Wes Ferrell

Baseball Player Won-Loss Records
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Wes Ferrell

2016 Veterans' Committee HOF Ballot: Wes Ferrell

The Baseball Hall of Fame recently announced their 2016 Veterans' ballot for the Pre-Integration Era. The ballot includes 10 names, including "three executives and one of the game's earliest organizers". Player won-lost records don't really have anything to say about non-players. Player won-lost records also don't really have anything to say about players who played before 1921. So, I don't really have anything to say about the non-players on the ballot or about 19th-century major-league players Bill Dahlen and Harry Stovey.

But I have calculated Player won-lost records for at least part of the careers of four of the candidates on the Pre-Integration ballot. This article looks at one of these players: former major-league pitcher Wes Ferrell. The first table below presents Wes Ferrell's career as measured by Player won-lost records. The records here have been extrapolated based on the games for which I have play-by-play data to estimate results for those games for which I do not have play-by-play data. The number of games actually played by Wes Ferrell are identified as "Total"; the number of games for which Player won-lost records are calculated are identified as "Known".

Season	Team	Age	Total	Known	pWins	pLosses	pWin Pct.	pWOPA	pWORL	eWins	eLosses	eWin Pct.	eWOPA	eWORL
Wes Ferrell Basic Player Won-Lost Records
												Value Decomposition
			Games
1927	CLE	19	1	1	0.0	0.1	0.027	-0.0	-0.0	0.0	0.1	0.093	-0.0	-0.0
1928	CLE	20	2	0	0.0	0.0	0.000	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.000	0.0	0.0
1929	CLE	21	47	46	16.3	12.6	0.565	2.3	3.6	15.1	13.8	0.523	1.1	2.3
1930	CLE	22	53	52	21.5	15.7	0.578	3.4	5.0	20.6	16.5	0.555	2.5	4.1
1931	CLE	23	48	48	19.7	15.7	0.556	2.6	4.0	19.5	15.9	0.551	2.4	3.8
1932	CLE	24	55	55	21.3	16.5	0.564	3.0	4.7	19.7	18.1	0.521	1.4	3.1
1933	CLE	25	61	57	15.1	15.2	0.498	0.4	1.6	16.2	14.1	0.534	1.5	2.7
1934	BOS	26	34	23	13.6	8.2	0.624	3.1	4.1	12.5	9.3	0.575	2.0	3.0
1935	BOS	27	75	46	26.6	17.2	0.607	5.6	7.6	24.8	18.9	0.568	3.8	5.9
1936	BOS	28	61	46	23.0	17.1	0.574	3.6	5.4	21.6	18.5	0.538	2.2	4.0
+– 1937		29	71	71	17.6	19.0	0.481	-0.2	1.4	18.3	18.3	0.500	0.6	2.1
	BOS		18	18	4.5	5.7	0.437	-0.5	-0.1	4.5	5.7	0.446	-0.4	0.0
	WS1		53	53	13.1	13.2	0.498	0.3	1.5	13.7	12.6	0.521	0.9	2.1
+– 1938		30	31	31	12.9	13.0	0.497	0.3	1.3	12.2	13.7	0.470	-0.4	0.6
	NYA		5	5	1.7	2.8	0.380	-0.5	-0.3	1.6	3.0	0.344	-0.7	-0.5
	WS1		26	26	11.1	10.2	0.522	0.8	1.6	10.6	10.7	0.497	0.3	1.1
1939	NYA	31	3	3	1.5	2.0	0.435	-0.2	-0.0	1.4	2.1	0.394	-0.3	-0.2
1940	BRO	32	2	2	0.2	0.2	0.486	-0.0	0.0	0.2	0.2	0.431	-0.0	0.0
1941	BSN	33	4	4	1.1	1.3	0.467	-0.0	0.1	1.2	1.2	0.511	0.1	0.2
------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------
CAREER (reg. season)			548	485	190.4	153.7	0.553	23.9	38.7	183.3	160.8	0.533	16.8	31.6
			------	------	------				------	------
PostSeason (career)			0	0	0.0	0.0			0.0	0.0	0.0			0.0
			------	------	------	------		------	------	------	------		------
COMBINED			548	485	190.4	153.7	0.553		38.7	183.3	160.8	0.533		31.6

Overall, I am missing 63 games from Wes Ferrell's career within seasons for which I have calculated Player won-lost records.

In addition to being an excellent pitcher - 193-128, 4.04 ERA (good for an ERA+ of 116 per Baseball-Reference) in 2,623 IP - Wes Ferrell also might have been the best hitting pitcher in major-league history. For his career, Ferrell batted .280/.351/.446 with 38 HR in 1,345 PA. In fact, Wes Ferrell out-hit his brother, Rick, who made the Hall of Fame (in 1984) as a catcher. Rick batted .281/.378/.363 for his career and hit only 28 home runs in 7,077 plate appearances.

As measured by Player won-lost records, Wes Ferrell was above average at all four factors of the game: batting, baserunning, pitching, and fielding. The next table shows every player for whom this is true with at least 0.5 Player wins in each factor, sorted by pWins over replacement level (pWORL). The numbers below have not been adjusted to extrapolate missing games.

Player	pWORL	Batting	Baserunning	Pitching	Fielding
		Factor Winning Percentage
Jimmie Foxx	54.8	0.607	0.502	0.534	0.505
Wes Ferrell	32.8	0.515	0.577	0.518	0.557
Ken Brett	9.8	0.504	0.611	0.502	0.577

Raising the limit to at least 1.2 Player wins in each factor would eliminate Jimmie Foxx (1.1 pitching wins, all in 1945) and Ken Brett (0.8 baserunning wins), which would leave Wes Ferrell as, perhaps, the only player in major-league history (since at least 1916) who was meaningfully above average at everything: batting, baserunning, pitching, and fielding. Pretty damn impressive.

All articles are written so that they pull data directly from the most recent version of the Player won-lost database. Hence, any numbers cited within these articles should automatically incorporate the most recent update to Player won-lost records. In some cases, however, the accompanying text may have been written based on previous versions of Player won-lost records. I apologize if this results in non-sensical text in any cases.

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