Sunday, October 4, 2009

Brett Anderson's Place in History



I realize these types of posts may be somewhat annoying to people, but I just signed up for a 1 month subscription to baseball-reference.com, so I'm trying to get my moneys worth.

Anyways, I wanted to take a look at Brett Anderson's season stats as compared to historical performances and see if he's as good as I think he is. I ran a screen for players that at or before the age of 21 struck out at least 150 batters, while posting an ERA below 5.00. My search brought up a total of 60 instances, with 48 individual pitchers on the list (multiple players accomplished the feat multiple times). With such a large number of players to sort through, I decided I would shave down the list a bit more.

So, I then checked for the best K/BB ratios among the list, with Anderson's 2009 season coming in at number 8. Of course, there are a lot of other stats that should be considered when putting players into historical categories, but a solid K/BB ratio usually suggests that a pitcher is successful at an individual level regardless of his team's performance. I'm not going to draw any conclusions just yet, but I want to finish off by posting a simple chart comparing Anderson's strikeout and walk rates from this year with those posted by other pitchers in baseball history.


Not bad. Not bad at all.

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