Afternoon Baseball

Link here (in forum-style)

Rob Neyer talks pitching on Red Sox Nation. Not bad for an informal setting, but his analysis certainly won't make me pony up the ESPN Insider dollars for his regular columns.
His biggest flaw, in my opinion, is the equating Bob Gibson's 1968 season (22-9, 1.12 ERA) with Steve Carlton's 1972 season (27 wins for a 59-win team). He's right that the absurd ERA is the X factor, but says it's "theoretically possible that Carlton actually got more run support than Gibson did."
Well, with Retrosheet , isn't it possible to check that. Also, Gibson had 13 shutouts that season (an incredble number in itself). When he didn't pitch a shutout, his ERA was still under 2.00, but his record was only 9-9. So it's tough to believe that his run support could have been that much better than Carlton's without even going into the data.

(Neyer chat courtesy of Baseball Musings)