Lee Arthur Smith

[Crash Course]

He pitched in the major leagues from 1980 to 1997.

[YankeeLinks]

Lots of saves for a long time

[nyy26wc]

Very easy no

143 RSAA
only 1 year with 20+ RSAA
only 2 years with 15+ RSAA

[KCBOOMER]

Very easy yes. To deny Smith will be to write off a whole class of relief pitchers who aren't Mariano Rivera or Hoyt Wilhelm. Smith is amongst a class of pretty good pitchers who didn't get enough IP's to reach the career totals some would like. This includes Goose Gossage, Dan Quisenberry, Kent Tekulve, John Franco, etc. As work continues on the study of leverage these pitchers may well turn out to be more valuable than we had thought.

The guy hurled 1289 innings with an ERA+ of 132. His WARP3 of 82 reflects his lack of IP's. He may not have pitched as many innings as we would like but they were of a quality nature.

[nyy26wc]

Even in his most often used season, he spent 92% of the season doing something other than pitching.

You could have given his roster spot to a rotting corpse for 92% of the team's innings and that rotting corpse would have had the same value as Smith.

And, that's in most often used season. For the rest of his career, the rotting corpse could have been giving more than 92% of his roster spot.

To write him off means that we have to write off a whole class pitchers. How that's a bad thing?

Writing him off means we write off pitchers who don't save their teams enough runs to qualify for membership.

[crazydiamond]

pitchers should pitch the whole game every time they pitch unless they get hurt
how is it that with all our medical advances, pitchers' ability to pitch a lot has DECREASED?
it should INCREASE
but that's not Lee Smith's fault
he did his job, and he did it a lot better than a lot of others with his job
he gets a yes from me

[LisaG]

sorry lee but i agree with the other guys. relief pitchers exist. guys don't hardly ever pitch complete games any more. they just don't. they can't get near enough RSAA as a reliever to satisfy you.

but smith was very good for a very very long time.