Top 10 Seasons by an Angels Starting Pitcher
Also: Why did the team trade a star pitcher in his 20s twice in seven years?
It's the series that wouldn't die! For previous iterations (though not all, because "Charlie" refuses to "fix" my archives), see the top 10 seasons by Angel DHs and RFs. Let's get right to the number-pile!
W L ERA G GS CG SO SV IP K BB WHIP ERA+ WS AS? CY MVP
1) Dean Chance, 1964
20 9 1.65 46 35 15 11 4 278.3 207 86 1.01 200 31.7 x 1 5
2) Nolan Ryan, 1973
21 16 2.87 41 39 26 4 1 326.0 383 162 1.27 124 27.8 x 2 17
3) Frank Tanana, 1976
19 10 2.43 34 34 23 2 0 288.3 261 73 0.99 137 26.5 x 3 15
4) Nolan Ryan, 1972
19 16 2.28 39 39 20 9 0 284.0 329 157 1.14 128 24.7 x 8 30
5) Bill Singer, 1973
20 14 3.22 40 40 19 2 0 315.7 241 130 1.30 110 23.3 x
6) Chuck Finley, 1990
18 9 2.40 32 32 7 2 0 236.0 177 81 1.23 160 22.6 x 7
7) Mike Witt, 1986
18 10 2.84 34 34 14 3 0 269.0 208 73 1.08 144 22.5 x 3 12
8) Andy Messersmith, 1969
16 11 2.52 40 33 10 2 2 250.0 211 100 1.08 138 22.4 29
9) Bert Blyleven, 1989
17 5 2.73 33 33 8 5 0 241.0 131 44 1.12 140 22.2 4 13
10) Nolan Ryan, 1977
19 16 2.77 37 37 22 4 0 299.0 341 204 1.34 101 22.1 x 3 24And the winner is: 1964 Cy Young winner and suspected online bridge-player Dean Chance. Go take a leisurely gander at that season ... not only did he take his 35 dominant starts, with 11 shutouts, but Manager Bill Rigney also brought him in to close at least seven games, saving four. He led the league in wins, ERA, adjusted ERA+, innings pitched, complete games, and shutouts. At age 23. To give you an idea about how good 31.7 Win Shares is for a starting pitcher, only two have compiled that many in the last 30 years -- Roger Clemens in 1997 and Dwight Gooden in 1985, both in about the same number of innings. Was Chance, like his exact contemporary (and Cy Young winner in '63, '65-66) Sandy Koufax, helped by Dodger Stadium, this being the Angels' third of four years there? Well, sure -- 11-3, 1.07 ERA. But he was also dynamite on the road, going 9-6, 2.25. If you hit Baseball-Reference's awesome "Neutralize Stats" tool, Chance's 1964 actually improves in won-loss record, to 23-6 (the tool assumes neutral run support), and a still-terrific 2.15 ERA.
Dean Chance, like Jim Fregosi, was an original Angel, part of a December 1960 draft that took place just one week after major league baseball awarded the Angels to Gene Autry. Has there ever been a better pitcher-hitter combo in the history of expansion drafts? Nope! And it's not even close.
Take the Angels' expansion-mates, the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers. Best player? Probably Chuck Hinton. Pitcher? Uh, Dick Donovan? Doesn't quite rise up to a baseball-wide Cy Young winner and a Hall of Fame trajectory derailed by leg injuries. Continuing the exercise:
* Houston Colt .45s/Astros -- Eddie Bressoud and Ken Johnson.
* New York Mets -- Jim Hickman and Al Jackson.
* Kansas City Royals -- Pat Kelly and Jim Rooker.
* Seattle Pilots/Milwaukee Brewers -- Lou Piniella and Mike Marshall.
* San Diego Padres -- Nate Colbert and Dave Roberts.
* Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals -- Manny Mota and Carl Morton.
* Seattle Mariners -- Ruppert Jones and Glenn Abbott.
* Toronto Blue Jays -- Ernie Whitt and Jim Clancy.
* Colorado Rockies -- Vinny Castilla and Andy Ashby.
* Florida Marlins -- Jeff Conine and Trevor Hoffman.
* Arizona Diamondbacks -- Joe Randa and Jeff Suppan.
* Tampa Bay Devil Rays -- Bobby Abreu and Roberto Hernandez.
The only position player who comes anywhere close to Fregosi is the terrific Bobby Abreu (who, like many on this list, rose to prominence away from his expansion home). The only pitchers who could think about carrying Chance's jock are Mike Marshall and Trevor Hoffman. The Angels got more front-line talent with their expansion draft than any team in Major League history (though Tampa Bay's was also very good, and deeper). As they would eventually do with the player they traded Fregosi for (Nolan Ryan), the Angels failed to surround their superstars with adequate supporting casts, squandering a golden opportunity to build a perennial contender.
Conspicuous absence from the list: Bartolo Colon's Cy Young 2005 (19.5 Win Shares), Mark Langston's All-Star 1993 and 1991 (20.3 and 20.1), and Clyde Wright's storybook no-hitter season of 1970 (20.0).
The hell's HE doing here?: Bill Singer, I guess, though he was a two-time 20-game winner and All-Star, a Bob Welch-type who could have provided one hell of a fourth punch after the Ryan-Tanana-Ed Figueroa 1-2-3 had his back not given out in 1974.
Other Weirdnesses: Did you know that Ken McBride made more All-Star games (3) than Bert Blyleven (2)? That's pretty weird, and makes me think yet again that we need some kind of "Real All-Star" list, whereby we post-facto declare who the All-Stars should have been in a given year, rather than which mediocre pitcher had a hot first half on a lousy team & thereby cost a deserving Hall of Famer some crucial votes from idiot sportswriters decades later....
OK, here's another odd thing: How often do teams trade their ace pitchers during their mid-twenties? The Angels did it twice in seven years -- Dean Chance in 1966, going into his age-26 season; and Andy Messersmith in 1972, going into age 27.
I've detailed the Messersmith-McMullen/Robinson-Valentine-Singer-Grabarkewitz trade here (though mostly from the Dodgers' point of view). Chance was sent to Minnesota with 26-year-old no-hit shortstop Jackie Hernandez for 29-year-old RHP-mashing first baseman Don Mincher, 29-year-old outfielder and two-time All-Star Jimmie Hall (who'd hit 98 home runs his previous four years, but in a sequence of 33-25-20-20 ... and he also couldn't hit lefties with a paddle); plus promising 24-year-old reliever Pete Cimino. Even though Chance had been the ace on an Angels rotation that had been paper thin the previous two seasons, and even though he would go on to win 20 games and make the All-Star team for the Twins in 1967, it was still a pretty defensible trade. For the previous five years the team had received indifferent production at first base and the corner outfield spots, wasting fine young talent up the middle (Fregosi, Bobby Knoop, Buck Rodgers and Jose Cardenal). The 23-year-old Cardenal and 24-year-old Rich Reichardt were two-thirds of a good young outfield, but 21-year-old Jay Johnstone wasn't quite ready. The Angels' bullpen was strong but old; acquiring Cimino gave them the flexibility to flip talented-but-declining closer Bob Lee (who'd posted ERA+s the previous three years of 218, 177, and 123) for what they must have thought was a promising young starter, the Dodgers' Nick Willhite. Chance himself had returned to earth in '65-66, going 27-27 with ERA+s of 108 and 109. And the team's minor league system was percolating with promising young arms.
And there's something else to keep in mind -- in the era before Tommy John surgery and free agency (the latter of which, of course, Messersmith helped usher in), you just never knew when great arms would snap like a twig. Management had every incentive to pile up fantastic workloads on kids, then flip 'em for value before they crapped out. Here, for example, is what the Angels did to pitchers aged 25 and under during the franchise's first 17 years:
YEAR AGE IP CG NAME
1961 25 242 11 Ken McBride
1963 22 248 06 Dean Chance
1964 23 278 15 Chance
1966 25 260 11 Chance
1969 23 250 10 Andy Messersmith
1971 25 277 14 Messersmith
1972 25 284 20 Nolan Ryan
1974 20 269 12 Frank Tanana
1975 21 257 16 Tanana
1976 22 288 23 Tanana
1977 23 241 20 Tanana
That last year of Tanana, of course, included 14 consecutive complete games, and the fairly predictable destruction of his arm after four seasons of child abuse. (Equally "of course," Nolan Ryan's bazillion pitches a season in the 1970s did nothing to prevent him from pitching well into his mid-40s, and -- he argues -- made it possible in the first place, though we have to remember that Ryan's age-25 season was his first with more than 152 IP.) When you add in the fact that the team traded 16-game winner Ed Figueroa after his first full season in the bigs, you can begin to see some of the historical rationale behind the franchise's most controversial personnel decision -- letting Ryan walk at age 33.
So how did the Dean Chance trade work out, anyway? Strangely, considering everyone involved was in his 20s, it only affected each team for about two years. If the Angels were gambling that Chance would flame out, they gambled well; after two good seasons with the Twins he was basically done, winning just 18 more games in 335 innings. Meanwhile, the team got a monster year from Mincher in 1967 (.273/.367/.487 with 25 homers in year the league average was .236/303/.351); plus 16 homers from Jimmie Hall and a decent season in the pen from Cimino, contributing to an 84-win season, 2nd most in team history. But in '68, Mincher regressed, Cimino suffered a career-ending injury, and Hall hit .214/.303/.262 in half a season before being traded for Vic Davalillo (who then raked -- .298/.326/.375, in the Year of the Pitcher). Davalillo was then traded for essentially nothing in 1969, while Mincher was plucked away in the expansion draft by the Seattle Pilots.
A final word about trading Ace Pitchers: Bad organizations often pin the blame for their woes on their best players, instead of on themselves for failing to surround the All-Stars with guys not named Tom Egan. Complementarily, one of the first instincts of inferior wheeler-dealers is to fix problems by offering their best chits (who don't happen to play the position where the perceived lack is greatest). My view is that you don't trade Championship Talent without an extremely compelling reason. It wasn't Andy Messersmith's fault that the Angels averaged 2.93 runs a game in 1972, it was the fault of Harry Dalton and Fred Haney, who thought it was a reasonable idea to back Ryan, Messersmith, Clyde Wright and Rudy May with the likes of Art Kusnyer and the worn out remains of Leo Cardenas. Front-line pitching talent is still a rare thing in baseball; thankfully current Angel GM Bill Stoneman (who was on the team back when Frank Tanana was being driven like a mule) realizes that, even if some fans don't.
SPs raised at home, made famous elsewhere: A short list. Bobby Darwin (did you know he started as a teenage-phenom pitcher? Go check out his bizarrely shaped career); Messersmith, Marty Pattin, and Ed Figueroa.
Old soldiers who came here to die: Sensitive Angel fans should avert their eyes. Ned Garver, Lew Burdette, Curt Simmons, Jim Maloney, Gary Nolan, Mike Cuellar, Dave Goltz, Luis Tiant, Bert Blyleven, Scott Sanderson, Kevin Gross, Mark Gubicza, Jack McDowell, and Tim Belcher.
Win Share Seasons and Totals: For Ryan, Finley, Tanana, Witt, Chance, Langston, Messersmith, Wright, Jarrod Washburn, Kirk McCaskill, Jim Abbott, John Lackey, Geoff Zahn, George Brunet, and Rudy May.
NM: 01/02/03/04/05/06/07/08/09/10/11 (total)
NR: 28/25/22/21/17/13/12/12 (150)
CF: 23/19/19/17/16/14/14/14/11/11/09 (167)
FT: 27/22/20/15/14/09/05/02 (114)
MW: 23/18/16/14/12/11/09/06/05 (114)
DC: 32/17/14/14/12 (89)
ML: 20/20/15/13/11/08/07/01 (95)
AM: 22/20/14/12/07 (75)
CW: 20/18/16/13/05/04/04/01 (81)
JW: 18/15/15/10/09/07/04/03 (81)
KM: 18/18/12/07/07/06/01 (69)
JA: 20/18/08/08/06 (60)
JL: 17/17/11/08/07 (60)
GZ: 16/16/14/06/02 (54)
GB: 15/13/12/11/04/02 (57)
RM: 14/12/10/06/05/04 (51)
Positional Miscellania: The two worst seasons for the Angels rotation (at least as expressed by Win Shares racked up by their top five starters) came during the Mike Scioscia/Bud Black era -- 2000 (just 27.4 WS total between Washburn, Scott Schoeneweis, Ramon Ortiz, Kent Bottenfield and Seth Etherton), and 2003 (26.1 from Washburn, Lackey, Ortiz, Kevin Gregg, Kevin Appier). Note that those two rotation totals are less than those of both Dean Chance in 1964 and Nolan Ryan in '73. It's a point frequently lost, but one I can't stress enough: The Scioscia/Stoneman Angels began as brute take-and-rake offense waddling behind a bunch of rag arms, and evolved steadily toward a punch-and-judy collection of good defenders behind the deepest rotation in baseball. That's a fascinating and complicated transformation, though the balance (I reckon) will begin to be tipped away from defense and toward offense in the next few years with the new generation of young hitters. That is, if Mickey Hatcher doesn't ruin them first.
The other thing that strikes you is the number of atrocious acquisitions the team has made over the years for injury-prone and/or mediocre and/or over-the-hill starting pitchers. After having established themselves as the team ready to trade or give up on young power arms (Chance, Messersmith, Figueroa, Ryan), the Angels started shelling out money and position players right and left for guys who had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they couldn't pitch 200 innings in a season -- Bruce Kison, Bill Travers, Jim Slaton, Dan Petry, Mark Gubicza, Jack McDowell, and so on. Kison pitched all right when healthy, and Slaton swallowed some innings, but these are the type of guys you should get with one-year free agent contracts, not four-year deals or the rights to Chili Davis.
Originally appeared at mattwelch.com.