More on Mussina

Delving into baseballreference.com's game details, I looked for all games in Mussina's career in which he earned a Bill James game score of 35 or less. My goal was inning pitch counts. I figured it was unlikely Mussina threw more than 46 pitches in an inning during a game in which he had a pretty good game score. It was also a means of narrowing my search.

Counting last night's games, Mussina has had 71 games with a game score <= 35. I was a little surprised by that number. That's nearly 15% of his starts. In future, I'll have to compare that to another Hall of Fame or near Hall of Fame pitcher to see if that is an unusually high percentage.

If you are going by how many times his game score was <=35 in a season, his worst years were '96, '00 and '05. Those weren't very bad years overall...he finished in the Top 5 Cy Young voting in '96. In fact, prior to this year, Mussina has not had an awful season. At his worst, he is league average, but usually well above.

So far, 2007 is his worst season statistically. And this year he is likely to exceed his previous high of 7 games with a game score of 35 or less, since he already has 5 in 16 starts.

I looked at all 71 of those games, searching for innings in which his pitch count was 35 or higher. Counting last night, there were only 12 such games. (Note, five of the 71 games had no pitch count data, but the pitch count estimator did not indicate that he would have been anywhere near 35 pitches in those five games). Here are those games, in chronological order:

Date      Pitches   Inn      Opp
5-21-93     39    Top 3rd    MIL
6-18-95     38    Bot 1st    DET
4-21-99     35    Bot 4th    TBD
4-21-01     35    Top 4th    BOS
6-5-01      39    Top 2nd    BAL
7-31-02     36    Bot 2nd    TEX
8-6-02      38    Top 3rd    KCR
7-1-03      35    Bot 3rd    BAL
5-29-05     35    Top 1st    BOS
8-3-05      44    Bot 5th    CLE
9-24-06     35    Bot 4th    TBD
7-20-07     46    Top 3rd    TBD

So the top of the 3rd inning last night actually appears to be Mussina's longest inning by pitch count in his 17 year career, topping another tiring inning on August 3, 2005 by two pitches. Hats off to Joe Magrane.

Interestingly, in what was probably his worst outing ever on April 21, 1999 against the Devil Rays (mentioned in my earlier post, and earning his worst game score = 0!), he threw no more than 35 pitches in an inning. In fact, Mussina has five career games with a game score of 10 or lower and only two made the list for high pitch count innings with 35 and 36. High pitch count innings may not correlate well with low game scores, though I imagine they correlate better with low game scores than high ones.