I was wondering how many brother-brother pairs or father-son pairs among MLB pitchers include 20-game winners (for a season) on both sides. I came up with only three pairs. Two of them most baseball fans will get right away: the Niekro brothers and the Perry brothers. The third is a little tougher. Guesses?
Jim Perry is one of those guys who could have had a Hall of Fame career had it not been for a little bad luck and a lot of stupidity in his managers. He spent most of the 1960's in no-man's-land, till finally it occurred to somebody that the man could pitch, and he ended up going 20-6 at age 33, and 24-12 at age 34 (winning the Cy Young Award).
Perry must have been a really smart fellow on the mound, and his brains are and are not reflected in his statistics. I mean that they ARE reflected in them, but somehow the statisticians haven't yet figured out a way to determine what they mean. Here's the thing. Jim Perry pitched more than 3200 innings, most of them in a time when stolen bases had returned to the game in a big way. Yet only 80 bases were stolen when he was on the mound -- one every 40 innings; while 126 were CAUGHT stealing. That is a stunner. Less than 40 percent of attempts were successful, AND runners stopped making any attempts. Perry was a RIGHT handed pitcher, who picked 21 men off base -- that's also excellent. Yet for all that, Baseball Reference rates him as a slightly below average fielder. (No, he did not make a ton of errors...) The conclusion is way off. Perry's ability to hold runners on base was incredible, much better than any of his contemporaries that I've seen. And that ability would save a lot of runs...
But having guys NOT steal is something that's hard to see ... You have to notice something that does NOT happen, rather than something that does happen. Keeping bad things FROM happening is always underrated ...
