Hey everyone, I just removed a post of mine that announced the creation and league placement of a team designed to beat Addie Joss and other deadball pitchers consistently. I designed it with care but after setting it up as a dream team I found that it won only about 45% of games against a dream team designed around the ones that are currently beating my teams consistently in open league play. This post now is about what I have discovered - maybe you all already knew it, about why it is so hard to design such a team with success, though let me say I have not given up.
I had (ok, ok, foolishly it turned out) even challenged Joss strategists and other lovers of deadball pitcher staffs to please place their teams in the league that mine was the first to be in (so when I withdrew there was still nobody else whom I had actually inconvenienced) and also on others who, like tdiddy3 feel as I do, to design their own versions of the Kryptonite team so we would have an open league as a kind of laboratory to see what worked. Half teams with Joss and other deadballers (and the inevitable Vince Coleman -did anyone actually like him when he played by the way? I didn't, though I liked Raines, and Rickey Henderson was a wonder to see play).
Of course, I will try again. But here is what I discovered about a great part of where the problem lay:
I wanted to counter the 3-man deadball staff with its typical 1.60 etc. ERA with either a 3 or 4-man rotation of completely modern pitchers. Then a decent bullpen (my usual strategy, which I threw overboard for this particular project, is to have more resources in the bullpen and treat starters as people who should throw 6 innings and keep my team in the ball game, but not for Joss % Co. to have a chance you need to keep the other team from scoring).
Here are some numbers:
Bob Gibson 68 - $40,052 per inning
Nolan Ryan 81 - $40,064 per inning
Luis Tiant 68 - $38,246 per inning
Sandy Koufax 65 - $48,713 per inning
BUT
Addie Joss 08 - $37,362 per inning
Addie Joss 07 - $27,963 per inning (!) - this latter is the equivalent of a $5,500,000 pitcher, not the ones I am discussing above who are comparable to deadball pitchers in their stats and could be competitive. This is why my staffs in fact are lined with 5-6 million dollar men, who apparently are no longer able to compete, not because of technological development since Lee Majors, (see Clemens, Roger - oh by the way Clemens 1997: $39,917 per inning.). But rather because they cost more than the old craft worker of the early age of the industrial revolution.
So this is a big part of the problem - it isn't that Koufax, Clemens or Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan or Guidry can't compete head to head today, or tomorrow, it is that you can't afford to get enough innings from them for your team, so either they are out of the game before Joss, or they are pitching only once every four days instead of 3 and you can't afford four of them the way you can Mathewson, Joss and Cy Young. If you do get four of these guys, you have no money at all - I don't mean only $4 but like $1 million - left over for the entire bullpen, but again, three - as it turns out grossly underpriced per inning, deadball pitchers might give you 350 innings a piece, and granted some of the bullpens are rather thin - this is why I have also not given up my other main strategy which is to load the bullpen with huge innings, and see what happens late in the season, which I have not yet had a chance to see. But my teams may be too far behind by the time those old arms start to fall off the deadball competition.
That is why I had the idea of a team with enough great hitters and overall high average and power, right ballpark and go with starting pitchers plus starting players who don't need rest, so that if you have to fill the roster with $200,000 players they won't play anyway, but at least you always have George Brett batting against these guys, or Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, whatever, rather than second team players, and you always have a comparable starter on the mound even statistically, despite the difference in eras. So the real issue is that either deadball pitchers are underpriced, or post-1919 pitchers underpriced.
It is annoying - the Homestead Grays with Satchel on the mound and Josh Gibson behind the plate would have massacred these guys and I am not convinced that Dotty Hinton, the great catcher and best player in the World War II era All Girls Baseball League would not have had a good chance against Joss as well. I mean who did the Cleveland Naps play against anyway? There was no farm system, no cars, no telephones, so recruitment was not of the best players in the country, who remained unknown (aside from the ones banned from playing) and today instead we know who the best HIGH SCHOOL prospects are in the Dominican Republic and Taiwan. But the stats from the Negro and All Girls leagues are not here, as if they are any less scientific than those of Providence in 1880 when leagues and players changed daily (like in the Negro leagues in the 30s) and rules and equipment different.
If Sandy Koufax in his best year cost what Joss does in his best year PER INNING it would be a different game here. I am not done yet though. And maybe someone better at this than I can construct a good team to more consistently beat deadball pitchers - just that, making it seriously competitive for them, would have two good results immediately:
1) Those of us who want to use more modern players, or who want to use deadball era players as fun thought experiments only with a modern roster, would have more fun and at least be able to compete even if not always, or not usually win - it would be enough to show that you COULD win to make this more fun and also to bring about the second good result:
2) The Joss/deadball strategy would be used less often, since it would not be a guarantee, so that those here who would like to use modern pitchers, but don't out of self-defense, seeing it as the price they must pay to be able to play Wade Boggs, or Pujols or Jeter, would no longer consider it absolutely necessary and further, since it would be then shown to be possible to defeat the Joss/deadball strategy then it would take some of the fun out of using it, since once you know the other player could beat you with...let's call it strategy X for now, then even if they don't employ strategy X which has been shown to be successful close enough to 50% of the time, it means when you win with Joss it is only because the other players are "letting" you win with Joss because they have chosen not to employ the Kryptonite strategy they could use, because they are having more fun without it, meaning that winning with Joss would become meaningless and bereft of all honor and glory.
This would even have another happy effect: we would, ironically, be free to use Joss again, and not out of war but because we want to see what happens with a staff of Kenny Rogers, Addie Joss, Roy Halliday and Jared Weaver, and with a pre-Rivera, Troy Hoffman etc. relief pitcher going the last 2-3 innings of a close game. Or whatever.
Anyway, this first incarnation of the team "Bring me the head of Addie Joss" (yes, that was, and someday will be its real name) didn't quite take. It doesn't have to win a majority of the time, but close to 50% would be enough to reduce the incentive a bit to use only deadball pitchers, but back to the drawing board. Mwaa Ha Ha !