The Ballot: Lilly and Lowe

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Ted Lilly Pitching: 107 points Official Crafty Lefty status: 25 points Weirdly unhittable in 2003 ALDS against Boston: 5 points Somehow avoided being called "Tiger" or any other nickname: minus-5 points Made $80 million in his career: no points awarded; just wanted to mention that Hall of Fame Race to...
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7 thoughts on “The Ballot: Lilly and Lowe”

  3. In the part about Lilly’s K rate and where it would rank, I also noticed there only two thirds of the amount of “qualifying” starter now than there was a short time ago. How many will there be 5, 10, or 15 years from now? With the changes in the game, we may want to revisit what it takes to qualify as a starter.

  4. Joe, I feel you kind of didn’t even mention Lowe’s huge contributions to the Red Sox in the 2004 playoffs as he started Game 4 of the ALCS (Sox won), started and won game 7 and started and won game 4 of the WS.
    His WAR of 34 (and career on general) puts him in a different class than Ted Lilly.
    I, unfortunately, went down the WAR rabbit hole win his similar players and was surprised Danny Darwin had a WAR of 39, saw that Rick Reuschel had a WAR of 69.4 . I know WAR is a counting stat, but he is 34th all time – can somebody explain?

    1. I scrolled down here hoping someone would mention the “won the clincher of all three playoff series” thing! I would also like to add his late-career status as an extreme all-ground-ball, virtually-no-strikeout outlier. If memory serves, he was posting strikeout rates that hadn’t been seen since the Dead Ball Era.

    2. This could be exhibit A for why I don’t care all that much for WAR. People will make the argument that “Larry Walker is 11th all-time in WAR for rightfielders with 72.7, how could anyone not vote for him?”, but if you made a similar argument for Reuschel, you’d probably be laughed at.

      I’m okay with WAR being part of the story, but it bothers me when people try to use it as the end all, be all argument for or against someone, as though WAR is a perfect stat.

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