Sain's Slump

Whatever happened to Johnny Sain?

Sain's Slump

Warren Spahn wasn’t the only great Braves pitcher of the late 1940s.

In fact, if you were to go back in a time machine to the end of the 1948 season, you’d hear just as much about Johnny Sain as you heard about Warren Spahn.

However, Sain fell apart in 1949, as explained in this front page Boston Globe article:

From Boston Globe, June 23, 1949, page 1

Now, there’s not a whole lot we can do to examine this. We don’t have great video of Sain pitching in 1949, so we can’t figure out if his arm angle was the problem. We don’t know if he was working on a screwball, or if his arm was actually sore, or if he really wanted to be traded.

There are a few things we do know, however. We know that the 1949 Boston Braves experienced a lot of dugout turmoil, caused largely by incompetent ownership and indifferent management. We know that somebody had to lose the games that the Braves were probably going to lose anyway. Maybe Sain was just unlucky.

Or perhaps he was unusually lucky in 1948.

If you take a gander at Sain’s Baseball Reference page, you’ll see that Johnny came marching home from the war on a hot streak:

• In 1946 he managed a 20-14 record with a 2.21 ERA.

• In 1947 he went 21-12, though his ERA rose to 3.52.

• In 1948 he went 24-15 as the ace of the staff, posting a 2.60 ERA and finishing 28 games.

But then, in 1949 the wheels came off the bus. Sain went 10-17 with a 4.81 ERA, which was quite high for the era.

Let’s look at a more modern stat: ERA+. Saint put up a 157 ERA+ in 1946, 112 in 1947, and 149 in 1948 — but that dropped to a measley 79 in 1949.

Now, a few days ago we looked into some other advanced statistics that can sometimes hint at a pitcher being lucky. Here’s the article in case you missed it:

While the article is specific to managing a pretend team in OOTP, the truth is that we can apply the same principles to real life statistics.

Let’s take a look at FIP first. Sain managed a 3.01 FIP in 1946, the year his ERA was 2.21. Now, if you remember that earlier article, we concluded that it’s often a sign of good fielding — or good luck — when FIP is significantly higher than ERA. Players with FIPs higher than their ERAs tend to see things even out over time: in other words, their luck runs out on them.

That’s what happened to Sain in 1947. His FIP that season was 3.50; his ERA was 3.51. A few more of those line drives evaded fielder gloves and fell in.

Then the FIP-ERA discrepancy came back up in 1948. Sain’s excellent 2.60 ERA marked a stark contrast to his 3.51 FIP. In fact, you can see this problem in the raw statistics: Sain gave up 19 home runs in 1948, one more than the 18 he gave up in 1947, and Sain walked 83 batters in 1948, 4 more than the 79 he walked in 1947. In short — Sain wasn’t making much progress in the pitcher-specific fields, leaving himself open to luck and the fielding behind him.

In 1949 his ERA was 4.81, but his FIP was only 3.69.

My guess is that this is a sign of the discontent on the ballclub. Maybe the boys in the field didn’t push as hard in 1949 as they did in 1948. Sain only gave up 15 home runs in 1949, and somehow got by giving up only 75 walks — quite a feat when you consider the record number of walks allowed in both leagues that year. Sain’s raw pitching stats held consistent from year to year, but the stats that are dependent on fielding support looked awful.

And now we can look at BABIP.

BABIP was pretty consistent in the National League between 1946 and 1949. However, Sain’s BABIP allowed was anything but consistent:

• 1946: National League .275; Sain .252

• 1947: National League .280; Sain .274

• 1948: National League .277; Sain .260

• 1949: National League .276; Sain .298

Now, think back to what we said earlier about this BABIP discrepancy. BABIP for pitchers tends to revert to the mean from one season to the next. In other words, a pitcher who gives up fewer base hits than expected on balls that aren’t home runs (i.e. on balls that fielders can actually field) can expect to not have such good lucky the next season.

Sain was lucky for 3 years in a row. He seemed more human in 1947 than he did during that spectacular 1946. Somehow the balls managed to hit the fielders in 1948 — but they simply didn’t in 1949.

By the way — the seesaw corrected itself again in 1950. The National League’s BABIP that season was .275 (told you it was consistent); Sain’s was .266.

Now, none of this is much consolation for Sain, of course. However, I wonder if he actually would have been dealt to the Yankees in 1950 if Braves management realized that a lot of Johnny’s problems came from his fielders.

There is one other factor that we haven’t mentioned here: Sain’s age.

Sain came up originally in 1942 at 24, which isn’t unusual. He then spent 3 years in the military, and was a ripe old 28 when he went back to the major leagues in 1946.

That’s not extremely old, of course. However, that meant Sain was 31 by 1949. He had pitched 265 innings in 1946, 266 in 1947, and a whopping 314 2/3 in 1948, not counting the World Series.

The combination of age and heavy wear and tear on his arm might have played a role as well. In other words, I don’t think we can completely write off the sore arm theory and just conclude that Sain was lucky in 1948.

But what do you think?