QMAX: KIND OF BLUE (VIDA'S 1971 PEAK)

The recent passing of Vida Blue brought back memories of 1971, when he took baseball by storm. We didn't have the Quality Matrix (QMAX) back then, but it gives us some extra texture for what the 22-year-old lefty achieved in a season that deserves to be burned into our collective memory.

Blue's emergence set the tone for a five-year run by the Oakland A's as the best team in baseball, including three straight wins in the World Series (1972-74, a feat that remains exceedingly rare: the Yankees are the only other team that's managed to do it, with their runs in 1936-39, 1949-53, and 1998-2000). Vida would not dominate things the way that he did in 1971, but he was a dynamic presence throughout the A's tumultuous time at the top.

'71 was special, however. After Blue's striking teasers in his September 1970 return to the majors after being too quickly brought up to the big leagues in 1969 (a no-hitter and a one-hitter were sprinkled among his six starts), he shook off a shaky first start to assemble a 19-3 record over his next 24 starts, with seven shutouts, seventeen complete games, and 212 strikeouts in 209 IP.  His ERA at that point was 1.37.

QMAX can take us further into the details of that performance, with its look at combined hit prevention/walk prevention, adding a palpable sense of shape to the standard stats. 

Let's start by looking at those first 25 starts. The major QMAX "regions of interest" are shown in color-coded regions within its bi-directional matrix. The best games--where low hits/walks cluster--are found toward the upper left, while the "blown starts" can be seen (when they exist...) in the lower right. You'll notice the absolute paucity of such games in Blue's first 25 starts: his worst outing (his first of the year, on April 5) grades out as a "5, 7" on the matrix. It's not a "hit hard" game, which is the region in orange that spans the bottom two rows of the matrix. 

The yellow area surrounding the green square are games where pitchers are commonly successful; for that reason, we took to calling it "the success square" back in the early days of BBBA when QMAX was devised (even though, of course, it's not quite a square). That green square represents games where the pitcher and his team almost always win: on average, teams win just under 80% of these contests. As you can see, in Blue's first 25 starts in 1971, he had 88% of his games in the "success square" (22 of 25) and 44% in the "elite square" (our monicker for the region in green. Needless to say, these are exceptional numbers. 

Top hit prevention games were also at a highly elevated level in those first 25 starts. "Top hit prevention" is calculated by adding the top two performance rows together: these are the rows where hits are at least -4 or -2 relative to the number of innings pitched. Blue met those performance levels in 20 of his first 25 starts, or 80%--as you'll see in the "S12" stat shown in the summary data below the matrix chart. 

By this point in '71 (July 25th) Blue already had 212 IP (a figure exceeded by only one starting pitcher for the entire season in 2022). He would throw another 100 IP before the season came to an end. Those last 100 innings were not quite as impressive as what he'd achieved previously.

Now, they weren't bad--he didn't curl up into a ball. His arm didn't fall off. But 300+ IP is a monster load for anyone, at any time, and it's not surprising that his level of achievement would take a hit. 

And the QMAX chart/data shows us exactly where that occurred via the locations of the games within the matrix box, which shift away from the upper left. Blue nearly matched his percentage of "elite square" games in August-September of '71 (36% as opposed to 44% in his first 25 starts), but he became noticeably more hittable in the latter stages of the season. There's a 60% rise in his average QMAX "S" score (from a blistering 2.0 to a merely above-average 3.3). 

Vida Blue was extremely athletic even by the standards of professional sports, but he was not an overly large man (6'0", 185 lbs). His heavy workload in '71 quite probably impeded his ability to sustain the level of performance he demonstrated during that magical year. In his first 25 starts in '71, his H/9 was 5.4; in his last 14 starts, that jumped to 7.4--a figure that would be very close to his performance level for the next four years of the A's run as the best team in baseball. After that, he would decline further: for the balance of his career, his H/9 was 8.4. 

He did not suffer any career-interrupting injuries--he's not fodder for the "Pitcher Abuse Points" parade of "kiddie sabermetrics." But he's still a cautionary tale for how young pitchers have always needed to have their managers take the foot off the gas--especially when they're showing an exceptional level of achievement. Blue was a sensation in '71 the way that Mark Fidrych was five years later. As Doc Gooden was in 1984-85. All of these sensations wound up being less than what they might have been...some "more less" than others, of course. 

So we celebrate Blue's banner year with something of a heavy heart, knowing that the inherent dynamic of the game will tend to undermine its precocious pitching talent if it gets worked too much, too soon. Vida was luckier than many in that regard--his "try to hit my fastball" approach didn't wipe him out, it merely ground him down, slowly and inexorably. He won 209 games, after all. But he was never the same as he was in those magical four months in 1971.