About once a year, the Toronto Blue Jays take a kid out of the minor leagues and put him right into the starting rotation.
Warning: there is trivia involved!
Scott Richmond's first start last week got me to thinking about major league debuts for starting pitchers. We've had two this year, with Purcey (4.1 2 1 1 7 3 GS: 51) and Richmond (5.1 7 3 3 0 4 GS: 46), but is that unusual? Is it unusual for a pitcher to debut as a starter and not worked in gradually as a reliever first? What can you tell from a pitcher's first game? How good are these first games? So I went to Baseball Reference and educated myself.
First, defining our terms. I was looking for pitchers who filled the following criteria:
- they made their major league debut in a Toronto uniform
- as a starting pitcher.
I found thirty such pitchers. This is the thirty-second season of Blue Jays baseball, so that's about one per year. So apparently it's reasonably common, but not overwhelmingly so. There is, however, a bit of a distorting factor at work, in that four of the pitchers in question made their debuts in the expansion year of 1977, and then three more in 1979. Take out the expansion effect and the frequency falls further behind one-per-year. The longest stretch the Jays have had without doing this was in the mid-'80s: they didn't debut a pitcher as a starter at all in the 1983-86 seasons. Other years in which multiple pitchers have debuted as starters have been '89, '91, '95, '04, '06 and '08. (Two in each of those years.) A couple of those were years in which the Jays had significant success, so it's hard to see a pattern in there. Twenty-five of the pitchers were righthanders; five lefthanded. That's about normal, right?
If you can tell anything from a pitcher's first game, I don't know what it is. Of the eleven Jays that threw quality starts (Game Score > 50) in their debuts, seven never amounted to much and it's too early to tell about the other four. On the other hand, the four worst starts by debuting Toronto pitchers included two guys (Jim Clancy, 2 5 5 5 3 1 GS:24 and Chris Carpenter, 3 8 7 5 3 5 GS: 21) who became rotation mainstays for years. It doesn't even seem like the decision to give a guy a debut start has much to do with eventual success; the two consensus greatest Jays starters, Dave Stieb (6 6 6 5 2 5 GS: 41) and Roy Halladay (5 8 3 2 2 5 GS: 44) were both debut starters, but so was Mike Darr (1.1 3 5 5 4 1 GS: 25), whose debut start was his only major league game.
For some reason, more Jays pitchers have made debut starts against the Orioles than any other team: six. Most of the other AL teams are also represented on the list, and some National League teams as well (Mets: Pasqual Coco in '00 (4 5 4 4 5 2 GS: 33); Expos: David Bush in '04 (5.2 4 1 1 1 4 GS: 60); Rockies: Taubenheim in '06 (5 5 3 3 3 3 GS: 45)), but not the Mariners. Why not the Mariners? You'd think it'd be a natural.
Our thirty pitchers went a combined 9-14 in these games, for whatever that's worth. Mixed in there were two Cheap Wins (a win with a Game Score below 50) and one Tough Loss (a loss with a Game Score above 50). The Cheap Wins went to Luis Leal against the Yankees in 1980 (7.2 12 3 3 4 0 GS: 39) and Giovanni Carrara in '95 (5 7 5 5 5 2 GS: 30; this was a wild one. Anybody remember it? The Jays beat the Athletics 18-11!). It's a bit tough to call Leal's win cheap, because after all he only gave up three runs in seven-plus innings against the Bronx Zoo, but come on. Twelve hits and no strikeouts? The Tough Loss was Bush's game against the Expos, mentioned above.
There is one pattern that stood out. Of these games, twenty of them were at home and ten on the road. I imagine that that reflects a clear preference for giving the new guy the home-field advantage when it's possible to do that.
Another thing I was wondering about was, you always hear about a guy who's new to the majors having an advantage over all the hitters who've never seen him before, but how true is it? Are there a disproportionate number of debut starts that are particularly good games? I took the Game Scores and did a quick-and-dirty graph:
GS 10-19 X
GS 20-29 XXX
GS 30-39 XXXXXXX
GS 40-49 XXXXXXXX
GS 50-59 XXXX
GS 60-69 XXXX
GS 70-79 XXX
You can't tell anything from just thirty games, of course, but it doesn't look like an unusual pattern. Maybe there are a couple more games than I expected in the 60s and 70s, but I wouldn't want to put any weight on that.
By the way: lowest Game Score was registered by the hapless Jeff Ware against the White Sox in '95 (1.1 7 7 6 3 1 GS: 12); highest was Mauro Gozzo against the Rangers in '89 (8 3 0 0 3 4 GS: 77).
Here's the trivia part. Of the thirty men to make their major league debuts as a Toronto starting pitcher, I've already mentioned fourteen: Bush, Carpenter, Carrara, Clancy, Coco, Darr, Gozzo, Halladay, Leal, Purcey, Richmond, Stieb, Taubenheim and Ware. That leaves sixteen. Name them! Try to do it without looking it up, but I warn you, some of these guys are pretty obscure...
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20080808161302480