Now that’s a provocative headline.
Is Mariano Rivera The Greatest Pitcher Ever?
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The Yankees' Mariano Rivera got a lot of attention this week for breaking the career saves record, and he added one more to that total on Wednesday. 603 saves are indeed impressive, as is the fact that Rivera has eight 40+ save seasons. Only Trevor Hoffman (nine) had more; no other relief pitcher has had more than four.
So it’s pretty well established that Rivera is the greatest relief pitcher of all time. But how does he stack up against other pitchers who have been acknowledged as the greatest ever? And what other records could he hold before he finally retires?
We should first examine this question: When will Mariano retire? He turns 42 in November, but 2011 is one of his better seasons. Perhaps most impressive about his 2011 season is the seven walks (seven!) in 60 innings. His 0.898 WHIP is the fifth-best of his career. Rivera is under contract for 2012, and it was suggested to me yesterday that he might want to play long enough so that he and his forever teammate Derek Jeter could retire at the same time.
Jeter is under contract through 2013 and has a player option for 2014 that he’ll almost certainly exercise if he continues to play as well as he has in the second half of this season.
If Rivera can pitch for three more seasons, he could very well threaten the record for most games pitched. That’s currently 1,252, held by Jesse Orosco, who hung on until he was 46 years old, pitching fairly effectively until his final season.
Wednesday's appearance for Rivera was his 1,040th; he currently ranks ninth on that list. He's consistently appeared in 60-65 games a year for the last six seasons, and his workload has dropped; in 2011, for the second straight season, he'll throw fewer innings than games pitched. By the end of 2012, at this pace he'll have 1,100 games pitched, which would put him fourth on the list behind Orosco and two other hurlers who were primarily setup men, Mike Stanton and Mike Jackson. He'd need 2013 and 2014 at that pace and about half of another season to break the record.
What is more impressive, though, are the other all-time lists that Rivera shows up on. These lists require a minimum of 1,000 innings; Rivera has 1,210, which is about one-third the innings most modern-day starters who have long careers have. But it’s enough for this:
13th on the all-time ERA list: 2.217. Check out some of the names ahead of him: Walter Johnson. Christy Mathewson. Mordecai Brown. Ed Walsh. Rivera has put up the best career ERA since the dead ball era 100 years ago. The next active pitcher on this list is Tim Lincecum, who, at 2.947, is 154th.
Second on the all-time WHIP list: 0.9975. Addie Joss -- another dead-ball era pitcher -- is first with 0.9678. Rivera probably can't pass Joss; another two years like 2011 would put him at 0.9872. Only one other pitcher of the modern era is in the top 15 on this list -- Pedro Martinez (1.0544).
Sixth on the all-time fewest hits/nine innings list: 6.9397. You might have heard of the top two pitchers on this list: Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax.
Fourth on the all-time K/BB ratio list: 4.0474. 19th Century hurler Tommy Bond leads this list, followed by future Hall of Famers Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez. There are a number of active pitchers in the top 100 on this list -- but the rest, except Rivera, are starters. Every single one of them.
First on the Adjusted ERA+ list: 206. That means he’s been over 50% better than any other pitcher of his era -- and next on the list is Pedro, off in the distance with 154. The rest of the top 20, again, is littered with dead ball era hurlers.
And then there's WAR. Rivera has 56.2 career WAR, which ranks 53rd all-time, and second among active pitchers to Roy Halladay. Rivera is averaging about 3 WAR per season these days, which would get him to about 65 if he plays three more seasons; that would rank 33rd. Every pitcher who ranks higher was primarily a starter (Dennis Eckersley is the sole exception, and even he was a starter for most of his career). Among active pitchers, the next-highest-ranking pitcher in WAR who has been primarily a reliever is Francisco Rodriguez -- who ranks 34th, with 22.6.
Note, please, that different pitchers are the leaders on those various lists. And Rivera ranks highly among all of them, in many categories.
When Mariano Rivera was first called up by the Yankees in 1995, he made ten starts and wasn't very good; he posted a 5.94 ERA and 1.68 WHIP and allowed eight home runs in 50 innings. But one of those starts was outstanding -- eight innings of shutout ball with 11 strikeouts against the White Sox in Chicago on July 4, 1995. By September 1995, Mariano went to the bullpen for good and became the Yankees' closer in 1997, when John Wetteland left via free agency.
And since then, Rivera has been lights-out virtually every time he has taken the mound. He has just 72 blown saves -- which sounds like a lot, but it’s in 675 opportunities, and averages just a little over four per season. And that’s not even counting his postseason numbers, where he has posted an otherworldly 0.71 ERA and 0.766 WHIP in 139.2 innings
You may not think a relief pitcher should be considered for the title “greatest ever”. But Rivera has put up numbers not seen in many categories in a century, and has saved some of his best performances for the highest-stakes games, the postseason. We have never seen a pitcher quite like him, and likely never will again.
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