According to WikipediA, in baseball a quality start is a statistic for a starting pitcher defined as a game in which the pitcher completes at least six innings and permits no more than three earned runs. The quality start has effectively replaced the ‘complete game’ as a meaningful measure of a starting pitcher’s performance.
The quality start was developed by sportswriter John Lowe in 1985 while writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Nolan Ryan has used the term “High Quality Start” for games where the pitcher goes seven innings or more and allows three earned runs or fewer, which baseball columnist and formber BBWAA president Derrick Goold referred to as “Quality Start Plus.”
Complete games are getting to be rare in today’s game of baseball. I don’t think they will ever completely go away as there will always be a small handful of pitchers that believe in finishing what they start and now and then they will be allowed to pitch complete games. Nowadays QS and strikeouts seem to be the measuring stick for good pitchers. But like most stats in baseball or any sport for that matter they don’t tell you the whole story.
Pitching has changed so much over the years, both for the better and for the worse, much more so I think than hitting and defense. What fun it would be to talk with great pitchers from the past to get their thoughts on the state of pitching in the major leagues today. I am just going to say that the bar for good pitching has dropped dramatically since I started following America’s pastime back in the mid 50’s and leave it at that and move on to QS and Minnesota Twins pitchers over the years.
The most QS in a single season by a Minnesota Twins pitcher was 31 (38 starts) by Bert Blyleven in 1972 and his record that season was 17-17 in a year in which the Twins went 77-77 and finished third. Pretty impressive huh? But be patient because later on you will see something that will knock you socks off about this 1972 Twins pitching staff.
The all-time Twins leader in QS is Jim Kaat with 253 followed by Bert Blyleven with 218 and Brad Radke rounds out the top three with 208.
The link below will take you to a Baseball-Reference Stathead search I did for the Twins pitcher with the highest QS percentage in a single season. To qualify you had to have a minimum of 15 starts and a QS percentage of at least 70%.
https://stathead.com/tiny/mKLrP
If you check out the results of that search you will find that in 1972 Jim Kaat, Ray Corbin and Dick Woodson and Blyleven were all part of the starting rotation that season and they all showed up on this list. Kaat even ended up with a higher QS percetage than Blyleven had. All four of these pitchers had ERA’s of under 2.74 and Blylevens was the highest at 2.73. The fifth starter on this team was Jim Perry and his ERA was just 3.35. Dave Goltz was the only other pitcher to start games for this team and he started 11 games and posted and ERA of 2.67. Any yet this 1972 Twins team finished 77-77 and in third place in the American League West 15.5 games behind the Oakland A’s. I can’t help but scratch my head and ask how this possibly could have happened.
Just for fun, what Twins teams had the lowest QS over a full season? Shocker I know, but that would the 2021 Twins with 32 QS followed closely by this years 2022 Twins with 35 QS under manager Rocco Baldelli’s watchful eyes. The team with the most was of course the 1972 Twins with 114 QS and they only played 154 games. No team in the American League has had as many QS in a season as the 1972 Twins have had between 1961 and the present.