Brandon Webb Was Really Good At Baseball

The wonderful site at BaseballReference.com offers a nifty stat called ERA+. It adjusts a pitcher's Earned Run Average to account for his context (league and ballpark), which allows us to more accurately compare pitchers from different eras. If we just used raw ERA all the time, well, we'd think Smoky Joe Wood and Eddie Plank were the greatest pitchers who ever lived just because they were around during the low-scoring dead-ball era of the early-20th century.

Brandon Webb is tied for the 11th-best ERA+ of all time. Remove from consideration any pitcher who debuted before 1920, and Webb moves up to seventh. Remove from consideration any relief pitcher, and Webb moves up to fourth. In other words, the only modern starting pitchers with a better ERA+ than Brandon Webb are Pedro Martinez, Lefty Grove, and Roger Clemens. That's it.

Why does he rank so highly? Because his career ERA was a stellar 3.27 across more than 1,300 innings, and he pitched in Arizona's Chase Field, a hitter-friendly park, and he did so between 2003 and 2008, a hitter-friendly era. Across that span, his ERA was second-best in all of baseball, behind only Johan Santana and tied with Roy Halladay. He won the Cy Young in 2006, finished second for the award in 2007, and finished second again in 2008. Unlike traditional aces, his secret was groundballs, not strikeouts. When a hitter put a ball into play against Brandon Webb, it was a groundball almost two-thirds of the time, an absurd rate. He was so ruthlessly effective at inducing harmless groundouts that for his career, he held opposing right-handed batters to a pathetic .213/.267/.292 line. That's approximately the same as what batters hit against Sandy Koufax.

Unfortunately, Brandon Webb is a non-factor in baseball these days despite still being just 33 years old. In fact, he retired last week, to little fanfare (and he was upstaged a bit by a similar announcement from Chris Carpenter). All of this happened because on Opening Day of the 2009 season, he was forced to leave his start after only four innings, and he would never throw another major league pitch again. He was diagnosed with right shoulder bursitis, went on the Disabled List the next day, and underwent season-ending surgery in August. Setbacks kept him from returning in 2010 and a comeback attempt in 2011 was derailed by rotator cuff surgery. He finally gave up last week. His shoulder just stopped working.

What makes Webb's demise so unexpected is that he doesn't fit the profile of a high-injury-risk pitcher. He didn't over-exert his arm to light up the radar gun; on the contrary, his primary pitch was his sinker, which rarely even exceeded 90 miles per hour. It's not like he was Mark Prior or Kerry Wood. And he was a model of consistency before the injury struck, essentially never missing a start. He was the Justin Verlander or C.C. Sabathia of his day, one of the last guys you'd pick to suddenly break down.

Webb serves as a reminder of the cruel fickleness of pitching injuries. At the age of 30, he was on pace to become one of the most dominant pitchers ever. At the age of 33, he's retiring from the game without anyone really noticing. Throwing a baseball is one of the more unnatural physical activities humans have ever dreamed up, and doing it 100 times every five days has consequences we don't really understand. Some people, like Chris Carpenter, have an uncanny ability to recover from seemingly-damning diagnoses enough times to cobble together a memorable career. Others, like Brandon Webb, go from durable iron man to spectator in the space of about four innings, because their arms just fall off and that's the end of that. Granted, Webb doesn't need much sympathy, because he made over $30 million during his playing days. I just wonder how much of that he'd be willing to give back in exchange for a healthy right shoulder.