A Comparison of Wins Per Inning Pitched - Greg Maddux and Cy Young

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Cy Young has a number of all-time records that would be difficult to beat by today’s pitchers. He has the most games started, complete games, innings pitched, wins and losses. In many of these categories, nobody even comes close. His 511 wins are 94 more than the next guy, and his 7356 innings pitched are 1352.2 more than second place.

In modern day baseball, the most successful pitchers, as far as wins go, is Greg Maddux who leads with 355. Maddux is at 13^th in innings pitched, but at 5008.1, that’s far less than Young. Of course, the win statistic is widely known as being far from the best measurement of a pitcher’s success and skill.

On top of that, pitchers are used in a completely different way, making comparisons between the present and past bordering on the impossible. Regardless of its true worth, the win statistic is nevertheless one that inevitably gets highlighted, and as for comparing players, well, that’s part of the fun of statistics.

With this in mind, I indeed attempted a comparison…

I had the notion to check to see which pitcher won the highest percentage of games that they started. For instance, Young won 511 out of 815 starts (62.3%), while Maddux won 355 out of 740 (48.0%).

That might not be such a fair comparison, though, since pitchers are generally taken out of games pretty soon these days and don’t have much of a chance at more wins. I thought I might try out wins per innings pitched for a more accurate (and yet still imperfect) comparison.

Here’s the data for some of the pitchers on the top wins list:

1) Cy Young                W: 511             GS: 815           IP: 7356           W per IP: .069

2) Walter Johnson:        W: 417             GS 666            IP: 5914.1        W per IP: .071

3) Grover Alexander     W: 373             GS: 600           IP: 5190           W per IP: .072

3) Christy Mathewson  W: 373             GS 551            IP: 4780.2        W per IP: .078

5) Pud Galvin               W: 365             GS: 688           IP: 6003.1        W per IP: .061

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