Mark Buehrle might be hard to appreciate. I mean, really appreciate. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't really appreciate him.
I've written about Buehrle's tremendous durability and reliability before, but of course he's just finished a season in which he did it again? What's "it"? It is what he always does.
Of course, Mark Buehrle's far from a superstar. The next time he appears on the cover of a magazine, it'll be his first.
Damn it, that's a lie. In 2005, he made the cover of The Sporting News. Which used to be a newspaper, technically. But then became a magazine. And then he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 2009 (Sports Illustrated has always been a magazine). But you know what I mean. In his long and productive career, Buehrle has appeared in the Cy Young balloting just once, in 2005 when he finished a distant fifth. Now, you can certainly argue that he was actually the second- or third-best pitcher in the league that season, and the voters just didn't notice. I think you would be right. You can certainly argue that he should have received more support from Cy Young voters in other years. I think you would probably be right about that, too.
But that's not my point. My point is that for a pitcher who now leads all active pitchers in Wins Above Replacement, Mark Buehrle's not famous at all. Because while slow and steady might win the race, it's big seasons that get you the magazine covers. And the Cy Young votes. And the shiny, semi-recognizable plaques near the shores of Otsego Lake.*
* Buehrle leads all active pitchers in Baseball-Reference.com's Wins Above Replacement, anyway. The FanGraphs version, which I actually prefer, ranks Buehrle second among active pitchers, well behind CC Sabathia. But why should we let preferences get in the way of a good story?
I don't mean to suggest that Buehrle actually deserves one of those semi-recognizable plaques. He's what we sometimes describe as a compiler, which is hardly a bad thing but doesn't often get counted as a great thing. Do you want Sandy Koufax, or do you want Tommy John? You want Sandy Koufax. Or most of you do, anyway. Mark Buehrle is Tommy John, except he didn't need the surgery. I mean, he really didn't need the surgery. As Baseball Info Solutions' John Dewan points out, Buehrle just finished his 14th straight season with at least 30 starts. Which is actually sort of phenomenal. Here are the three pitchers with more than 14 straight seasons: Cy Young (19), Warren Spahn (17), Gaylord Perry (15). All of them, of course, resting near Otsego Lake. Buehrle's tied for fourth place on this list with Christy Mathewson. Also Otsego. Dewan:
I had my idea for this topic because of a fascinating article Bill James recently wrote on Rotation Emperors, which you can read with a subscription to Bill James Online. Rather than look at pitchers on the season-level, Bill looks at consecutive-start streaks. On that list, Buehrle became the current Rotation Emperor when Justin Verlander missed a start in late August of this season. Buehrle currently has 228 consecutive starts, which dates back to September of 2007.
What’s interesting is that Buehrle did not miss a start then because of an injury. Instead, manager Ozzie Guillen skipped Buehrle to allow rookie John Danks to get a start off the DL; the White Sox were well out of the race, so he was simply looking at his young pitcher to help plan for the 2008 season. That snapped a 224-game streak Buehrle had entering that rotation turn, which dated back to his sophomore season in 2001, his first season as a full-time starter. Had Buehrle’s streak not been snapped in 2007, his active streak would be 452 consecutive games. That would have been the longest streak, by far, of any pitcher Bill studied, going back to 1955 where Bill started his list! The player with the longest streak Bill studied was Jim Bunning, who had a streak of 337 consecutive starts end in 1968. That’s almost 50 years ago.
You can argue that Buehrle's the most reliable starting pitcher since ... well, maybe Warren Spahn, and you might be right. Speaking of which, Craig Wright does point out in the comments (below Dewan's essay) that Greg Maddux was quite probably robbed by the strike of a pretty impressive streak of his own. He's tied for sixth on the list, with 13 straight seasons of 30 or more starts. But that badly undersells Maddux's reliability. He started at least 34 games from 1988 through '93, won Cy Young Awards in the strike-shortened '94 and '95 seasons, then ran off that streak of 13 straight beginning in '96. So it seems quite likely that if not for the strike, Maddux's streak would actually have reached 21 straight seasons, out-distancing even ol' Cy Young himself.
Oh, well. I generally don't feel too sorry for players who lost things during the strike, since they're the ones who struck. It might well have been the right choice, but it was a choice. But while Maddux is stuck at 13, Buehrle's not stuck at 14. As Dewan points out, "Buehrle is still just 35 years old and is showing no decline in performance. He has half a decade to go to reach Young, but it's not inconceivable that he could reach that total, especially since he does not rely on big velocity to be effective."
All of that's true. Last season, Buehrle essentially matched his career averages in wins and losses and walks and strikeouts, but was slightly stingier with home runs than ever before. Which was almost certainly just a blip.
He's the same pitcher he's always been, give or take a small adjustment here or there. He's not going into the Hall of Fame, and he's not winning 300 games, because he hasn't managed to win more than 16 since 2002, and not more than 13 since 2008. But he's been better than some pitchers who are in the Hall of Fame, and he's been steadier than nearly all of them.
