Doctoring The Numbers: Great Young Rotations

The Florida Marlins are trying to do the unthinkable. They’re doing their
best to prove that yes, you can have too much pitching.

Or, at the very least, too much young pitching. Dave Dombrowski, who has a
nose for young pitching unlike any other GM today, has assembled a
collection of young aces-in-training that is the envy of baseball:

• A.J. Burnett, 24, acquired for Al Leiter during the
  Marlins’ fire sale after 1997, has a 2.89 ERA and has allowed just 56 hits
  in 75 innings, including a no-hitter on May 12 and a two-hitter on June 9.

• Jesus Sanchez, 26, also acquired in that deal, made his first
  start of the season last week and allowed two hits in eight innings.

• Brad Penny, 23, stolen from the Diamondbacks as part of the
  Matt Mantei heist two seasons ago, has a 3.47 ERA and a K/BB ratio of
  90/30 in 112 innings. His one-hit, one-walk, 13-strikeout performance on
  June 26 was as impressive as Burnett’s no-hitter.

• The Diamondbacks, not content to give up Penny alone for Mantei, also
  tossed in Vladimir Nunez, 26, who has made three spot starts for the
  Marlins and has a 2.95 ERA in 49 innings overall. (They also threw in
  five-tool outfielder Abraham Nunez, but we’ll save our Joe Garagiola
  insults for another time.)

• Ryan Dempster (24), who was pilfered from the Rangers for John
  Burkett in 1996, has already established himself as the Marlins’ ace
  after going 14-10, with a 3.66 ERA and 209 strikeouts in 226 innings last
  season. Just imagine how good that trade would look if the Marlins hadn’t
  traded Rick Helling, also acquired in the deal, back to Texas for
  Ed Vosberg the following season, a trade that almost certainly
  qualifies as the worst trade not made under duress of Dombrowski’s career.

• Matt Clement, 26,
  picked up before the season for Mark
  Kotsay, has loads of talent and has already made 81 major-league starts,
  but has walked 271 batters in 494 innings and has a career 4.90 ERA. If a
  case is to be made that the Marlins have too much pitching, it’s that they
  really didn’t need Clement as much as they needed a quality right fielder
  like Kotsay. In Clement’s defense, he’s recovering from a bout with
  autoimmune hepatitis this spring and is a good candidate to bounce back.

• Toss in Jason Grilli, 24, a former Giants’ #1 pick who was
  acquired in the Livan Hernandez trade, and the Marlins have received
  71 of their 82 starts from pitchers who have yet to turn 27 years old. The
  other 11 have all been made by 31-year-old Chuck Smith,
  who was the
  most promising 30-year-old rookie in recent times when he debuted last
  season.

  Smith, like Dempster, was nabbed from the Rangers, coming over last season
  in a three-way trade that netted Texas Dave Martinez. (Think Doug
  Melvin has some splainin’ to do?) The Marlins have not only assembled a
  rotation that is made up almost entirely of pitchers 26 and younger, but
  they’ve done so without developing a single starting pitcher themselves!

The Marlins have received 87% of their starts from pitchers under the age of
27. Is that a record? Not even close. Seventy-five teams have received all
of their starts from the 26-and-under crowd. Most of those are 19th-century
teams, a time when pitchers threw 500 innings a season and few pitchers made
it into their thirties, or even late twenties. Since 1900, six teams have
had a rotation made up exclusively of pitchers younger than 27:

There are some success stories on this list. The 1968 A’s would ascend to
the top of the AL West within three years, with Catfish Hunter and
Blue Moon Odom–and Vida Blue, who was only 18 in 1968–as key
members of the rotation. The 1990 White Sox are by far the best team on this
list, going 94-68 with their young rotation, and they would win the AL West
in 1993. But of the four starters listed, only Jack McDowell would
still be in the rotation. (Alex Fernandez, who made 13 starts in
1990, was the #2 starter on the division titlist.) The 1999 Twins didn’t
look like they were on the road to anywhere except the cellar, but two years
later, Brad Radke, Eric Milton, and Joe Mays make up
arguably the best 1-2-3 combo in the league as the Twins continue to hold on
to the AL Central lead.

Let’s look at this from another angle. If you calculate the average age of
the Marlins’ pitchers, weighing each starter’s contribution based on how
many starts he has made, you find that the average age of the Marlins’
rotation is 25.64 years old.

The youngest rotations since 1900:

You remember the 1915 A’s, don’t you? In the wake of the greatest fire sale
in major-league history, Connie Mack went with the youngest rotation ever.
The A’s went 43-109 that year (down from 99-53 and the AL pennant a year
before), but two of their young starters, Bob Shawkey and Herb
Pennock, are both remembered as members of the 1927 Yankees, and Pennock
went into the Hall of Fame.

But for sustained youth, no rotation comes close to the 1966-69 Kansas
City/Oakland A’s. Consider this chart:

The 1966 A’s featured one of the youngest rotations of all time, and the
rotation actually became younger over the following two years. That’s tough
to do.

But while the young A’s would eventually develop into the dynasty that would
win three straight World Series, they did not reach the playoffs until 1971,
when their pitchers had matured into their mid-20s. None of the teams listed
above made the playoffs with their baby-faced rotation.

This year’s Marlins don’t simply boast a young rotation, but a good young
rotation. Or, as my colleague Michael Wolverton writes,

I did a quick study for the A's SNWL comment in this year's book where I
looked at the best young rotations of recent years. Here "best young
rotations" was arbitrarily defined as the ones who got the most
production (SNWAR) from starters under 25.

By that measure, the Marlins' under-25's (Burnett, Dempster, Grilli, and
Penny) have a total SNWAR of 5.0, which projects to 10.5 over the full
season. That would rank them fourth among young rotations for the years I
have data (1978-present, except 1991).

The 1985 Gooden/Darling/Aguilera Mets were first with 14.3 SNWAR, the 1993
Fernandez/Alvarez/Bere White Sox were second with 13.6, and the 1985
Saberhagen/Jackson/Gubicza Royals were third with 10.9. (The 1994 White Sox
would also finish ahead of the 2001 projected Marlins if we projected the
strike-shortened 1994 to a full season.)

The Marlins, who despite stumbling against the Phillies this weekend are
still just 5 1/2 games out of first place, would have one of the youngest
rotations for a playoff team in history should they bounce back:

All ten teams made the World Series, and seven won championships, including
the first of the Sandy Koufax/Don Drysdale champion Dodger teams, as
well as the 1966 Oriole rotation that officially ended the Dodger run of
greatness (coinciding with Koufax’s decision to retire) with the greatest
pitching show in World Series history: the Dodgers scored just two runs in
the four-game sweep, and no runs after the third inning of the first game.

The Whiz Kids brought the Phillies a pennant in 1950 after the team had
finished above .500 once between 1918 and 1948. (That’s 30 losing seasons in
31 years, for you Devil Ray fans who are wondering how long misery can
last.) The 1986 Mets represented the culmination of Davey Johnson’s
impressive work as a manager and team-builder. The 1985 Royals
simultaneously won a World Series and deluded the franchise into thinking
that a weak offense is no impediment to greatness.

The early years of the Big Red Machine, from 1970-72, featured the most
consistently young rotation on a great team in modern times. The 1970 and
1972 Reds won the NL pennant; the 1971 team (listed above) had the youngest
rotation of the three (courtesy Don Gullett, who made 31 starts at
age 20…and who had to retire at age 27), but finished 79-83.

But the most impressive young rotation has to be the 1912-16 Red Sox, who
won three World Series in five years, each time with a rotation younger than
the Marlins’ staff of today. Think about that for a moment.

For any contrarians out there that want to make a claim for anyone other
than Babe Ruth as the greatest player of all time, you would do well
to contemplate Ruth’s position as the junior member of two of the three
youngest World Champion rotations of all time. Before Ruth turned 24 years
old, he had won 80 games–only Bob Feller and Dwight Gooden
have matched that feat since–and three World Championships.

Rany Jazayerli is an author of Baseball Prospectus. You can contact him by
clicking here.