The 1973 New York Mets had a great pitching staff. The three pitchers who started the most games for them (Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Jon Matlack) all had excellent seasons, combining for an average WAR of 6.9 and an ERA of 2.67. Their fourth starter George Stone was no slouch either, producing a 2.80 ERA and 3.2 WAR. There is no denying that staff was dominant, with the Mets striking out more batters than any other team that season, and having one of the leagues best ERAs.
This success came out of necessity, as pitching greatness was this team's only chance at winning. The importance of the pitching was because the offense was straight up horrible. They were second to last in the league for runs scored, and tied for last in OPS+. No Met hit .300 that year, and only one Met hit over 20 home runs (John Milner, 23). With average pitchers, this team would have been lucky to win 60 games.
But because of the staff, they were able to finish 82-79 and win the franchise's second pennant. In that World Series, despite having the worst winning percentage of any team to ever make a Fall Classic, the Mets competed with the powerhouse Oakland A's for seven games and were only three runs away from a championship. Coming that close and falling short always makes you wonder what could have been done differently.
One major thing that could have been done differently happened a couple years earlier, in December of 1971, when the Mets traded away a young pitcher named Nolan Ryan. During that 1973 season, playing for the California Angels, Ryan had a 2.87 ERA, 20 wins, a 7.7 WAR, and was the AL Cy Young Runner up. Ryan didn't stop with the 1973 season and would go on to have 80.6 career WAR after joining the Angels. Would the Mets have been better off not making this trade? Yes, of course, but to answer why we have to look at who the Mets got in return.
The Mets got infielder Jim Fregosi in the trade, who carried a .234 batting average through July 7th, his final game before being sold to the Texas Rangers. He not only played poorly for the Mets in '73, but he was only there for less than half of the season. Fregosi would have .3 WAR with the Mets in and would have a total of 2.7 Career WAR after being traded to the Mets.
No new ground is being broken by saying "The Ryan/Fregosi trade was bad". That has been known for 48 years. What isn't as known is why the Mets made the trade in the first place. The conventional wisdom is that "Nolan Ryan just wasn't that good for the Mets", but is that really true? I don't believe it is.
Ryan, in terms of overall success with the Mets, was slightly below average. He had an ERA of 3.58 (league average at the time was 3.48) and his career Wins Above Average at the time was -1.5. None of that is what's important to me though, as my point isn't that he was a great pitcher for the Mets, he clearly wasn't.
My point is that Ryan was a passable pitcher who has had an absurd amount of potential, far too much potential to trade, and trading him was a display of gross incompetence.
Ryan was probably (According to the documentary "Fastball"), already the hardest thrower of all time (before or since) when he was with the Mets. Even though Velocity wasn't looked at then quite as much as it is now, baseball players have understood that faster pitches are harder to hit since the beginning of the sport. They knew that his velocity was beyond elite, and they knew how important that was. Why they chose to ignore it is beyond me.
During his time with the Mets Ryan struck out more batters per 9 innings than Tom Seaver (8.7 vs 7.9) and allowed fewer Hits per 9 (6.5) than any Met before or since. The future all-time strikeout leader and 7-time no-hitter-thrower was undeniably already inside of him, and sometimes it would show itself in a major way. An example of this is April 18th of 1970, when he threw a complete-game one-hitter, while striking out 15, and out-dueling Hall of Famer Jim Bunning. That was Ryan's best start as a Met, but great starts weren't too uncommon. In over 20% of his starts with the Mets, Ryan would last 8 or more innings, while allowing two or fewer runs.
Ryan's time with the Mets is nowhere near as good as the rest of his career, as shown by his WAR of only three (and his 6.1 Walks per 9) but he showed flashes of dominance and had more upside than just about any pitcher in MLB history thus far. Yes, hindsight is 2020, but it's not unreasonable to expect the Mets' front office and scouting department to be able to see what they had with Ryan.
So what if the Mets DID keep Nolan Ryan? Would they have won the 1973 World Series? Maybe, but probably not. Yes, they would have still had a great team, but Met pitchers dominated in the World Series already, that wasn't the problem. During the '73 Fall Classic Met pitchers had an ERA of 2.90, only slightly worse than Ryans regular-season ERA of 2.87. The issue in this World Series is that the Mets offense couldn't score when runs were needed. Ryan probably wouldn't have changed the outcome in that World Series, but what he would have done is solidified that pitching staff as the single greatest pitching staff of all time
The 1973 Mets, in the hypothetical universe where they have Ryan, had the best collection of pitchers any team has ever had, and it's not even remotely close. To prove this, I've selected six pitching staffs that are known as the greatest ever, which will be used to gauge the greatness of these hypothetical Mets. To avoid bias (intentionally picking weak staff to make the Mets look good) I chose these pitching staffs from a CBS Sports article. The staffs in question are the 1998 Braves, the 1966 Dodgers, the 2019 Astros, the 1988 Mets, the 1954 Indians, and the 1971 Orioles.
The stats I'm going to use for this comparison are cumulative WAR/162 (the WAR of the teams five most commonly used starters combined, per 162 games started) and cumulative ERA (how many Earned Runs per nine innings were scored with a starter on the mound. These two stats will let us compare the teams using both an important traditional stat, and an important modern stat, while ignoring the useless stuff like "Wins". The 73 With-Ryan-Mets' had a cumulative WAR/162 of 30.8 and an ERA of 2.73. Is that good? The short answer is yes. The long answer is VERY yes.
The team ERA of 2.73 was better than all but 8 individual ERAs in the MLB that season. It also is the only sub-three ERA by any staff I could find, with the 2019 Astros being the only team to come close (3.09).
The cumulative WAR/162 of 30.8 is where they really separate themselves though, as only a few teams come within 10. The 1998 Braves (with Maddux Glavine and Smoltz) had 21.3, the 1966 Dodgers (with Koufax, Drysdale, and Sutton) had 21.2, and the 2019 Astros (Verlander, Cole, Greinke) had 22.8. Those staff, which are all legendary and probably the three best real staffs of all time, aren't even in the same league as the hypothetical '73 Mets.
It's also worth mentioning that three of the Staffs that I compared the Mets to had three Hall of Famers while the Mets only had two. BUT the Two that the Mets had have the highest and second-highest HOF election percentage off all time (for starting pitchers) and were one and two for anybody until Ken Griffey Jr in 2016. ALSO, Jerry Koosman arguably should have been the third Hall of Famer on that staff but that's a conversation for another day.
The legend of the hypothetical 1973 Mets pitching staff is one that is bittersweet. On one hand, it's an opportunity to celebrate the greatness of the real-life 1973 Mets and to think back on the days when Nolan Ryan wore the blue and orange. On the other hand its yet another heartbreaking example of a poor move by the Mets, and one of the worst moves by any team ever. The moral of the story is that you don't know what you got till its gone... and also NEVER trade a 24-year-old who throws 107 MPH for a 30-year-old .266 hitter.
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