Wade Davis and Steph Curry Are More Similar Than You Probably Think
If you’ve followed the NBA at all this season and last you’ve heard this narrative: you have to build a team like the Golden State Warriors to win in today’s NBA; you have to be able to play small, spread the floor and shoot from all five positions while simultaneously playing defense at an elite level. That’s the future of the NBA.
You’ve also heard this backlash: you can’t build a team like the Warriors because only one team is going to have Steph Curry (a guy trending towards one of the best players ever), Klay Thompson (one of the best shooters ever) and Draymond Green (a jack-of-all-trades All-Star defender and facilitator who shoots 40% from three). They’re impossible to replicate.
It seems like baseball is trending in a similar direction with how pitching staffs are built: as the 200-inning starter continues its slow death, everyone wants a shutdown bullpen for innings seven through nine after, hopefully, a quality outing from a decent starter. The 2014 Royals really started to popularize the trend with their vaunted Kelvin Herrera-Wade Davis-Greg Holland trio that combined for a 1.28 ERA, 0.969 WHIP and 258 strikeouts in 204.1 innings. The last pitcher to reach those numbers on his own in a single season was Bob Gibson in 1968.
That line, along with an unexpected run to an AL Pennant, made people start to take notice.
Any remaining skeptics were silenced when the same group, with the addition of Ryan Madson, threw 245 innings with a 2.28 ERA, 1.049 WHIP and 249 strikeouts on the way to a World Series championship last year. Holland was inactive during that playoff run, but the other three produced a 1.65 ERA and 15.2 strikeouts per nine innings over 32.2 innings against the Astros, Blue Jays and Mets.
With those results, building an elite bullpen quickly moved beyond some Moneyball strategy that small market teams could exploit to gain a competitive advantage against the big guys. The big guys were paying attention too and they were ready to implement it themselves.
The Yankees went out and acquired Aroldis Chapman and his $11.32 million salary to go with Andrew Miller ($9 million per year through 2018) and Dellin Betances (arbitration eligible next year). The Red Sox already had Koji Uehara under contract for $9 million this season before putting together a package that included the #56 prospect in baseball to trade for Craig Kimbrel (who will make $37.5 million the next three years) and Carson Smith (who won’t be arbitration eligible until 2018).
Those are some impressive, expensive bullpens. Those bullpens definitely have their Klay Thompsons and Draymond Greens, to go back to our Warriors analogy, but there’s still only one Steph Curry. And in terms of MLB relief pitchers, that’s Wade Davis.
Yup, the guy who made his first 64 Major League appearances as a starter (a starter becoming a reliever, what is this madness!?!?). The guy who started 24 games as recently as 2013. The guy who has 20 career saves and only got the closer job in last year’s postseason because of an injury. He’s the best relief pitcher in baseball. And guess what: it’s not particularly close.
In the two years since Davis became a full-time reliever in 2014, only four pitchers have thrown at least 100 innings with an ERA+ of at least 250. From four to one: Ken Giles, Darren O’Day, Dellin Betances and Wade Davis. Don’t cry for Betances’ runner-up finish: his ERA+ of 270 in the past two years, especially at his age, is remarkable. Wade Davis’ ERA+ in that time is 418. That’s otherworldly.
It’s the kind of number that we would question the legitimacy of if it came from some dude we’d never heard of from back in 1907. “Yeah, Slow Doc Howell back in 1907-1908 had a 418 ERA+, but I mean that’s back when Teddy Roosevelt was president so can you really trust those numbers?”
Nope. Wade Davis has done it the last two years. And it’s the best two-year ERA+ figure of the past 50 years. Only three other pitchers have really even come close: Craig Kimbrel in 2012 and 2013 (350), Jonathan Papelbon in 2006 and 2007 (353), and Dennis Eckersley in 1989 and 1990 (360). Davis outpaced Eck’s combined 89-90 ERA+ by 58 points despite Eckersley’s 0.61 ERA, 48 save, 603 ERA+ 1990.
Speaking of crazy single seasons like Eck’s, it’s not like Davis had some insane 2014 followed by a really good, but not great 2015 or vice versa. His 396 ERA+ was the best in baseball among pitchers with at least 50 innings in 2014, and his 444 ERA+ earned the same status last year: both those seasons are absurd in their own right, each ranking among the best reliever seasons of all-time in terms of ERA+; specifically, the 12th and 6th best. Goose Gossage, Billy Wagner, and Trevor Hoffman, to name just a few all-time great relievers, never had a year good enough to make the 40 best seasons once.
And Davis did it twice consecutively. Forget having seasons that good two years in a row, the only other players to appear twice at all in the top-40 reliever ERA+ seasons are Craig Kimbrel (10th and 38th) and Mariano Rivera (37th and 40th). Speaking of baseball’s patron saint of relief pitchers, Davis clearly has a case for having a better run the last two years than Mo ever did.
Does that make Davis better than Rivera overall? No. Despite the 652 saves, top-five finishes in Cy Young voting five times and the best career ERA+ ever at 205, Rivera made his bones in the postseason. He never posted a season to match Davis’ ERA or ERA+ in 2015; he never threw a full season without giving up a home run or struck out over 13 batters per nine innings like Davis in 2014. But when the lights were the brightest, Rivera was at his best.
The World Series MVP, 0.70 ERA and 0.759 WHIP in 141 postseason innings speak for themselves. More specifically, Rivera’s 1998 and 1999 postseasons will likely never be matched: 25.2 innings with a 0.701 WHIP without surrendering a run on the way to two World Series championships. But Davis came just about as close as possible these past two postseasons: 25 innings, 38 strikeouts, a 0.760 WHIP allowing just one earned run (0.36 ERA) while helping his team to an AL pennant and a World Series title.
Rivera is the unquestioned Greatest of All-Time. He probably always will be. He’s Michael Jordan. But right now Wade Davis is on a remarkable run that’s arguably better than any one run that Rivera ever had. It’s a performance we can all just sit back and marvel at. Who would that make him again?
