By the Iron_Throne

Every season when the postseason winds to a close, there are always managers fired, coaches hired, and the baseball pundits roast Larry Bowa or praise Dusty Baker for the quality of their work. But does any of us actually believe that a single manager can make the difference between an 80-82 record or winning a division? So many of the decisions in roster construction or bullpen usage are “by the book” that the number of decisions a manager makes can’t add up to that many wins over the course of a season. But the pitching coach seems to be different from the hitting coach, or the eight thousand bench coaches and basepath coaches each team carries. Leo Mazzone in Atlanta, Don Gullet in Cincinnati, and our own Dave Duncan are all credited with reclaiming lost arms from the garbage and making them into quality arms.

Now I’m hardly unbiased about Dunc. I have my very own Dave Duncan official jersey I wore to the NLDS game 4 and two games of the NLCS. I suppose with Tony I can take him or leave him, but the combination of Duncan and Walt Jocketty since 1996 has been the largest component of making the Cardinals the perennial contenders that have dominated the Central since 2000. One key to their success has been getting excellent value from their starting pitchers. The Cards have been able to save money on the rotation to pay for an extra All-Star hitter or two. How have the Cardinals brass been able to do this? Is it luck? Walt’s keen eye? Or is it Dunc’s miraculous skill in not only reviving lost arms but holding them together with spit and bailing wire?

I started this article with the idea of putting some semi-quantitative data together to justify my love of Dunc (which is ridiculous; love should be unconditional, not subject to tests. I’ll always love you Dunc! Call me! I'll never foget that night on the beach in Cabo!). Of course it turns out that you really can’t use the same metrics to measure both relievers and starters, and relief pitchers are far too variable year to year because of their small innings pitched. So I decided to use the metric SNLVAR from the baseballprospectus website to look at Duncan's starters. It stands for Support Neutral Value Above Replacement (Lineup adjusted). Essentially it is defense, ballpark, and opposing batter neutral. It works like a counting statistic, so more innings collected gives a higher number, which for starting pitchers is fine.

To see if Duncan could fix broken pitchers, I took the three years a starter pitched before he came under Dunc’s tutelage, weighted more heavily for the most recent seasons, and the seasons he pitched for Duncan, weighted more towards the first season under Dunc (I weighted the seasons 135|531 where there were three seasons, and 5.5 | 3.5 for two seasons, and no weight where there was one season either before or under Dunc). I did the same for pitchers who left Dunc for “greener” pastures, weighting the last season under Duncan and the first season away from him the heaviest. I only considered the seasons working for the Cardinals, since most of the pitchers have some sort of story behind them, and I only know those in the Cardinal uniform.

What comes out of this is a list of 15 starting pitchers since 1996 who were starters either before or after the toiled for Duncan (Andy Benes is counted once for each stint):

Duncan's Babies
Benes, An.	1996
Morgan, M.	1996
Osborne, D.	1996
Stottlemyre, T.	1996
Bottenfield, K.	1998
Merker, K.	1998
Oliver, D.	1998
Benes, An. (2)	2000
Hentgen, P.	2000
Kile, D.	2000
Hermanson, D.	2001
Williams, W.	2001
Finley, C.	2002
Tomko, B.	2003
Carpenter, C.	2004
Suppan, J.	2004

It’s actually easiest to just divide these sixteen cases into three categories: Dunc’s failures, successes, and no effect.

Failures:

Brett Tomko represents Duncan’s greatest failure as a pitching coach for the Cardinals, and that in itself is not too bad. He didn’t start much in 2001 or 2000, but he was average in 2002 for the Padres, and an average starter for the Giants last year, but a disaster for the Cardinals in 2003. His SNLVAR for these three years: 4.1 | 2.3 | 3.9. (An average starter will post about a 3.8 SNLVAR in 200 innings). There isn’t really anything I can think of to mitigate this; Tomko stunk for Dunc and was average everywhere else he played.

Mike Morgan is also probably not on Dunc’s Christmas Card list, though it’s tough to remember the last time he was actually decent other than 1998 for the Twins, but it was 1995, when he started 17 games for the Cards and posted an ERA of 3.88. But for Dunc in his first year for Walt and the MICDS boys, he started 18 games and had an ERA of 5.24. His weighted SNLVAR before Duncan was 1.21, and after was 1.77, but he gave a 0.60 performance in 1996. Morgan rarely pitched a full season at this point, always finding a way to miss about half the season. Age and injuries most likely played more of a roll in his performance than his work with pitching coaches.

The final pitcher (seriously, there are only three!) was Andy Benes in his second go with the Cardinals. After a snafu with getting a contract into the league office in the off-season before 1998, he spent two seasons with the Diamondbacks. When he came back after his collective bargaining-induced exile, he posted an adequate season of 3.7 SNLVAR after seasons of 3.5 and 3.4 for the Snakes. However, he fell off a cliff in 2001, going -0.6 in 107 innings. He resurrected himself down the stretch briefly in 2002 to earn a 3.2 SNLVAR in only 94 innings. However, that middle season drags down his weighted average in his second stint, and is counted as a failure by this system. However, I don’t think anyone expects a pitching coach to lay his hands on an arthritic knee and effect a cure. In fact, I think that some credit must be given for that fabulous comeback in 2002, though whether to Duncan, Benes, or someone else, I don’t know.

Successes

The very first success for Duncan under the Arch was that very same Andy Benes four years earlier in 1996. He had been below average and on the decline in San Diego before he came to us posting SNLVARs of 3.9, 3.3, and 1 on his way out. He posted a great season and was the best starter on the division winning team with a SNLVAR of 4.6, which he followed up with a good 1997 of 4.1. We’ve already seen that after he left he declined to 3.5 and 3.4, leaving these two seasons under Dave Duncan is by far his best.

His next triumph was the canonical Kent Bottenfield who posted a fabulous 4.4 SNLVAR in his first stint as a full time starter. He then of course was the magic beans that bought us Jim Edmonds, and away from Duncan’s sheltering brows, he went from bad to awful for the Angels and Astros going 1.8 and -0.9 before disappearing from the scene. I always thought that Walt should have tried this type of move more often, turning junk into trade value (though Edmonds turning into a Hall of Famer is probably just a lucky break). Duncan could another Chavez Ravine, lowering ERAs and making pitchers look more attractive than they really are in a trade. Suppan and Marquis would fit into this mode well this year.

Darren Oliver is often forgotten, but his 1999 season clocks in at a freakish 5.3, which he never even came close to before or after without Duncan.

Darryl Kile is one of the most well known of Duncan’s successes, a Cy Young contender in Houston before his disastrous journey into the clouds. He was even better for Duncan than he was for the Astros, posting 6.2 and 7.6 before his 2002 was cut short by his untimely death. It’s easy to say that just leaving altitude was the solution to his problems, but there weren’t a lot of teams that were jumping at the chance to get him, and remember that Mike Hampton never bounced back, even under the supposedly great Leo Mazzone.

Woody Williams was an out of nowhere trade after the deadline, that really brought Duncan’s skills to my notice. Unfairly maligned as a mediocre pitcher in San Diego before the trade, he posted SNLVAR s of 3.4, 5.4, and 4.7 the years before he was traded, and a prorated 3.2 before he was traded. Everyone remembers how he pitched down the stretch in 2001, which prorated over the full season would have been worth a SNLVAR of 8.8, more than enough to win a Cy Young in a full season. He followed this up with a SNLVAR of 3.8 in half a season and 5.5 in 2003. He went from an above average pitcher that was driven from SD for reasons that are still unclear to me to a staff ace that was occasionally hampered by injuries.

The final success story is last year’s Christ Carpenter, who came off an injury to be the ace of the 2004 pennant winning staff. Touted both last spring training and the year before as an ace in waiting, he always seemed overrated to me. He had one good season with the Jays in 2001 when he posted a SNLVAR of 4.9 before succumbing to injury. Of course last year he finally showed his promise under Duncan and earned a 5.2 in abbreviated action.

The remaining five pitchers either played as expected, or didn’t play enough to get a good read on their skills. Donovan Osborne in 1996 had one healthy season under Duncan bracketed by a whole bunch of injured years. Todd Stottlemyer had a great year in 1996 with a 4.4 SNLVAR surrounded by many years of below average play (two of which were with the Cardinals). Kent Merker was just continuing his decline from his glory day(s) on his way through town in 1998. Chuck Finley was good after his acquisition in 2002, but not much better than his prorated numbers for the whole season or his years before. And Jeff Suppan showed a little improvement with a 3.8 after 3.6, 2.2 and 3.8 SNLVAR years.

Overall, there are very few true failures under Dave Duncan (though it must be said terrible pitchers don’t get a lot of starts and wouldn’t show up in this study). Even his ambiguous pitchers for the most part did well or at least gave the Cardinals one good season. But it is the number or success stories, where a pitcher came to the Cardinals as junk at best and became a star that stands Duncan above his peers. I thought coming into this that Duncan would be the guy you meet in the casino in Vegas. “I’m an awesome gambler,” he says, “I’ve won more than I’ve lost!” And you’re like, “well, I’d expect almost half of the guys here to say that.…” But Duncan has hit the jackpot an alful lot, and has rarely missed.

the Iron_Throne