Everybody loves Baseball-Reference.com. They're wonderful. But do you read the Baseball-Reference blog? I hope you do, because it is fantastic.
I love when they plug in some search criteria, run it, and see what comes out. I particularly like posts like the one today from Steve Lombardi called "Worked So Long For What?". As Steve said:
Playing around with Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitching Season Finder today, I asked it to show me all pitchers with 350+ career Games Started whose career wins were less than 1.02 times their losses.
It's just another way to look at starting pitchers who worked a long time in the big leagues without great winning percentages.
Commenter John Williams summarized the list well:
This is like the kevin costner or bruce willis list. Lots of movies without much box office. Never an Oscar acting, but never the worst thing in the movie. A hit one a decade, but a movie every year.
I decided to check the career WAR (from Rally) of these guys to see if any stood out from the crowd of supposed mediocre pitchers. Here is the original list, but now ordered by WAR:
| Name | GS | W | L | ERA | ERA+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frank Tanana | 616 | 240 | 236 | 3.66 | 106 | 55.1 |
| Bob Friend | 497 | 197 | 230 | 3.58 | 107 | 48.9 |
| Bobo Newsom | 483 | 211 | 222 | 3.98 | 107 | 45.9 |
| Jack Powell | 515 | 245 | 254 | 2.97 | 106 | 44.5 |
| Tom Candiotti | 410 | 151 | 164 | 3.73 | 108 | 41.0 |
| Claude Osteen | 488 | 196 | 195 | 3.30 | 104 | 39.8 |
| Charlie Hough | 440 | 216 | 216 | 3.75 | 107 | 37.5 |
| Javier Vazquez | 386 | 142 | 140 | 4.21 | 107 | 37.2 |
| Danny Darwin | 371 | 171 | 182 | 3.84 | 106 | 37.1 |
| Tom Zachary | 408 | 186 | 191 | 3.73 | 107 | 30.6 |
| Bump Hadley | 355 | 161 | 165 | 4.24 | 105 | 29.8 |
| Kevin Gross | 368 | 142 | 158 | 4.11 | 95 | 26.4 |
| Mike Morgan | 411 | 141 | 186 | 4.23 | 98 | 26.0 |
| Mike Moore | 440 | 161 | 176 | 4.39 | 95 | 24.9 |
| Floyd Bannister | 363 | 134 | 143 | 4.06 | 102 | 24.3 |
| Steve Renko | 365 | 134 | 146 | 3.99 | 98 | 22.0 |
| Steve Trachsel | 417 | 143 | 159 | 4.39 | 99 | 21.0 |
| Bob Knepper | 413 | 146 | 155 | 3.68 | 95 | 20.8 |
| Rudy May | 360 | 152 | 156 | 3.46 | 102 | 19.6 |
| Jim Clancy | 381 | 140 | 167 | 4.23 | 99 | 18.7 |
| Jim Slaton | 360 | 151 | 158 | 4.03 | 95 | 16.5 |
| Jeff Suppan | 396 | 135 | 135 | 4.68 | 98 | 13.3 |
| Bobby Witt | 397 | 142 | 157 | 4.83 | 91 | 13.2 |
Frank Tanana stands out over the rest. Tanana, of course, is the pitcher with the most career WAR to never receive a Hall of Fame vote. Bobby Witt, as much as I liked his strikeouts as a kid, simply deserved his fate. Bob Friend and Bobo Newsom both pitched for a long time at a clip moderately above league average. While there aren't a ton of Hall of Famers with less career WAR than them, there are some.
Jack Powell's stats were off in the original table (it only counted his stats from 1901 on). This table has his complete totals. Hard to imagine a sub-3.00 starter losing 254 games while only winning 245, but his ERA was only a little above the league average (106 ERA+). Still, he deserved more wins than he got.
Tom Candiotti completes the group of 40+ WAR pitchers. Like fellow list member Charlie Hough, Tom rode his knuckleball into slightly-above-average-but-stayed-on-the-mound-for-a-long-time immortality. How does fellow knuckleballer Tim Wakefield compare? His winning percentage (.538) is too good to make this list and he slides into the middle of the pack with 33.5 WAR.