Stats Geek: Who Does That Pirate Pitcher Remind You Of?

Brian O'Neill / Post-Gazette 9 years ago

A week ago, I looked at how Pirates hitters’ statistical profiles lined up with players past. Now let’s do the same for Pirates pitchers.

Baseball-reference.com finds the best statistical match based on innings pitched, strikeouts, wins, losses, saves, walks, earned run average and other stats. The most intriguing pairing is Gerrit Cole and Juan Marichal, whose Hall of Fame career began with the San Francisco Giants in 1960.

If you ever had the pleasure of watching the high-kicking, high-whiffing, high-energy Marichal, you might be surprised at this comparison. Cole has four inches and 55 pounds on his fellow righty. Still his stats are remarkably close to the lanky Dominican. Here’s how the two 23-year-olds compare through two seasons.

W L ERA G CG SHO IP H BB K ERA+

Marichal 19 12 3.51 40 15 4 266.3 242 76 182 105

Cole 21 12 3.45 41 0 0 255.3 236 68 238 103

That’s a near even match in places, but the differences are also clear. Cole is never going to be allowed to finish games the way Marichal did. Cole is striking out a couple more batters every nine innings than the young Marichal, but he probably won’t have as many complete games in his career as Marichal did in his first two seasons. If Marichal had thrown 248 1/3 IP the way major league leader David Price did last season, it would have been an off year. Marichal threw more innings than that eight times, and more than 300 three times. That’s not the way baseball is played anymore.

This may be a one-off comparison for Cole, but it’s still a nice one, as is his second comp: Rick Sutcliffe. Cole’s ERA+ (with 100 being average) and winning percentage shows he’s every bit the competitor, too. Remember that Marichal had three fellow Hall of Famers (Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda) providing his run support. They won the National League pennant in Marichal’s third season.

The better news for Cole concerns a contemporary Giant. The more advanced metrics of Baseball Prospectus has Madison Bumgarner as one of Cole’s 10 most comparable pitchers. Maybe they’ll get to face each other in next year’s playoffs.

Anyway, with all the caveats about how much pitchers’ usage has changed, what follows are the baseball-reference’s age-based Similarity Scores for Pirates hurlers. I should warn you that this is an extraordinarily unimpressive lot, not nearly as compelling as last week’s batting comparisons: Rarely have I encountered more pitchers, particularly among the starters, whom I either never had heard of or did not care that I had.

The only good news is that such rudimentary stats can’t be considered highly predictive. If they were, pitching coach Ray Searage really would have his work cut out for him:

Edinson Volquez: Joey Hamilton, Doug Davis, Gavin Floyd

Francisco Liriano: Randy Wolf, Jose Guzman, Matt Garza

Charlie Morton: Pete Smith, Jim Owens, Paul Wilson

Jeff Locke: Tim Lollar, Zach Day, Danny McDevitt

Vance Worley: Tex Carleton, Mike Harkey, Jim Tobin

Brandon Cumpton: Billy Wynne, Chien-Ming Wang, Ben Harris

Bullpen

Tony Watson: Rob Murphy, Al Holland, Eric O’Flaherty

Mark Melancon: Greg McMichael, Jim Johnson, Tom Henke

Justin Wilson: Rafael Perez, Sean Doolittle, Slim Love

Jared Hughes: Todd Frohwirth, Darren O’Day, Pat Neshek

Jeanmar Gomez: Jon Lieber, Jeff Juden, Mark Portugal