BP Unfiltered

I would say an ace is a pitcher who could face off against the best pitcher in the game without either team feeling like it has a huge advantage (i.e. anybody your team could match up against Roy Halladay that doesn't cause you to go "we're screwed"). Teams can have multiple aces. In regard to timeline, I think you need to look at about a season and a half on a rolling basis, this seems like a reasonable amount of time to both ignore a slump (think Lincecum last year), but acknowledge that factors can cause pitchers to lose "Ace" status (think late career Greg Maddux).

I agree with SC. If you have an "ace" you know you have an ace. Is King Felix an is? I think there can be more than one on a team, Lester, Buchholz, Beckett???, Lackey (who most would have considered and ace before this season). I think if you have an ace you feel like your chances are good that you will win the vast majority of the games he pitches, if you score on the others teams ace.

1) No, I think teams can have more than one... if the Yankees do in fact sign Cliff Lee, would anyone argue that either is not ace quality just because the other is present? It would be absurd.

2) A pitcher can be Ace-like at anytime, though it would likely take multiple seasons of preforming as such to have the label slapped on them.

3) Every pitcher throws the occasional clunker... Wouldn't the more important thing to look for be how many times a particular guy stops a losing streak or comes in and wins after a loss the day before? I don't think the average guy or mediocre pitcher even sniffs the Ace label...


4) CY Young's are a horrible way judging pitchers for this purpose, they don't grade the award on difficulty. Does anyone honestly think King Felix out pitches David Price for the CY Young this year if he was pitching in the AL East? I don't; and I'm not saying King Felix isn't an ace, like the first poster... you know it when you see it.

5) Why should Cliff Lee's seemingly mediocre past matter if he's done it over a period of back to back years... Its kinda like Hall of Fame voting in a sense, no? Shouldn't a pitcher be dominate at some point for a few years?

6)Reputations and recognition don't matter... Numbers do.

I think it would be interesting to see if there are any trends related to age, handedness or the number of years after being called up from the minors that guys achieve Ace-dom.

In response to Jquinton82's Hernanez/Price comparison:

Hitter that King Felix faced this year posed a combined .728 OPS. Hitters that Price faced OPSed a collective .739.

There is no question that Hernandez faced weaker hitters on the whole. That said, do you honestly believe that the difference is all that significant?

I know that this comment has nothing to do with the main point of the article. Looking forward to reading the piece when it comes out.

I think that 'ace' = '#1 starter' = roughly the top 30 pitchers in baseball. (Hence the etymology of the word 'ace' and the distinction between an ace and a #2, #3, etc.) If every team in baseball got to draft their rotations from scratch, the first thirty taken are #1 starters. Aces.

Obviously one team may have a couple or three of the top 30 pitchers in baseball, and other teams may have none. There's also obviously going to be no sharp distinction between 30 and 31, but there are tiers and dropoffs. The set of tiers that roughly corresponds to 30 is the set of aces.

A pitcher can become an ace quickly, I think. Lincecum was easily one after his first full season; Kershaw and Price are there. Sandy Koufax lasted four years at the top - if he wasn't an ace, no one ever was.

I see "Ace" as a subjective term. An Ace is a pitcher who makes you pencil in a "W" every time his name comes up in the rotation. If your team is facing an Ace, you mentally write off the game as an excusable loss. An Ace is dominant. He strikes out a lot of guys and often seems unhittable. A contact pitcher can be an ace (Tim Hudson), but that's the exception. And yes, a team can have two aces. If you want to put statistical guidelines on the term, I'd say that An Ace has to be a minimum 5-win pitcher for at least two consecutive seasons.

This leads to a secondary discussion as to what defines a #2,3,4 or 5 starter.

I had this same discussion three years ago, when Seattle acquired 'Ace' Eric Bedard. I put a bit of thought into it at the time. I disagreed with Bedard's Ace distinction at the time, and I argued (quite convincingly if you ask me) that one season of realized promise didn't make him an Ace, even if he was the best pitcher on his team or even one of the top 10 in the league. Earning that title meant achieving and maintaining a level of consistency and durability both...

At the time, I think I put forward that any pitcher ranked in the top 30 in two of the past three seasons would make him an Ace in the upcoming one, regardless of which roster he was on.

With that criterion, by VORP, there are 18 Aces at the beginning of 2011:

2010 Top 10, and also Top 30 in 2008, 2009, or both: Halladay, Hernandez, Wainwright, Jimenez, Josh Johnson, Jered Weaver, Sabathia;

2 of 3 Top 30s: Johan Santana, Cain, Verlander, Kershaw, Lester, Lincecum, Greinke, Haren, Carpenter, Danks, and Oswalt.

Best of the rest / Just missed the cut (1 of 3 Top 30s):
'10 only: Hudson, Price, Buchholz, Hamels, Gio Gonzalez, Cahill, Latos, Myers, Wilson, Dickey, Sanchez, Carpenter, Liriano, Pavano, Duensing, Scherzer; (these pitchers have two more years to repeat in the top 30 to qualify as 'Aces' in the future).

'09 only: Jurrjens, Vazquez, Edwin Jackson, Wolf, Wandy Rodriguez, Happ, Buehrle, Washburn, Millwood, Lilly, Beckett, Garza, Feldman; (could qualify as an Ace in 2012 if they get another top 30 finish in 2011)

'08 only: Dempster, Ervin Santana, Matsuzaka, Sheets, Webb, Peavy, Billingsley, Lowe, Saunders, Nolasco, Duchscherer, Mussina, Baker, Shields, Volquez, Guthrie, Maholm (these pitchers are having their clocks reset... gotta get 2 of the next 3 seasons to qualify as Aces again...)

Given the rare occassion for a touted rookie to be deserving of the title after (or during) the rooked season, I'd be willing to offer an exception for a rookie if he makes the top 3 or top 5 in his debut season... Lincecum yes, Strasburg unfortunately, no.

So, this may not be a perfect definition or analysis for such a nebulous term, but I think it's a defensible starting point for the discussion.

I appreciate a lot of the posts already made, and want to say thank you to BurrRutledge for the in-depth post. I however have a very different view point on the term "Ace".

If a SP were to become an unrestricted free agent right now...today, would there be a feeding frenzy? Would everyone covet what you have, and in turn fear it at the same time? That is an "Ace". When you can reasonably deduct that a 30 game starter, will win 60% or more of those games, without any worry...that is an Ace.

I don't think it matters where you fall in the rotation at all. Before this season Jake Peavy could have been considered an Ace, but when he moved to Chicago he became the #2, because Buehrle has pitched every opening day for what seems like more than a decade, 8 years in actuality and a franchise record.

I think going by a 2/3 standard for performance is a bit short sighted. If Brandon Webb were to win 19 games this season, after missing almost 2 full season to injuries, would he not be considered an Ace again? Durability, consistency and reliability make a good pitcher, great. But not necessarily an Ace. That is the creme de la creme. Let's look at it this way. There a 4 Aces in a 52 card deck. So let's take the 150 SP (30 teams x 5) and that should yield roughly 10-11 Aces.

My question to everyone is, who are the consensus 10 Aces in baseball today?

One qualification that I have for an ace that hasn't been brought up here is how long a pitcher CAN last in a game (effectively) if called upon, and how long he typically DOES last.

A pitcher is, in my view, probably not an ace if he can't be reasonably expected to go 8-9 innings IF NECESSARY. Obviously everyone has ineffective days and I don't see any evidence that anyone can make himself have a better game by wanting to, but there seems to be a skill of going deep into or completing the occasional must-win game.

This skill should not be confused with the separate skill of putting going fairly deep into games often (averaging around or over 7IP/start).

I would require both of these skills to call someone an ace. Of course, that pitcher must also have the skills and the track record for me to want him to pitch must-win games and average 220IP/season--I'm not trying to bring Livan Hernandez into this discussion.) Basically, an ace needs to be someone the team can trust to handle a playoff game more or less by himself and to take a big percentage of the team's total innings.

Francisco Liriano has elite talent--ace talent--but he just doesn't pitch enough of the Twins' innings to be an ace. And when he duels CC Sabathia in the playoffs, he's outlasted by two or three innings.

To give Andrew's post a reply, here are 10 guys that I think qualify as aces. This is gonna be off the cuff, though, but I don't mean the inevitable oversights personally:

1. Roy Halladay
2. Tim Lincecum
3. Felix Hernandez
4. Cliff Lee
5. Jon Lester
6. CC Sabathia
7. Adam Wainwright
8. Josh Johnson
9. Zack Grienke
10.Cole Hamels

This list is only sort of in order and really, any of the following could be in the 10th spot (so maybe I believe in only 9 aces...): Clay Buchholtz, Chris Carpenter, Justin Verlander, Jared Weaver, maybe Ubaldo Jimenez.

I gotta revert back to my original definition, Andrew. I just can't see limiting it to 10 Aces. I like my 19 guys from the definition I compiled a few years ago better (and I admit it's a confirmation bias):

20 Aces: Halladay, Hernandez, Lee, Wainwright, Jimenez, Josh Johnson, Jered Weaver, Sabathia, Hamels, Johan Santana, Cain, Verlander, Kershaw, Lester, Lincecum, Greinke, Haren, Carpenter, Danks, and Oswalt.

Their is undeniably some variation within this list, but I think of all them would be highly coveted.

I subconsciously use fantasy sports now to help me with terms like "ace". Basically, I want top-five position players at every position in fantasy baseball. When it comes to the pitching staff, because we use a lot more SPs than 2Bmen, that number jumps to fifteen. In other words, I want as many of the top-fifteen SPs in the game. A starter who is in the conversation for being a top-15 starter is an "ace" in my book*.

It passes the smell test. Each team in baseball has their own #1 starter. I think the term "ace" is more selective than #1 starter. We can say that maybe half of those #1 starters are "aces" and that teams can have more than one ace.

* note: this means there are possibly more than 15 of them. If your personal #15 and #16 guys are Haren and Carpenter, for example, and you think they are about equal, they can both be considered "aces".

Just my three cents.

Aces make up 7.7% of a deck of cards.

Seems like if you are using that term, that would imply out of 150 starting pitchers there would be 11 or 12 of them that would be an ace.

In this agrument, the sabermetrics lose out. In my opinion, this is the sentence uttered by an opposing manager that defines an ace: "Oh crap, we have to face this guy today."

Strat-O-Matic breakdowns for simulations can filter out your aces each year. Take the list each year and see the pitchers that repeat three out of four years and you have your aces.

Using this example over some of the prior lists, guys like Greinke and Kershaw aren't aces. Greinke has been a bit inconsistent and Kershaw hasn't pitched long enough. Young pitchers like Lincecum are because they have been dominant since joining the league with only smatterings of inconsistencies over short time periods. And folks like Halladay are obviously aces because they've done it multiple years over a greater time period than five years.

Yep, it's subjective.