Choosing the best of several great contenders
We have now completed the position player portion of our Brewers All-Time Team (links to all of which can be found here). As I explained in the Molitor essay, we chose not to go with a designated hitter, so that just leaves two spots left: a starting pitcher and a relief pitcher. We’re only going to choose one of each, so this is going to get a little bit Thunderdome-y. Our old rules don’t really apply here (pretty self-explanatory!), so let’s get to it, starting with the squad’s starting pitcher… a near-impossible decision!
I’m going to do this one a little differently: I’m going to present the top contenders, and then choose after breaking them down.
The way I see it, there are six seasons that are truly contenders for “best season ever by a Brewers starting pitcher.” Choosing which of them you like best depends on your answers to a few questions. Are you a FIP or an ERA person? How much does volume matter? Do you value team success in the decision?
The Contenders
Here are the six seasons that I think need to be strongly considered when making this decision, presented in chronological order:
- Mike Caldwell, 1978: 37g, 293 1⁄3 IP, 8.2 bWAR/6.3 fWAR, 22-9, 2.36 ERA/2.94 FIP, 160 ERA+, 131 K, 54 BB, 1.064 WHIP
- Teddy Higuera, 1986: 34g, 248 1⁄3 IP, 9.4 bWAR/5.1 fWAR, 20-11, 2.79 ERA/3.40 FIP, 156 ERA+, 207 K, 74 BB, 1.208 WHIP
- Higuera, 1988: 31g, 227 1⁄3 IP, 7.4 bWAR/5.9 fWAR, 16-9, 2.45 ERA/2.80 FIP, 162 ERA+, 192 K, 59 BB, 0.999 WHIP
- Ben Sheets, 2004: 34g, 237 IP, 7.3 bWAR/8.0 fWAR, 12-14, 2.70 ERA/2.65 FIP, 162 ERA+, 264 K, 32 BB, 0.983 WHIP
- CC Sabathia, 2008 (numbers with MIL): 17g, 130 2⁄3 IP, 5.2 bWAR/4.7 fWAR, 11-2, 1.65 ERA/2.44 FIP, 255 ERA+, 128 K, 25 BB, 1.003 WHIP
- Corbin Burnes, 2021: 28g, 167 IP, 5.3 bWAR/7.5 fWAR, 11-5, 2.43 ERA/1.63 FIP, 170 ERA+, 234 K, 34 BB, 0.940 WHIP
I’ll say it right now: I think you can craft an argument for any one of these seasons, and I don’t think you’d be wrong. Pick your favorite Higuera season (by the measure of fWAR, his 1987 season—not listed here—is actually his best) and pair it with these others, and you’ve got your All-Time five-man rotation. But I want to figure this out. Which one is best?
By the time Caldwell arrived in Milwaukee, he was already what people call a “journeyman.” He’d pitched a couple of seasons in San Diego, three more in San Francisco (after being traded for Willie McCovey!), and been traded to and from St. Louis and Cincinnati before he got to Milwaukee in June 1977. Only one of his six seasons had been better than average (1974 in San Francisco), and there was no real reason to expect much of him.
But something clicked in spring training in 1978, and a rejuvenated Caldwell put together a record-setting season. He led baseball by throwing 23 complete games, six of which were shutouts, and in 34 starts (and three more relief appearances) he went 22-9 with a 2.36 ERA (160 ERA+) and 2.94 FIP in a massive number of innings (293 1/3, third in the AL). Ron Guidry had a historically great year in 1978 and deservedly won the Cy Young unanimously, but Caldwell was right behind him in second place.
That success carried into 1979 when Caldwell went 16-6 with a 3.29 ERA (127 ERA+), but while he still picked up decent win totals after that (he won at least 11 games in each of the next four seasons, topping out at 17 in 1982) his other numbers dropped back to the slightly below-average place they’d been prior to 1978. It was sort of an odd career. But that 1978 season was the best in Brewers history in several ways: his 2.36 ERA is a record for a qualifying pitcher, his 22 wins are the most in franchise history, and his 23 complete games and six shutouts are both team records.
The player that most Brewers historians would point to as the best starting pitcher in franchise history would be Teddy Higuera, who was a young star in the early-80s Mexican League before the Brewers purchased his contract when he was 25. After spending 1984 in Milwaukee’s minor league system, Higuera broke camp with the Brewers in 1985 as a 27-year-old rookie and made an impact immediately: he was 15-8 with a 107 ERA+ and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting to the White Sox’s Ozzie Guillén.
Higuera ascended to stardom in 1986. He started 34 games and completed 15 of them (with four shutouts) and went 20-11 with a 2.79 ERA (156 ERA+). By the measure of bWAR, Higuera’s 9.4 in 1986 is the most in team history by a significant margin (Caldwell’s 8.2 in ’78 being second), and Higuera finished second in Cy Young voting to Boston’s Roger Clemens and made his only All-Star appearance. But it was far from Higuera’s only good season: in 1987, he won 18 games and while his 3.85 ERA was solid (119 ERA+) his 3.25 FIP was even better, and he set career highs with 240 strikeouts and 6.7 fWAR.
But his best season may not have been either of those. My vote would probably go to 1988, even though his innings lagged slightly behind the previous two seasons. In 31 starts, Higuera was 16-9 and set career-best marks in ERA (2.45), ERA+ (162), and FIP (2.80); he also had his lowest rates in H/9 (6.7), HR/9 (0.6), and BB/9 (2.3) while leading the American League in WHIP (0.999). Higuera received no official recognition for this season; with the Brewers dropping back to third in the AL East and his win total receding, Higuera didn’t get so much as one vote for MVP or Cy Young. He battled injuries after 1988 and never threw more than 170 innings in a season again, but his three-year run from 1986-88 is, for me, the best multi-year stretch for a starting pitcher in team history.
While starters occasionally had blips on the radar in the 1990s, the next truly great season by a Brewer starter would not come for another 16 years.
Ben Sheets was Milwaukee’s first-round pick in the 1999 draft, and he became arguably the most famous minor leaguer on Earth when he threw a shutout in the United States’ 4-0 victory over Cuba in the gold medal game of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. The Brewers were desperate for any sort of positive news in the early 2000s and Sheets made the Brewers out of spring training in 2001 after Baseball America named him the No. 5 prospect in the league. Through June, Sheets was 10-4 with a 3.35 ERA and he made the All-Star team, but he faded badly down the stretch and finished with a 4.76 ERA. For the next two seasons, Sheets was about league average, but he was making tweaks, mainly by becoming an ace control pitcher.
In 2004, everything came together. Sheets made 34 starts and threw 237 innings and while his record was an unremarkable 12-14 (for a team that went 67-94), everything else about that season was fantastic. He had a 2.70 ERA and 162 ERA+, and his FIP was even better at 2.65. He struck out 264 batters, by far a career-high and second in the NL to Randy Johnson. Perhaps even more impressively, Sheets walked only 32, and he thus put up an absurd 8.25 K:BB ratio, which was far and away ahead of the rest of the league (Johnson at 6.59) and is in the top 10 single-season marks by a qualifying pitcher after 1900. Sheets’ 0.983 WHIP in 2004 is the best for any Brewer starter prior to 2021 and his 8.0 fWAR is the single-season team record for a pitcher. The pinnacle of Sheets’ great season came on May 16th against the Atlanta Braves, when he had what is probably the best start ever by a Brewer pitcher: he tossed a complete game, allowed one run on three hits and a walk, and struck out 18 batters, three more than any other Brewer has ever struck out in a game, a number topped only 12 times in baseball history.
Of course, after that, Sheets could not stay healthy, even though he showed flashes of his old brilliance, most notably in 2008 when he pitched basically until his arm fell off in his 31st and final start of the year (rendering him unusable in the postseason). Even still, from 2004-08, Sheets had a 134 ERA+ in 839 1/3 innings with a 5.16 K:BB ratio (which, just to give it some context, would be the record for a retired starting pitcher if that were his full-career mark).
Speaking of 2008, no discussion of the greatest Brewer pitching season can be complete without talking about CC Sabathia. It’s very difficult to say that the best season ever by a Brewer pitcher came from a guy who made only 17 appearances after being acquired in July, but these are not normal appearances! In those 17 starts, Sabathia threw seven complete games and three shutouts, he had a 5.12 K:BB ratio, and he had a 1.65 ERA (255 ERA+). He came a whisker away from throwing the second no-hitter in team history, he went 11-2, and he basically single-handedly dragged the Brewers to their first postseason in 26 years by pitching on short rest three straight times down the stretch, including a complete game in which he allowed only an unearned run in a 3-1, Wild-Card-clinching victory on the last day of the season.
The last season that must be considered is one of only two seasons in which a Brewers starter won a Cy Young Award, and that’s Corbin Burnes in 2021.* It was a somewhat controversial award in that Burnes threw only 167 innings that season, but by basically every other measure, he was the league’s best pitcher. He led the majors in ERA (2.43), FIP (1.63) HR/9 (0.4), K/9 (12.6), K:BB (6.88), and fWAR (7.5), and for good measure, he threw eight hitless innings (with 14 strikeouts and one walk) when he and Josh Hader combined for just the second no-hitter in team history. Burnes just edged Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler in Cy Young voting (they both got 12 first-place votes but Burnes finished better on other ballots and finished with 151 vote points to Wheeler’s 141), and he had two more very good seasons with the Brewers (in which he finished seventh and eighth in Cy Young voting).
*Pete Vuckovich won the Cy Young in 1982, but it was entirely because of his team-leading 18 wins for a division champion. His ERA+ was 114 and he had 2.8 bWAR and 2.4 fWAR; by modern standards, there is almost no chance he would have gotten so much as a vote for Cy Young.
So which do you choose? Caldwell was the most potent workhorse in team history, pitching to a 162 ERA+ in massive innings. Higuera showcased all-around brilliance and set a team record for bWAR in 1986 but was even better by rate stats in 1988. Sabathia did legend things. Burnes was a finely tuned precision tool: maximum efficiency, maximum effectiveness. But…
Starting Pitcher: Ben Sheets, 2004
34g, 237 IP, 12-14, 2.70 ERA, 162 ERA+, 2.65 FIP, 264 K, 32 BB, 0.983 WHIP, 8.25 K:BB, 7.3 bWAR, 8.0 fWAR
For me, this spot goes to Sheets. The combination of volume and effectiveness gave him what is, in my opinion, the most effective season in team history. He did it in obscurity for an awful team while everyone was paying attention to two of the best pitchers of all time (Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson went 1-2 in Cy Young voting in the NL), but Sheets in ’04 had a unique combination of dominant strikeout stuff and pinpoint control, besting even Burnes’ Cy Young season in terms of strikeout-to-walk ratio.
As I said before, I think you could craft a winning argument for any one of these seasons, and I’ve found that Sabathia’s season in particular gets the juices flowing among fans (that was the go-to answer among the friends I polled prior to writing this). I would not argue against you if that was your choice, nor would I really argue with the selection of any of the seasons discussed. This was a hard one!
Also worth mentioning, in addition to the six “finalists” listed above: Brandon Woodruff in 2021, who was almost as good as Burnes; Cal Eldred in 1992, who went 11-2 with a 1.79 ERA (217 ERA+) in 14 starts and finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting despite not making his debut until after the All-Star break; Ben McDonald in 1996 and Chris Bosio in 1989, who just had very solid seasons; Jeff D’Amico in 2000, who showed the potential that made him a first-round pick by pitching to a 171 ERA+ in 23 starts in the midst of an injury-cursed career; and Ricky Bones in 1994, who rode good fortune to a 146 ERA+ and made the All-Star team in a strike-shortened season.