Comrades, as much as I hate to defuse a raging discussion in the commentary section, it’s much ado about nothing. I understand the difference between the popular accounting of decades and the more logical way of doing it. However, as one of you pointed out, everyone else is doing it. I decided to go with the flow. As it says in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” when the decade becomes fact, print the decade—or something like that.

As for me, the only date that matters is the one in which I close out the Baseball Prospectus annual and get to start looking forward to spring training and having the book in the hands of you all, whatever decade you feel like we’ll be in starting the day after tomorrow. I’m not picky when it comes to stuff like that.

MORE GREATEST HITS OF THE (SORTA) DECADE: PITCHING
Picking up where we left off yesterday, a few more top 10s for the years 2000-2009. Think I need to bother running a saves list?

WINS
1    Mike Mussina 123  
2    Andy Pettitte 111  
3    Roger Clemens 69  
4    Chien-Ming Wang 55  
5    Mariano Rivera 45  
T6   David Wells 34  
T6   Randy Johnson 34  
8    Orlando Hernandez 32  
9    Ramiro Mendoza 23  
T10  Mike Stanton 19  
T10  C.C. Sabathia 19  

It makes sense for Mussina to be up there, but somehow it surprised me. Ramiro Mendoza is another ghostly figure who seems as if he was a Yankee a million years ago.

LOSSES
1    Mike Mussina 72  
2    Andy Pettitte 63  
3    Mariano Rivera 39  
4    Roger Clemens 32  
5    Orlando Hernandez 27  
6    Chien-Ming Wang 26  
7    Randy Johnson 19  
T8   David Cone 14  
T8   Darrell Rasner 14  
T8   David Wells 14  

We’re capturing the tail end of David Cone here, which is not the right way to remember one of my favorite pitchers of the last 20 years. The other guy who sticks out is Rasner, who just couldn’t get out of his own way when he was with the Yankees, mostly because injuries kept stealing his chances. Alas, he didn’t pitch that well in Japan this year either.

ERA (Min. 200 innings, second column is innings pitched)
1    Mariano Rivera 2.08    713.1  
2    C.C. Sabathia 3.37    230    
3    Mike Stanton 3.41    240.1  
4    Joba Chamberlain 3.61    281.2  
5    Ramiro Mendoza 3.82    259    
6    Mike Mussina 3.88   1553    
7    Roger Clemens 3.88    915.1  
8    David Wells 3.95    419.1  
9    A.J. Burnett 4.04    207    
10   Andy Pettitte 4.10   1362.1  

That Mariano Rivera guy, he’s pretty good. I might have set the innings limit a little low. If you raise the cutoff to 300 innings, you get  Orlando Hernandez (4.13), Chien-Ming Wang (4.16), and Randy Johnson (4.37).

Let’s do a top 20 for appearances, so we capture both starters and relievers. Second column is games started.

GAMES
1    Mariano Rivera 651        0  
2    Mike Stanton 252        0  
3    Mike Mussina 249      248  
4    Andy Pettitte 219      217  
5    Scott Proctor 190        1  
6    Kyle Farnsworth 181        0  
7    Tom Gordon 159        0  
8    Brian Bruney 153        1  
9    Roger Clemens 145      144  
10   Ramiro Mendoza 133       11  
11   Mike Myers 117        0  
12   Tanyon Sturtze 110        4  
13   Chien-Ming Wang 109      104  
14   Paul Quantrill 108        0  
15   Ron Villone 107        0  
16   Jose Veras 106        0  
17   Jeff Nelson 97        0  
18   Edwar Ramirez 96        0  
19   Joba Chamberlain 93       43  
20   Steve Karsay 91        0 

You see something right and appropriate here: turnover in the bullpen. If you find a Mariano Rivera, you keep him at all costs, but most other relievers are just too variable to worry about keeping them. The Yankees have bucked the industry the last two years in filling their bullpen needs from inside the organization. It’s taken a little experimentation in both seasons to get it right, but it has ultimately worked. As high as the Yankees’ payroll has been, they’ve saved a good deal of money by not throwing cash at random middle relievers, a standard tactic for just about every GM in the game.