Was Clayton Kershaw The Greatest Pitcher in Baseball History? I Make My Argument

 

I've been a die-hard baseball fan for around thirty years. During that period I have seen some of the greatest pitchers of all time even if it was only on TV occasionally.

I saw Atlanta's holy trinity of Maddux, Smoltz and Glavine. I saw Randy Johnson do wondrous things for three different teams. I saw Pedro be the Yankee's daddy and then turn them into his bitch. While he'll likely never make it to Cooperstown, I saw just how superb Curt Schilling was. And I've seen enough of Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer to know they are among the all-time greats.

And yet of all of them I am convinced the greatest pitcher of my lifetime – and possibly of all time – is the just retired Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers.

This may seem counterintuitive compared to many of the names above, considering that three of them won well over 300 games apiece, that Johnson is second on the all-time strikeout list only to Nolan Ryan and that Maddux and Johnson each have four Cy Young Awards to their credit. No one's going to call Kershaw a piker – he did win 3 Cy Young Awards, did twice win 21 games and finished his career with 3052 strikeouts. And few would argue he hasn't some of the most dominant season in this century: in 2014 he went 21-3 with a 1.77 era which is right up there with Koufax and Drysdale.  And indeed most will agree that the rules of how pitching works during Kershaw's career are vastly different then during the majority of those listing above. But Kershaw didn't even with 250 games before he retired where as Verlander has 266 to his credit. How could I call Kershaw the greatest of this era, let alone of all time?

To give my answer I actually going to back further in time. Many years ago I had a chance to read one of the first editions of Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Readers of that tome will know that there was a section where James used his then relatively little-known sabermetrics to try and argue who the greatest players in baseball history were at every position.

When we got to left-handed pitchers he made the case that Lefty Grove was not just the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time, but the greatest pitcher of all time full stop. I suspect this was a bold statement to those convinced the greatest was going to be one of the holy trinity of pitchers Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander and Walter Johnson.

No one was going to argue Grove was not one of the greatest pitchers of all time. He had won 300 games and in the early 1980 that club was not much bigger than it was today. (Tom Seaver, Phil Niekro and Don Sutton had yet to join it, just to name some of the biggest pitchers of James' era.) He'd won 20 games or more 8 times, seven consecutively. In 1931 he became one of only three pitchers since 1920 to win 30 games or more. He led the American League in strikeouts his first seven years in baseball.

But there was the fact he'd 'only' won 300 games compared to the more than 350 that Mathewson, Johnson and Alexander had as well as Warren Spahn. And his lifetime ERA of 3.06 offended the sensibilities of those who thought pitchers could throw with a lower one. Carl Hubbell, for one, managed to finish with 2.98 ERA and he was essentially Grove's contemporary.

But James made his case not by using his fancy sabermetrics but with the good old-fashioned Baseball Almanac.  For starters he argued that Grove had led the league in ERA average 9 times, which was then and is now more than any pitcher in baseball history. (In a distant second is Sandy Koufax and Clayton Kershaw with five each.) The other statistic he used was winning percentage. Grove led the American League in that category five times, something now major league pitcher has ever come close to except Whitey Ford who did it four. And finally he points out that Grove's lifetime winning percentage is .680 which was third all time then and for the next forty years.

That final figure is the highest by far of any pitcher with more than 300 wins. The only player with a higher one was Whitey Ford at .690 and Ford's managed 234 wins, nowhere near Grove's total. The only pitcher who has any many wins and is even close to Grove is Mathewson with a lifetime winning percentage of .665.  

James would later come up with other statistics to prove Grove's dominance but I won't use them here, if for no other reason that in most recent Historical Abstract James backpedaled and said that Walter Johnson is the greatest pitcher who ever lived. (I am inclined to agree at least by the standards of the 20^th century.)

So using those figures here's why I think Kershaw is the greatest pitcher of this century and a contender for the greatest of all time. Kershaw's lifetime record in 223 wins and 96 losses. That gives him a lifetime winning percentage of .699. That is the highest in baseball history surpassing Ford. (There are some quibblers who would say that Spud Chandler, who finished with a .717 winning percentage holds the all time record, but considering he only had 109 wins to do so, let's not entertain that. ) Kershaw I should mention managed an .800 plus winning percentage four times to qualify for the title and finished 11-2 this year, though he didn't have enough innings

So that's pretty remarkable. But I haven't gotten to his lifetime ERA.  Kershaw's lifetime earned run average is 2.53. That is by a long shot lower than every other pitcher I listed in the first paragraph. The only pitcher of that group who has an era close to it is Pedro and his ERA is 2.93. His winning percentage is also one of the best of all time at .687, which was second only to Ford until the end of this year.

Now I don't have to tell anyone how great a career ERA of 2.53 is considering how rare it is these days for a pitcher to finish a season with an ERA that low. Kershaw's lifetime ERA ranks 47^th all time which is astonishing. But prepare to have your mind blown as to how astounding. Kershaw's lifetime ERA is the best that any starting pitcher has had during the Live ball Era which dates back to 1920.  That means of all the pitchers who have had their entire careers in the last 105 years Clayton Kershaw has the greatest ever.

Let me just give some comparisons of other all-time greats:

Bob Gibson: 2.91

Whitey Ford: 2.74

Jim Palmer: 2.86

Juan Marichal 2.89

Don Drysdale: 2.95

Tom Seaver: 2.86

It might not seem fair to compare them but all of these pitchers played the bulk of their careers in the 1960s and 1970s in an era that was infinitely more friendly to pitchers than it is today.  Many of them did pitch far more innings, have far more complete games and definitely had infinitely more shutouts that Kershaw did in his career. (Kershaw only had 15 in his career and Bob Gibson once had nearly that many in a season.) And it may not be as fair to compare them to a man who didn't even pitch 3000 innings total in his career.  I have little doubt Kershaw even made it to the top 100 on that particular all-time category.

But the numbers don't lie. Kershaw has finished with the best lifetime ERA in the last century and the highest winning percentage of all time. That has to count for something even in an era where we keep inventing new statistics every hour on the hour.

So what's the argument against his greatness? The pedants will say his relatively poor postseason performance. He did finish 9-11 with an ERA pretty close to 5.00. But I truly believe that postseason record being a credit to the greatest of all time is a canard held by most New York sportswriters. And honestly Yankee fans (because we all know who's arguing it) stop holding your dominance over the rest of baseball.

I'll deal with just how ridiculous this is in a different article but do you really want to make that argument?  Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt won more World Series games lifetime than Walter Johnson or Grover Cleveland Alexander did, and I'm pretty sure both of them knew who the better pitchers were. Don Larsen has a better post-season record than Warren Spahn, you want to argue who the better pitcher was lifetime? And for the record Jerry Koosman was undefeated in postseason play and Tom Seaver went 3-3. You can look it up.

Maybe I'll change my mind about it down the road: that's what these kinds of argument are for. But I'm just going to paraphrase another sportswriter: "It'll be a long time before we see a second Kershaw. And then it'll be just that: a second Kershaw. You've seen the first, and only."