Thorn: Clayton Kershaw and ‘almost perfect’
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on June 19, 2014:
An old friend who happens to be a Dodger fan–US District Judge Andrew Guilford–wrote to me this afternoon about last night’s no-hitter by L.A.’s Clay Kershaw. “I’ve always been troubled when a pitcher loses a perfect game through an error by his teammate,” he wrote. “Decades ago, I checked it out, and I may be wrong, but I think it happens infrequently. It happened last night to Kershaw, who belongs with Koufax in the rarefied conversation of Dodger perfect games, yet will not be there through no fault of his own. We need a catchy phrase for a ‘no hit, no walk, no HBP, no E-1’ game and I have an idea. In a game now being flooded with all kinds of new sabermetric words we need to introduce this phrase: ‘A PITCHER’S perfect game.’
“I wonder,” Andy continued, “if anyone else has flown the flag I’m now flying (or tilted at this windmill), and whether there is any chance of adding a ‘pitcher’s perfect game’ to WAR, WHIP, OPS, DICE, DIPS, RISP, PECOTA, etc. Heck, I might even settle for ‘PPG’!”
This subject had interested me way back in 1987 when John Holway and I collaborated on a long out of print book called The Pitcher. Not even I possess a copy, but recalling that Dick Bosman lost a perfect game by committing an error HIMSELF (the E-1 which my friend would have exempted from his proposed PPG), I was able to wind my thoughts back to an article in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal of 1991, by William Ruiz, “Near-Perfect Games.” He identified five no-hitters in which the only man to reach base did so on an error.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2014/06/19/almost-perfect/
Originally published: June 19, 2014. Last Updated: June 19, 2014.