That Guy Was Good: Kevin Appier

That Guy Was Good: Kevin Appier

For a time, there was a rumor going around Kansas City that Kevin Appier was a member of Mensa. It’s unclear which of Ape’s teammates started that gag, but it obviously went so much further than the prankster expected because for a time you would actually hear people say, in all seriousness, “You wouldn’t know it, but Kevin Appier is actually brilliant. He’s in Mensa.”

Kevin Appier was not a member of Mensa.

But he was a crazy good pitcher.

The Royals shocked everybody by taking him with the ninth pick in the 1987 draft out of Antelope Valley College. The Major League scouting bureau had rated him a second or third-round pick. Baseball America projected him there down there, too. He had an awkward delivery. He had faced low-level competition.

But Royals scout Guy Hansen saw him pitch and was absolutely hooked. “I had him ranked No. 1 in the entire West,” he told a Kansas City reporter. “He reminds me so much of Bret Saberhagen at the same age.”

It must be such a satisfying feeling as a scout to be so right. Just like Sabes, Appier blazed through the minor leagues and was pitching in the big leagues less than two years after he was drafted.

Then, in short order:

• In 1990, he was probably the best rookie in the American League, going 12-8 with a 2.75 ERA in 185 innings. By bWAR, he was two wins better than any other rookie in the league and three wins better than the actual Rookie of the Year winner, Sandy Alomar Jr.

• In 1992, he might have been the best pitcher in the American League. The Cy Young winner (and MVP) was Dennis Eckersley, who was, you know, typically good for his 80 innings of work. But Appier had a 2.46 ERA over 208 innings; again by bWAR, Ape was FIVE WINS better than Eck that season. Appier did not get a single Cy Young vote.

• In 1993, he almost certainly was the best pitcher in the American League. He threw 238 innings and led the league in both ERA and FIP. He had a 33-inning scoreless streak in there. His 9.3 bWAR that season was not only tops in baseball, it was the highest for any pitcher in three years. Jack McDowell, with his league-leading 22 wins, ran away with the Cy Young Award because that’s how things went back then. Appier finished third.

You can’t really blame people for missing it — in the early 1990s, as the Jack McDowell Cy Young suggests, pitching was about wins and losses. Appier’s record never wowed anybody. Mostly. this was because he pitched for some meh Royals teams, and he won less than he should have and lost more than he should have. In 1993, he went 18-8 which certainly is good. But then you realize that those eight losses included two 3-2 losses, a 3-1 loss, a 2-1 loss and a 1-0 loss. And he threw a quality start in seven of his eight no-decisions (he got hurt in the other one).

Kevin Appier, from 1990 to 1993, was a great pitcher. This series is dedicated to the good player, and I’d argue that’s what Appier was over the length of his career. But those four years stand as one of the most underappreciated spans for any pitcher in any era.

He was also a glorious, Greinkesque character. That’s what the whole Mensa gag was all about. “I don’t think Kevin Appier knows what planet he’s on sometimes,” his manager John Wathan once said.

There was the time in Seattle when he was scheduled to pitch the second game of the series. Before the game, he went to the bullpen to warm up. “Um,” someone out there told him, “this is the home team’s bullpen.”

There was a time in Anaheim when he was charting the game, and he asked Wathan which way Johnny Ray hit.

“He’s a switch-hitter,” Wathan said. Ape looked puzzled.

“OK,” he said. “But which way is he going to hit tonight?”

There was this joyful conversation he had with Mark Gubicza after throwing a one-hitter against the Tigers. He allowed a single to leadoff hitter Lou Whitaker and didn’t give one up the rest of the game.

“You realize you threw a one-hitter,” Gubicza said after the game when he saw no reaction from Appier. “I mean, that’s a pretty big deal.”

Appier looked at him for a beat … another beat … a third beat …

“Yeah,” Ape said blandly. “I realize it.”

One of my favorite Ape stories came late in his career when he threw six shutout innings against the Yankees. Reporters gathered around his locker and waited for a good while. When Appier showed up, he apologized for being late.

“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t find my underwear.”

“He’s pretty much clueless all the time,” George Brett said. “That’s a good way to be when you play this game.”

The young Appier had dominating stuff — a good fastball, a nasty splitter, an even nastier slider — batters used to say the ball just felt HEAVIER when he threw it. This might have been in part because he was very particular about the baseballs he pitched. He would throw them out for any reason — one was too dark, another was too light, one felt too smooth, one felt too rough …

“What was wrong with that one?” his catcher Mike Macfarlane asked him once.

“It was dented,” Appier said.

Appier just put so much into every pitch. He was a max-effort pitcher before max-effort pitching was cool.

“I had full concentration and intensity on every pitch,” he told the Kansas City Star when he was inducted into the Royals Hall of Fame in 2011. “Some pitchers got away with going on cruise control here and there. But I didn’t have the skill to be able to do that. It probably shortened my career by a few years, but it would devastate me to think I gave up a hit or a game because I was in cruise control mode. I took pride in going full out all the time.”

Appier was never quite as good after his remarkable 1993 season, but to be fair, very few pitchers were as good after 1993.

So, yes, he was still above average … he just wasn’t quite the same dynamo. In many ways, it’s this above-average version of Appier I enjoyed watching the most. He had a gruesome series of injuries, starting with a torn labrum in 1998, and against the odds, he kept on finding ways to get outs even as his stuff faded to black.

Appier is one of those pitchers — I’d put Rick Reuschel in this category, Chuck Finley, Mark Langston, Frank Tanana, a few others — whose career WAR will catch you by surprise. I mean, look at this:

Career bWAR

• Kevin Appier, 54.9

• Whitey Ford, 53.6

• Sandy Koufax, 53.1

• Jim Kaat, 45.2

• Jack Morris, 43.6

• Bob Lemon, 37.5

• Catfish Hunter, 36.3

It’s easy to make too much of this, and I will occasionally hear from someone who will ask me to make a Hall of Fame case for Ape. It’s also easy to make too little of this. Kevin Appier was good.

My favorite Appier game was, in fact, that “I couldn’t find my underwear” game in 2003. Appier was just 35, but he seemed so much older. Three years earlier, he had signed what was then a huge deal with the New York Mets — four years, $42 million. After one of those above-average seasons, the Mets dealt him to his hometown Angels straight up for Mo Vaughn, a trade of once-fantastic veterans trying to have one more year in the sun.

Sure enough, they each had quite reasonable 2002 seasons. Vaughn’s knees were shot, but he somehow hit 25 home runs and posted a 114 OPS+. Appier’s fastball was barely in the mid-80s, but he went 14-12 with a 113 ERA+.

And then they each got old overnight. So it goes, right? Vaughn played only 27 games for the Mets in 2003 and retired. Ape, meanwhile, struggled so mightily that the Angels flat-out released him and ate the last few million left on his contract. Appier signed on with the Royals in the hopes of recapturing a little of what he had lost.

And briefly, on the lost underwear day, throwing softballs, he did recapture something. That 2003 season was slightly magical for the Royals; they were in first place on August 14 when they faced the Yankees. It made no sense at all. They had lost 100 games a year earlier. They would lose 100 games each of the next three seasons. But in 2003, all this weird stuff happened — Ángel Berroa won Rookie of the Year, Darrell May was a Cy Young candidate, Mike MacDougal was an All-Star, Rondell White crushed the ball for three weeks, Tony Peña won Manager of the Year, etc.

And on Kevin Appier threw six joyful shutout innings against the mighty Yankees in front of a packed house that included his wife and mother. The Royals won 11-0. The monumental moment came in the sixth inning. Appier was running on fumes when he faced Jason Giambi — this at the time when Giambi was probably the biggest pitcher’s nightmare East of Barry Bonds.

They battled for five pitches, with Giambi doing what he always did, spoiling good pitches, waiting for the mistake. On the sixth pitch, Appier decided — as he often did in his career — “OK, fine, here’s my best fastball. Let’s see if you can hit it.” He reared back and threw the high heat up in the no-go-zone. Giambi saw it clearly and unleashed his mighty swing. And Giambi struck out.

“There’s the old Ape!” someone in the pressbox shouted with glee.

And we all looked at the board to see just how hard he had thrown that fastball.

Yeah. He threw it 86 mph.

“It looked like 95,” Peña said after the game. And as I wrote then: It really did.

Revisiting pitcher wins

So the other day, I wrote a bit about pitcher wins — the main point being that I miss starting pitchers having an easily countable statistic that can aid in baseball storytelling. Well, as usual, our guy Tom Tango has a super-interesting idea. He thinks we should change the way we determine which pitchers won and lost the game.

Right now, a starter needs to go at least five innings and leave the game with the lead in order to qualify for the win. Even if he does go five innings and leave the game with the lead, that’s no guarantee that he will get the win — the bullpen can and reasonably often does blow starter wins all the time. Then the win goes to the pitcher who happens to be in the game when the winning run happens.

Nobody thinks this is a good thing.

So Tom’s idea is simple enough — he has devised a pitcher win/loss point system.

Winning pitcher system: One point per out and lose five points for every run allowed.

Losing pitcher system: Ten points per run, lose one point for every out recorded.

So let’s look at a couple of Chris Sale games from last year. Sale’s win-loss record last year was 18-3. But his modified win total was 21-5. What was the difference?

Well, OK, let’s look at a no-decision he had against Milwaukee in July. The Braves ended up winning the game 6-2. He pitched 5 2/3 innings and allowed both runs.

Winning points: 17 outs (17 points), 2 runs allowed (minus-10 points). Total: 7 points.

Unfortunately for Sale, he left the game when it was still 2-2. Pierce Johnson came into the game in the sixth with runners on first and second and pitched out of it. The Braves scored in the next half-inning, setting up Johnson as the winner.

Points for Johnson: 4 outs (4 points), 0 runs allowed (minus-0 points). Total: 4 points.

Johnson got the official win. I think most of us would agree that Sale was more worthy of the win.

And it works the other way, too. On June 1, Sale faced the Athletics. Atlanta lost the game 11-9, and Sale got roughed up, allowing eight runs in just four innings.

Losing points: 8 runs (80 points), 12 outs (minus-12 points): Total: 68 points.

The Braves were losing 8-3 when Sale left the game. But then, after he was gone, Atlanta rallied and scored six runs to take the lead. Jimmy Herget was in the game to receive this bounty, but he gave up a couple of hits to lead off the sixth and then the aforementioned Johnson gave up a triple to Brent Rooker that scored two runs and gave Oakland the lead again. Herget took the hard-luck loss. But …

Points for Herget: 2 runs (20 points), 4 hours (minus-4 points). Total: 16 points.

It isn’t even close. Sale absolutely should have taken that loss.

There’s an awful lot to like about this system, including the fact that we can go back retroactively and reassign pitchers wins and losses and see how the numbers shake out. That would be a lot of fun. Of course, Tango’s point system is just a suggestion; others might want to change outs to two points or runs to four points or whatever. And, as Tango says, that will probably lead to 20 years of saber infighting and no action.

My thought: If we like this idea, let’s just do it. I mean, it doesn’t have to be official yet. Let’s just try it on. Baseball Reference? Can you give us modified wins to play around with?

Ask Joe!

Let’s get a couple of quick Ask Joe questions in!

It is impossible for me to be honest with you on this question because the one guarantee in life is that if I say that the Yankees are done, they will win 106 games and sweep the World Series. So it has always been. So it is.

The crushing loss of Gerrit Cole does seem to be an ominous sign. Luis Gil’s injury does seem to be an ominous sign. The fact that the Yankees are seriously considering making Austin Wells they’re leadoff hitter does seem to be an ominous sign. Having the soon-to-be 38-year-old Paul Goldschmidt in the cleanup spot does seem to be an ominous sign. Giancarlo Stanton’s rather remarkable “double tennis elbow” injury does seem to be an ominous sign. And so on. And so on.

But it’s not like this is now the Bad News Bears. You could see Max Fried battling for the Cy Young. You could see Cody Bellinger finding life at new Yankee Stadium. You could see Anthony Volpe stepping up into stardom. You could see Jasson Domínguez wowing everybody. You could see Devin Williams shutting doors. You could see Aaron Judge do Goliath Aaron Judge things. I would guess, in a pretty mediocre-looking American League, the Yankees are still a playoff team.

Here’s what I think: The MLB All-Star Game is a perfect example of baseball being paralyzed between tradition and the future. The game doesn’t make any sense anymore. It made a whole lot of sense when the American and National League were entirely separate, when fans read about baseball in the morning newspapers, when people honestly wondered just what would happen when Stan Musial faced Bob Feller or Jim Palmer faced Mike Schmidt, when players were not only willing but eager to play several innings.

Times change, and none of those things are still true. The American and National Leagues are essentially merged. Morning newspapers barely exist. We all know what will happen when an American League star faces a National League star because we see some version of it every day.

And pitchers all go one inning, at most, while batters are barely in the game long enough to be noticed. The two transcendent stars in baseball are, obviously, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. Each got two plate appearances in last year’s All-Star Game. How excited is anyone going to get to see Judge and Shohei get two meaningless at-bats on a Tuesday night? Who is building their schedule around that?

There are countless ideas for making the game matter more. I like some of them. I like a U.S. vs. the World concept. I like suspending baseball’s substitution rules and allowing the game’s biggest stars to hit, in any order, in the ninth inning. I like a home-run derby shootout for tie games.

But what I’d like most of all is for MLB to make this the fan’s game again. Right now, it just feels like a major inconvenience for everybody in the middle of a very long season. Many players would prefer to skip it. Many organizations are opposed to it out of injury fears. MLB itself will try all kinds of dumb things like last year’s uniform fiasco. The whole thing just feels stale, and I think the way to make it less stale is for everyone to remember that, yes, this is for the fans — so give the fans what they want. Make it fun. Try some stuff.

Alas, making it fun and trying some stuff isn’t exactly an MLB strong suit.

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