Bud Black. Hilarious. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more about him very shortly.

There’s lots of representation from the late 70’s, early 80’s. It seems like pitching in that era was very different from the late 90’s or even today.

Hey…. Just read this stuff on my way home from finally breaking down and letting my wife buy me a Blackberry… she wanted me to get a cell phone, and I didn’t want to, so I think that she bribed me with a “toy.” Too bad SBNation doesn’t allow commenting on their mobile sites, yet, or I’d totally be pulling a Stephen A. Smith.

I understand why people feel the way they do, and I admit that I need to find a list of historical park factors that is easily importable into MySQL (I admit — I’m too lazy to go to B-R and type in park factors for every year for every team in existence from 1871-2008 manually).

Have said that, RAR/WAR does adjust for era in that it bases replacement level at Rate Stat (ERA/FIP/Whatever) at 1285 of league average. So the further up the player is from league average, the better he will be.

In 2008, the lgERA was 4.36. Greinke had an ERA of 3.47, or about 126% of league average.

In 1989, the lgERA was 3.89…and Saberhagen had an ERA of 2.16, or about 181% of league average.

These numbers aren’t that far off from the baseball-reference park-adjusted ERA+s of each man — for Greinke in 2008 — 123, for Sabes in 1989 —180.

As for number of innings, well, yeah, I guess I’d have to say that, for better or worse in the long run for the pitcher’s career health and the franchises, pitchers were used in a way that gave them more chances to be valuable (again, whether that was a good idea short- or long-term or not is a another issue). As we see, my numbers do a good job of adjusting the rate stats for the era, and thus for the relative value of that rate stat. When you add in the fact that Saberhagen was allowed to pitch 60 more innings.

Moreover, keep in mind we’re talking about single season value, not ability. In the 2008 AL, about 10.1 runs = a win. In the 1989 AL, it was about 9.5 Thus, each run scored/saved has more marginal value.

It’s not as if no pitchers these days come close to beingn 8 wins above replacement. Look at my top 50 list. Both Halladay and Lee are at about 7 WAR apiece according to “fe2RAR” or whatever. I did that in runs so that I wouldn’t have to get into the big explanation, but it’s not as if inthe “offensive era” fo the late 90s or whatever, there weren’t dominant performances recognized by this method:

1997 Clemens 10.22 feWAR (McCready magic?)
1998 Clemens 7.99
1999 Pedro 9.6
2000 Pedro 9.34

and a number of guys around 7 almost every year in the AL….

Anyway, the truth of the matter is that Kansas City’s pitching probably just hasn’t been that great. Yes, Zack and Meche did have good years this year. But no, they weren’t in the same league as Hallady or Lee, really, but few were. Just as few were in the same league as Brett Saberhagen in 1989.

Anyway, I hope to revisit this with BaseRuns, and hopefully park factors incorporated, as well.

Thanks for the comments. Cheers, all!