Dead Ball Disadvantage

First off, I would like to rant about the disadvantages faced by pitchers from teams before World War I in this baseball simulation tournament we're running here. Pitchers on whatifsports.com's baseball simulator are always taken out at or around 100 pitches (for starters). The highest pitch count i've ever seen on there is 105 by Rube Walberg (of the '31 A's), in a 9 inning complete game shut out. Pitchers who worked in a 4 man rotation back in the earlier days of baseball would definitely not just throw 100 pitches then be removed from the game especially if they were pitching well. a guy who has given up 0-1 run in 7 innings will be removed the same as a guy that has given up 3-4. this is all well and good in the age of pitch counts, but back before WWI, that would never happen. this also brings us to these teams bullpen issues. Teams before WWI did not really have any sort of bullpen to speak of, they would bring starters in to pitch, which if you look at the season where Walter Johnson won 36 games (a guy not in the simulation, but a perfect example of this phenomenon), he made 36 starts (there is no way he won every start, he went 36-7). Johnson also had 2 saves, a 1.14 ERA, and pitched 346 innings. He pitched in 48 games, that means there were 2 games that he pitched in where he didn't earn a win, loss or save. Now, when you think of that era, you know guys were throwing an exorbinant amount of pitches, which is not accurately portrayed by this simulator. Which is why pitchers from those pre-WWI teams really get the shaft.

I'm starting to rethink my status on the best baseball teams of all time, because deadball era pitchers were way more dominant than anyone we see now. Think of Cy Young winning all those games, and pitching all those years. The dead ball era was one filled with baseball's best players, we're just too blinded by flashy power numbers now to see that. If pitching is the foundation of any great team, why wouldn't a dead ball era team be the best? The answer: dead ball era teams were the best. There's a reason why some of the pitching records will never be broken, because the pitchers at that time were so much more dominant and nobody babied them. Look up the stats, you'll see its true.

Tyler