Zachry, Fred Norman, Jack Billingham, Santo Alcala and Don Gullett. Zachry and Nolan were both rookies, and Zachry was the 1976 Rookie of the Year. To younger fans, Gullett may be the best-remembered now, having served as the Reds’ pitching coach from 1993 to 2005.)
I made a list of all 111 World Series-winning teams. Exactly seven of them had an ERA- below the league median:
2014 Giants*
2012 Giants
2011 Cardinals*
2006 Cardinals
2003 Marlins*
1987 Twins
1913 Athletics
* Wild Card
Four of those occurred in the last 10 years. Prior to 2006, only three other championship teams had an ERA- below the league median: the ’03 Marlins, the ’87 Twins and the 1913 Philadelphia Athletics, who were likely the worst-pitching team ever to win it all.
Now, the 1987 Twins are routinely regarded as one of the worst regular-season teams of any stripe to ever win the World Series. As late as Aug. 28, they were a tied with Oakland for the AL West lead with a record of just 67-63, only four games over .500 and 10 games worse than the AL East-leading Blue Jays, who were at 76-52. They finished with 85 wins, the second-lowest win total by a World Series-winning team, and the lowest until the 83-win Cardinals of 2006 managed to win it all.
The 2003 Marlins were so bad out of the gate that they fired skipper Jeff Torborg in early May, when their record was a miserable 16-22, replacing him with 72-year-old Jack McKeon, who hadn’t managed in more than two years.
The 1913 A’s weren’t like that. They were dominant. They just couldn’t pitch.
Those A’s had an ERA- of 112, third-worst in baseball that year. The team’s “ace” was probably 37-year-old Eddie Plank, a future Hall of Famer, and he pitched 242.2 innings with a 91 ERA-, reasonably better than league average. Their best pitcher was their closer and swingman, the future Hall of Famer Albert “Chief” Bender, who started 21 games and saved 13 more and finished the year with an ERA- of 78, 15th-best in baseball.
It’s not like the rest were complete duffers. They were just incredibly young. Rookie Bob Shawkey threw 111 innings and went on to win 195 games, and 19-year-old Herb Pennock twirled 33 innings in the very early stages of what would be Hall of Fame career. But they were far from their primes in 1913.
And most of the rest of the staff was far worse, including 20-year old Bullet Joe Bush, who threw 200 innings with a frightful ERA- of 135. (He got better, to paraphrase Monty Python. He went on to win 196 games in a 17-year career.) The 21-year-old Byron Houck was even more wretched than that, as his 176 innings of a 146 ERA- showed. The workhorse was 24-year-old Boardwalk Brown, who led the team in starts and pitched 235.1 innings with an indifferent ERA- of 104.
But that didn’t stop the Athletics from winning 96 games, finishing six and a half games ahead of the Senators, and taking down the Giants in five games to win the World Series. Those A’s were famous for the “$100,000 Infield”: first baseman Stuffy McInnis, second baseman Eddie Collins, shortstop Jack Barry and third baseman Frank “Home Run” Baker. Collins and Baker are in the Hall of Fame, and McInnis and Barry were quite good in their day. So was rookie Wally Schang, the part-time catcher, who is one of the best backstops not to make the Hall of Fame. The 1913 championship was the A’s third championship in four years, and cemented their legacy as one of the greatest dynasties of all time.
Indeed, in his New Historical Abstract, Bill James made the direct comparison: “Connie Mack’s ‘$100,000 Infield’… dominated baseball from 1910 through 1914 as the Reds did in the mid-seventies.”
Understanding the Athletics’ dominance requires understanding Eddie Collins. From 1909 to 1915, he tallied 61.4 WAR, an average of 8.8 per year. He hit for high average, drew scores of walks, and played fine defense. He also won the 1914 MVP award and finished in the top three in 1911, 1913, 1923 and 1924. Appropriately enough for a paragon of his era, he is also the all-time leader in sacrifice bunts, a record that will almost certainly never be broken. (He had 512 sac bunts, 120 more than the player in second place, Jake Daubert.)
But the Cincinnati infield may even have been even better than the one in Philly. Collins remains the best second baseman in American League history, just as Joe Morgan is probably the best second baseman since World War II. But Perez, now a Hall of Famer, was surely better than Stuffy McInnis, just as Davey Concepcion was clearly a better player than Jack Barry, and Pete Rose — whatever your opinion of his eligibility for the Hall — was at least as good a player in his prime as Home Run Baker, and had a far better and far longer career. And, of course, Wally Schang was a very good ballplayer, but he was no Johnny Bench.
Other than those 1913 A’s, fully half of the poor-pitching regular season teams that have gone on to win it all have been Wild Card teams: the 2014 Giants, the 2011 Cardinals and the 2003 Marlins. Of the World Series champions with the worst regular-season winning percentages, five of the seven worst had team ERAs below the major league median: the 83-win 2006 Cardinals, the 85-win 1987 Twins, the 88-win 2014 Giants, the 90-win 2011 Cardinals and the 91-win 2003 Marlins. In other words, if you don’t have good pitching, then you’d better have one of the greatest lineups and one of the single best players in baseball history, or else your best chance of winning the World Series is to hope for a fluke.
To be fair, the Reds pitching staff wasn’t quite wretched; it was just above the median, 11th out of 24, rather than just below it. And unlike the Wild Card teams that managed to catch fire at the right time, the Big Red Machine won 102 games that year. But that’s still extraordinarily unusual.
Of the 111 teams that have won the World Series, 34 won at least 100 games during the regular season. All but two of them did so with a pitching staff that finished the season with an ERA- in the top 10. Those two outliers were the 2009 Yankees, who won 103 games, and the 1976 Reds. (The ’09 Yankees finished 11th out of 30 teams, a slightly better performance than the Reds, who were 11th out of only 24.)
The Reds had a true six-man rotation. Each of their starters averaged between four and five days of rest, though injuries cost Gullett a total of about six weeks in May, June and July.
The starters certainly weren’t all that effective, and thanks to manager Sparky Anderson, who was known as “Captain Hook” for his quick calls to the bullpen, they didn’t stay in the game all that long. The Reds staff average of 6.27 innings per start was the seventh-lowest in baseball. Unlike the A’s, they didn’t have any future Hall of Famers on that side of the ball.
But they had a pretty good pen, and Anderson didn’t mind letting his firemen work, as was the style of the time. The co-closers were Rawly Eastwick and Pedro Borbon. Eastwick threw 107.2 innings across 71 games, with a terrific ERA- of 59. And Borbon threw 121 innings in 69 games, with a 95 ERA-. Borbon and Eastwick accounted for literally 50 percent of the relief innings on the club. (Borbon threw more than 120 innings in six straight years from 1972 to 1977. Eastwick was over 90 innings in 1975, 1976 and 1977. Both were out of baseball after 1981.)
The Reds displayed their dominance most directly by making quick work of their opponents in October, dispatching the 101-win Phillies in three straight games and the 97-win Yankees in four, one of only two World Series sweeps the Yankees have ever suffered. The Phillies, just four years away from the first championship in franchise history, were probably a better team than those Yankees, who were still a year away from acquiring Reggie Jackson and winning the 1977 and 1978 championships.
The 1976 Phillies had Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton at the height of their powers, along with Hall of Very Gooders Jim Kaat and candlestick Allen and a fine supporting cast that included Tim McCarver, Tug McGraw, Bob Boone, Garry Maddox, Greg Luzinski and the slick-fielding no-hit shortstop Larry Bowa.
And it wasn’t close. The Reds won the first game behind Gullett, who went eight innings, allowing just a first-inning run, while his offense scored six. Eastwick then came in to pitch the ninth inning of a 6-1 game and gave up two runs, but he got the three necessary outs. In the second game, Pat Zachry went five innings and Borbon went the other four, while the Reds offense scored six to the Phillies’ three.
The third game was the Phillies’ best chance. They scored a run off starter Gary Nolan, then two more off Manny Sarmiento, the first and only reliever in the series Anderson called upon other than Eastwick or Borbon. Sarmiento gave up two runs, and that ended Anderson’s open-mindedness. Borbon came in for the final out of the seventh, and the score was Phillies 3, Reds 0. In the bottom of the seventh, the Reds scored four runs, because that’s what they did.
Anderson turned the ball over to Eastwick to nail down the final two innings. But over the course of getting the final six outs, he gave up his third, fourth and fifth runs of the series. The score was Phillies 6, Reds 4. Then George Foster and Johnny Bench opened the ninth by hitting back-to-back homers to tie the game. After a single and two walks, Ken Griffey strode to the plate and ended the series with a walk-off single.
The Reds went on to outscore the Yankees 22-8 and win a World Series in which only one game, Game Two, was decided by a margin of fewer than four runs. Eastwick didn’t throw a pitch in the Series, and Borbon was called on for just an inning and a half of work. Neither man was needed. Series MVP Johnny Bench got eight hits in 15 at-bats, two of them homers, and the Yankees never had a prayer.
That’s why they called them a Machine. And that’s why Sparky Anderson got the name of “Captain Hook.” If you’re going to win the World Series with a shaky starting rotation, you’d better have a truly dread-inspiring offense. The Reds certainly did. That’s why we remember nearly every one of their starting players — except for their starting pitchers.
