The Extremely Odd Career Path of R.A. Dickey

Perusing R.A. Dickey's baseball-reference.com page a few minutes ago, I noticed the massive oddness in his "similar players" section. The baseball-reference similarity scores judge players based on their career totals, and does not distinguish timing, although one can deduce timing from the changes in "most similar players at age X" over time. But because Dickey's career had such an odd path, the "most similar players" aren't remotely like him. Specifically, over the last three years, during his age 35, 36, and 37 seasons, Dickey posted 12.1 bWAR, while having accumulated only 0.2 bWAR during his entire prior career. That's weird!



Specifically, that's the 23rd-highest bWAR for a pitcher in his age 35-37 seasons ever. The names ahead of him are Lefty Grove, Randy Johnson, Cy Young, Curt Schilling, Steve Carlton, Phil Niekro, Dazzy Vance, Gaylord Perry, Jim Kaat, Bob Gibson, Walter Johnson, Roger Clemens, Charlie Hough, Dennis Martinez, Early Wynn, Eddie Cicotte, Luis Tiant, Chuck Finley, Warren Spahn, Eddie Plank, Rip Sewell, and Virgil Trucks. Many of these are among the greatest pitchers ever. Most of them entered this period of their careers with at least 20 bWAR already under their belts--Walter Johnson was already over 100 WAR! There is, in other words, absolutely no precedent for a career-replacement-level 34-year-old pitcher suddenly to put up 12+ WAR over his next three seasons. None.

There are, however, three pitchers who I think merit some interesting comparison. One is Rip Sewell, who had 5.5 career bWAR by age 34, and then put up years of 1.9, 4.9, and 5.9 WAR. That's the closest to Dickey's level of utter suckitude prior to this age period among the people who've been as good as him at this age. Two things to note about Sewell, though, are that, like Dickey, he made his living with an eccentric pitch, the "eephus" pitch, which he invented after an injury, and that the years in question when he suddenly became good at an advanced age were 1942, 1943, and 1944. The league against which he was competing, in other words, changed, which is absent from Dickey's story. Still, he's not a conventional pitcher. After the war, for what it's worth, he regressed to being almost exactly a league-average pitcher, with a further 5.7 WAR over five years.

Next we come to Charlie Hough, who is I think the most similar pitcher to R.A. by far, and not just because he's a fellow knuckleballer. Hough had only 6.0 bWAR after his age-34 season, and had only just become a starter in the last year of that period. Before that he had spent a decade bouncing around the Dodgers' bullpen and performing somewhere between average and replacement level. Then, from 1983 to 1985, he put up seasons of 4.4, 4.3, and 6.0 bWAR, basically tracking Dickey's trajectory but with one extra win per year. Hough was never as good after that, though he did keep pitching every fifth day for quite a few years and put up 14.1 further WAR before retiring.

Finally, let's examine Phil Niekro, the legendary knuckleballer. Now, Niekro was plenty good before turning 35, and had 29.7 career bWAR by that time. But his best season had been a 5.9-WAR effort in 1969, when the Mets' Tom Seaver beat him out for the Cy Young Award, a fact which enabled Dickey to claim the first knuckler's CYA this year (it's a grand Mets conspiracy!). Upon hitting his 35th birthday, however, Niekro ran off years at 7.5, 6.5, and 6.4 WAR. So even though he had been plenty good, he got better during just the period when Dickey got better. And then he kept getting better still! At the age of 38, Niekro was worth 8.6 wins. The following year, 9.6, and then 7.0 wins above replacement in his age-40 season. After that he did trail off, averaging just 2 WAR per year over eight more seasons--which, in fairness, gave him 23 WAR in his 40s!

So what we see is that the three people to achieve a level of improvement at this advanced age remotely similar to what Dickey has done were all unconventional pitchers. Two of them failed to maintain the newfound levels of success, while the greatest unconventional pitcher of all time kept elevating his game over exactly the time-period that Dickey's proposed next contract would cover. What I think all of this suggests about Dickey, insofar as it suggests anything, is that he probably will still be able to pitch over the course of his next contract, but whether he'll be able to quite maintain his current dominance level is genuinely uncertain. Of course, all of this is complicated by the fact that R.A. is a knuckler unlike any other; if he really is discovering new and better ways to use the pitch, he might be able to keep it up longer than, say, Hough did. In any event, it's interesting to see just how weird the trajectory he's been on. After all, each of these three comparisons had been somewhat better than R.A. Dickey was over the period of their careers comparable to his time with the Mets. He went from being unworthy of a Major League roster spot to winning the Cy Young Award in a mere three years' time, and that, I would say, makes R.A. Dickey entirely unique.

Or, to put it another way, pay the man, Mr. Alderson!