Times Facing Opponent in Game for Whitey Ford.

Whitey Ford pitched his first major league game July 1, 1950 at age 21. Ford went 9-1 and started the last game of a four game sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1950 World Series going 8.66 innings for the 5-2 win. After his rookie season Ford spent two years in the military service. Whitey Ford was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1974 with his buddy Mickey Mantle.

This post extends the previous post, which focused on current Yankee lefty CC Sabathia. Ford's data is for 14 seasons of over 100 innings through 1965.

Times Facing Opponent in Game for CC Sabathia. And a peak at Whitey Ford. Saturday, August 4, 2018 11:04 AM

We often hear that starting pitchers become much less effective the third time that they face batters in a game. We hear especially about Sabathia and especially in 2018...

OK, so let's look at his OPS (On Base Plus Slugging averages) for the first, second and third times through the batting order in his Yankee seasons.
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The data is only for starts, not relief appearances.

	Ford	Sabathia	Ford	Sabathia
time	PA	PA	Pct	Pct
1	3,870	4,754	31.09%	33.18%
2	3,647	4,701	29.30%	32.81%
3	3,162	4,018	25.41%	28.05%
4+	1,767	853	14.20%	5.95%
	12,446	14,326
Inn	3,170	3,424

Since Sabathia faced only 6% of batters in his fourth time through the lineup, his data in the previous post ignored the fourth time. Ford faced more than 14% of batters a fourth time, so his data presented here includes that.

Ford	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
Year	1950	1953	1954	1955	1956	1957	1958	1959	1960	1961	1962	1963	1964	1965
1	.591	.645	.551	.627	.596	.632	.592	.647	.613	.696	.687	.574	.637	.736
2	.593	.695	.726	.575	.639	.610	.578	.618	.616	.630	.564	.669	.568	.637
3	.531	.649	.641	.623	.603	.723	.509	.731	.573	.550	.738	.774	.489	.602
4+	.612	.731	.654	.525	.682	.912	.690	.628	.848	.700	.744	.518	.633	.828
Inn	112	207	210	253	225	129	219	204	192	283	257	269	244	244
ERA+	153	123	123	144	157	140	177	119	117	115	130	129	170	105