Dave Duncan will go down in history as one of the greatest pitching coaches of all time. He has an unbelievable track record. He has been coaching baseball since 1978 and a pitching coach for Tony LaRussa since 1982 with the Chicago White Sox. During his incredible career, he has coached 4 Cy Young Winners: LaMarr Hoyt (1983), Bob Welch (1990), Eckersley (1992), and Chris Carpenter (2005).

What has impressed me more about Duncan than coaching these Cy Young award winners, is his ability to take veteran pitchers that have been putting up mediocre numbers, and turn them into top performers with the Cardinals. It seemed for a long period of time, we could find a Jeff Suppan or Jeff Weaver just around the corner, that would work with Duncan and produce incredible results down the stretch run and into the playoffs.

That hasn’t seemed to happen as often lately with guys like Kyle Lohse and Jake Westbrook and even Edwin Jackson (although he’s only a few starts in as a Cardinal). Not to mention the bullpen issues in recent years that weren’t as evident during the 2000-2005 seasons. Now granted, I realize there is a separate bullpen coach, but Duncan is still the guy at the top when it comes to pitching. I also realize that both Lohse and Westbrook have had arm surgeries, and many factors are at play, but I wanted to see if there was any statistical backing to my theory that there has been less of a “Duncan effect” on pitchers in recent seasons.

I went back to the 2000 season and looked at veteran pitchers the Cardinals either acquired as free agents before the season, or traded for in-season. I then studied their career statistics with the Cardinals and with teams other than the Cardinals. I essentially broke the statistics into 4 groups: pre-Cardinal years, 1st year with Cardinals, Cardinal career, and post-Cardinal years to see if there is a trend we can pick up on or if I just had a couple too many fries in my happy meal last night. For the sake of time, I included only starting pitchers.

Here are the pitchers that have come to the Cardinals via free agency or in-season trades since 2000 (years w Cards noted, and 10 starts minimum, exception Edwin Jackson)

Darryl Kile (2000-02)

Garrett Stephenson (1999-2003)

Pat Hentgen (2000)

Andy Benes (1996-97, 2000-02)

Woody Williams (2001-04)

Dustin Hermanson (2001)

Chuck Finley (2002)

Brett Tomko (2003)

Chris Carpenter (2004-11)

Jason Marquis (2004-06)

Jeff Suppan (2004-06,10)

Mark Mulder (2005-08)

Jeff Weaver (2006)

Sidney Ponson (2006)

Todd Wellemeyer (2006-09)

Joel Pineiro (2007-09)

Kyle Lohse (2008-11)

Jake Westbrook (2010-11)

Edwin Jackson (2011)

Now I’m not going to go all SABRmetrics on you, although I wish I had the time to do that, but simply look at the following statistical categories: ERA, WHIP, K/9, and GO/AO (groundout/airout, note this is average of seasons totals but included bc a Duncan trademark is getting pitchers to throw more ground balls).

I don’t really care about wins and losses for this analysis, because that is suck a fickle stat for a pitcher.

This is as far as I’m able to get before having to go back to my “real job”.  But i will have the results of this study up sometime this weekend. Hopefully I’ve piqued your interest enough to come back when I get the post finished.