Game Score is a statistic developed by Bill James. It is one way of measuring a pitcher’s performance in any one game. 50 is about average and 100 or greater is extremely rare.
— Start with 50 points.
— Add a point for each out, and two more for each inning completed after Inning 4.
— Add one point for each strikeout.
— Take away two points for each hit, 4 points for each earned run, 2 points for each unearned run and 1 point for each walk.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It really is an elegant little formula.
Roy Halladay’s no-hitter Wednesday scored 94 (the same as Don Larsen’s no-hitter in the 1956 World Series).
And guess what? Last night’s little gem by San Francisco’s Tim Lincecum scored 96, the fourth best postseason pitching performance (according to Game Score) in baseball history.
Joe Posnanski has all the details.
Two personal observations. Watching Tim Lincecum pitch may be my current favorite thing in all of sports. Reading Joe Posnanski’s baseball writing is near the top, too. I think I’ve learned more about baseball from Poz in the past two months than I have since I stopped reading Bill James 20 years ago.
Bats blog agrees. A little background excerpt:
Although most fans have been led to believe that good pitchers can “induce” weak contact and generate easily fieldable balls, while bad ones will surrender a parade of blistering line drives, extensive research into the subject shows that the vast majority of pitchers wind up giving up hits on about 30 percent of balls in play over the course of their careers.
As a result, the only ways for most pitchers to reduce the number of hits they allow are to avoid surrendering home runs and to get more strikeouts, so batters never put the ball in play to begin with. This is why the list of pitchers who have whiffed 15 batters in a game over the last decade is so much more impressive than the list of pitchers who have thrown no-hitters in that timespan.
The only thing….just gotta say it…
When you throw for strikeouts, you throw more pitches than when you pitch to contact.
Strikethrowers will wear out their arms faster. Also…offspeed stuff takes more out of an arm than fastballs.
Given that Lincecum features mostly offspeed stuff and a lot of strikeouts…I worry. I think he’ll have a fine career, but keeping an eye on the progress and breakdown of that arm will be key.
It happens, that’s true. Many are through young.
However, Nolan Ryan 27 seasons. Roger Clemens 24 seasons. Randy Johnson 22 seasons. Walter Johnson 21 seasons. Steve Carlton 24 seasons. Tom Seaver 20 seasons. Gaylord Perry 22 seasons. Satchel Paige was 41 when he began his Major League career.
In other words, more is in play here than just being a strikeout pitcher.
It would be very interesting to see the longevity statistics for all pitchers. Maybe there’s no difference. Maybe we just miss the Ks more. Maybe.
Most of the names you listed (of the modern era) as they aged, they stopped pitching for strikeouts and started pitching to contact.
Their arms couldn’t sustain over the long run. That’s my only point.
There are plenty of pitchers, Jason Schmidt comes to mind, who had an amazing career ahead of him. He threw blazing strikeout stuff and his offspeed was only 1 to 2 mph below his fastball.
Never heard of Schmitty? That’s because he blew his arm out and retired before he was thirty.
I can give you plenty examples of fireballers you’ve never heard of who either tore a rotator cuff or had Tommy John and were out of the game.
Lincecum’s power and finesse are world class things. I want to see him pitch 20+ seasons. But I worry.
I don’t disagree with you Karen, though the pitchers I listed are 7 of the top 9 strikeout pitchers (career) all-time (I left off Blyleven (22) and Sutton (23) for no particular reason).
What I wonder is whether strikeout pitchers are any more prone to injury than all pitchers, or are they just the ones we notice more when they blow up. The whole pitching motion at any speed is unnatural.
Tommy John did pitch 26 seasons in the majors, though with fewer Ks per 9 after the surgery. John was 31 when he was injured. Strasburg is 21. Schmidt that you cite was 17-5 and lead the league in ERA and shutouts (3) when he was 30. How long did you expect him to last?
I’m just sayin’ I think pitching style might be less related to career-ending injury than the conventional wisdom dictates. Might.
Just found that a University of Colorado study a couple of years ago found that in the 20th century the average career for a major leaguer was 5.6 years. They did not include pitchers in the study.