Who's Your Ed Lynch?

[Edgy MD]

Your Ed Lynch might actually be Ed Lynch, but probably isn't. Nonetheless, Ed's as good a stand-in for the rest of his colleagues as any.

The question is — who is the Met pitcher who you think of as holding down a spot in the rotation for a long period, without being particularly productive, but nonetheless better-than-the-next-guy enough to persist in his role over and over again?

[Fman99]

Your Ed Lynch might actually be Ed Lynch, but probably isn't. Nonetheless, Ed's as good a stand-in for the rest of his colleagues as any.

The question is — who is the Met pitcher who you think of as holding down a spot in the rotation for a long period, without being particularly productive, but nonetheless better-than-the-next-guy enough to persist in his role over and over again?

Steve Traschel comes to mind

[Frayed Knot]

Jim McAndrew

[Marshmallowmilkshake]

I was thinking Bobby Jones, but he had moments of brilliance, like the one-hitter, and was an All-Star once.

[G-Fafif]

Tylor Megill.

[metirish]

John Maine came to mind ,and when I looked at the numbers they are similar to Lynch , although Maine had a winning record

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Lynch_(baseball)

[whippoorwill]

George Stone

[Benjamin Grimm]

Looking ahead... David Peterson?

[DocTee]

Mark Clark and Brian Bohanon

[Chad ochoseis]

Dillon Gee.

[Edgy MD]

All good answers. And nobody even went for Anthony Young.

This question was raised by a data set I found on my laptop that I left off right in the middle of crunching. It looks like i was trying to look at the ratio of innings pitched to an average of fWAR, bWAR, and WPA, but I left off in the middle, and so only had fWAR plugged in there for everybody. The answer, of course, depends on how you define "long period." And a lot of the data takes us back to Casey Stengel's Mets, when guys took their turn, stayed healthy, gave up a lot of runs, but didn't have anybody to replace them.

300

If hanging in there for 300 innings is an accomplishment, then the grindingest grinder of a Mets starting pitcher has to be magazine cover model Jay Hook, who took his turn long enough to compile 376 innings, while being credited with a humble 1.1 fWAR.

400

If you demand that such an animal prove himself for at least 400 innings, then please let me turn your attention to two-sport star Galen Cisco. Galen pounded out 479 innings for the Mets, bringing home only 1.5 fWAR. Galen had more success as a pitching coach and namesake of one of the characters in Planet of the Apes.

500, 600

But I hear you saying, "Four hunnert innings? Is that really taking the punishment for that long?" Maybe it's not. That's why you're wondering who threw as many as 500 innings while taking it on the chin. Well that would be none other than 1976 Rookie of the Year Pat Zachry! Pat, costar of the cult classick film Midnight Massacre, threw 698 1/3 Metly innings, while raking up only 4.4 fWAR, a ratio that brings some sweet relief to Oliver Perez, who felt certain he'd enter into the conversation somewhere around here.

And there he is!

Do I hear 600 innings? Well there's no point in that, because the data above tells you that's still the recently departed Pat Zachry! Pat once appeared on Kiner's Korner, and for his trouble was given some Getty gas gift certificates, redeemable at Getty filling stations in the tri-state area. So he stopped to fill up on his way home, and the station wouldn't take them.

Sorry, Pat!

700, 800, 900

But then there's the 700-inning plateau. Can you imagine throwing over 700 innings, not quite helping your team win, but never being quite so hopeless that they put the next guy in there? What sort of Purgatory is that?! It's the Purgatory of Jack Fisher. Fat Jack ground out 30 or more starts for four straight years, piling up a whopping 931 2/3 innings, while banking only 7.4 fWAR. He carried the ball through all that muck and mire only to get dealt off just as Gil Hodges was arriving to turn things around and bring the Mets to a championship.

There's taking one for the team, and then there's taking one for the team, and Jack took several hundred for the team, so much so that he's the answer at 700 innings, he's the answer at 800 innings, and he's the answer at 900 innings! When Gary Gentry and Jim McAndrew get together with Jack, after he kisses their championship rings, they have to thank him for keeping their names out of this conversation entirely. Jack OWNS the futility on a Mets mound over 700-1,000 innings category all by hisself!!

1,000

Which leads us to 1,000 innings. And let's face it, if you lasted 1,000 innings as a Met, you must've been pretty good, and pretty healthy, even if you were the worst of that noble category. And you can hear all about it some night on a random Mets broadcast from TV analyst Ron Darling!! Ron threw 1,589 2/3 innings as a Met, garnering 15.8 fWAR. That's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's a higher ratio than your Bobby Joneses and your Jonathan Nieses.

Thank you for playing everybody's favorite game show, Unproductive Staying Power! — aka Long-Term Futility!. I'm Johnny Olson, and for Bert Convey and all of us at Goodson-Todman Productions here at Television City Studios, we'll see you tomorrow!!

[Chad ochoseis]

Fun thread. Niese definitely came to mind when I was thinking about Mets of the Aughts.

I'm thinking pre-Seaver era pitchers would have to be excluded, since being an innings-eating plugger pre-1967 meant you had a good chance of being the staff ace. Without checking because I'm lazy and have an auto insurance program in front of me to review, I think Galen Cisco might have been the best pitcher on some of the early teams.

[MFS62]

I hate to say it because he is my all time favorite Met, but Al Jackson pitched 990 innings as a Met.
His career FWar was 17.7, but I didn't see how much of that was as a Met.
Later

[batmagadanleadoff]

I hate to say it because he is my all time favorite Met, but Al Jackson pitched 990 innings as a Met.
His career FWar was 17.7, but I didn't see how much of that was as a Met.
Later

This whole thing doesn't really hold up well when analyzing pitchers that have thrown 1,000+ innings or close to it. You've got to be a pretty decent pitcher to get to throw that many innings, even in the era of Al Jackson. For 1,000 or so innings pitched, what you're really doing is averaging out several seasons, probably at least six. The faded Ron darling of 1989 and 1990 was not the same as the front of the rotation Ron Darling of Davey Johnson's first few seasons. This stat created a misleading portrait of Darling as a Met by averaging out his peak seasons and diminished seasons to suggest that he was average or below average. He was neither. He was a very good pitcher and then he declined.

We sort of had this same discussion here recently in another context -- Jeff McNeil. McNeil used to be a star player. Now he's struggling very much and appears to be a shell of his former peak. But that doesn't mean that McNeil was never any good. You shouldn't average out McNeil's best and worst seasons to come up with some average composite McNeil that supposedly represents what McNeil is. McNeil is or was two players: He used to be an all-star and now he isn't.