Is Nationals Starter Patrick Corbin Having the Worst Pitching Season Ever?

When your performance is drawing comparisons to Les Sweetland of the 1930 Philadelphia Phillies, you know things are bleak.

Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday during the regular season you’ll get a fresh, topical story to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.

The Nationals are off Thursday. That is merciful both generally, with the state of this roster, and specifically, with the fact that it would have been a start day for Patrick Corbin. The club announced earlier this week that it would take the opportunity to skip him in the rotation—but, lest fans grow too excited, they clarified he would still make his next start as scheduled on Tuesday. And then manager Dave Martinez offered something vaguely chilling.

“I want to leave this year with a positive moving forward to next year,” said Martinez, according to Andrew Golden of The Washington Post. “Because, regardless of what anyone thinks, he’s going to be one of our starters next year and the year after that.”

It is true that Corbin is under contract through 2024—the end of his six-year, $140-million deal with the Nationals. It is true that said contract would make him very difficult to move. It is true that the Nationals do not have designs on contending any time soon, making it important to have a few veteran arms in place who can eat innings while younger pitchers develop, no matter how bad the results are. In other words, Martinez’s statement about Corbin’s place in the rotation should not have been remotely surprising, given all of the relevant context.

Over his last six starts, Corbin is 0–6 with a 12.46 ERA. That’s more than four runs higher than the next worst ERA (Paul Blackburn’s 8.41) among starters with at least 20 innings pitched in that span.

Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA TODAY Sports

Yet with how Corbin has pitched lately? A commitment to him as a starter for next year and the year after that feels not so much like a statement of fact as it does like a threat.

It’s not just that this has been the worst performance of Corbin’s career. It’s not just that it is the worst performance this year in MLB. It’s that it is shaping up to be one of the worst pitching performances in history—arguably, depending on your choice of metric, the worst—with no end in sight.

If that sounds like hyperbole, it isn’t. A season that has been generally miserable for Corbin has somehow gotten even worse over the last two weeks: In two of his last three starts, he’s failed to get out of the first inning, giving up six runs both times. That leaves him with a 7.02 ERA (56 ERA+) and baseball’s worst marks for losses (16), hits allowed (161) and earned runs (86). The numbers are striking both in how extreme they are and in the fact that they have the chance to exist like this at all: It’s rare for a pitcher this bad to be afforded so many chances to keep going. It requires a particular set of circumstances—a team not especially motivated to win, able to send a pitcher like this out again and again, tied to him by a contract they cannot move or cut or otherwise justify away. The factors that led Martinez to note that Corbin will be in this rotation for years to come are the same ones keeping him in it now.

Which gets to the heart of the matter here. Corbin is not the worst pitcher you have ever seen. But you almost certainly have not seen a worse individual season from a pitcher—partially because, yes, it’s that bad, and partially because the guardrails usually in place to limit exposure just do not apply here. So: The worst pitching performance of all time? Let’s search for comparisons.

By ERA

Let’s start with the most obvious statistic—not the most illuminating, or the most informative, but the most straightforward. And it has good news for Corbin! He is not particularly likely to finish with the worst ERA ever in MLB. That dubious honor has long belonged to Les Sweetland and his 7.71 ERA for the 1930 Phillies. (Sweetland pitched one more year in MLB and spent much of the next decade trying and failing to make it back through minor and independent leagues.) And there are 15 men between Sweetland and Corbin: That’s certainly not many, in the grand scheme of things, but enough that Corbin does not stand out on top of the leaderboard. Someone posts an ERA over 7.00 roughly once a decade. It is bad. (Obviously). Yet it is not historically catastrophic. Corbin can breathe (somewhat) easy here.

By ERA+

But ERA doesn’t say anything about context. For a question like this one—of who might be the worst across eras and ballparks and scoring environments—it makes far more sense to use an adjusted metric like ERA+. Which is very bad for Corbin. Adjusted for his time and place, no one has been worse: His 56 ERA+ is tied for the lowest of all time. (He shares the title with Rube Bressler of the 1915 Philadelphia A’s, who later stopped pitching and enjoyed a career of more than a decade as a first baseman and left fielder.) There are only a handful of pitchers who have posted an ERA+ under 65. There are only three who have posted one under 60, with Gene Wright of the 1903 Cleveland Naps joining Bressler and Corbin. And there are none who have posted one under 56. Which means that no one has been worse off relative to his peers than Corbin. Here, he is the worst of all time.

By batting average and expected batting average

Opponents have a .331 batting average against Corbin. Do you know how many players in the National League have a batting average above .331? None. (Paul Goldschmidt leads the NL at .328.) Playing against Corbin makes the average hitter look worthy of the batting title. That might sound historically atrocious. Yet there have been 51 qualified starters who allowed a higher batting average. (Once again, Les Sweetland leads the pack here, with a .371 opponent average.) And if you look at expected batting average? Corbin looks better. There’s quite a gap between his .298 expected average and his .331 average—tied for the largest such difference in baseball right now. Through this lens, Corbin’s 2022 doesn’t look like the worst pitching performance of all time. It still looks bad. But the lines of some notably poor luck are visible under that poor performance.

By how it looks

And here is perhaps the most difficult part. At a glance, Corbin does not always seem like a lost cause. He has not lost his velocity: Never a pitcher who relied on power, Corbin’s fastball still sits at 92 mph, just as it did in 2019. His slider has roughly the same amount of horizontal break and his sinker the same amount of sink. He still has the ability to miss bats: His 8.3 K/9 is actually above the average rate for a starter this season. While his walk rate isn’t good, it’s not especially atrocious, either, with 20 starters this year posting a number worse than his 3.26 BB/9. Given all this, it’s not surprising that he’s had multiple starts this year that have actually been quite good: It’s been scarcely a month since he pitched eight innings of one-run ball against the Marlins!

Yet, of course, there are other areas of his game that do present as clearly terrible: His spin rate has dropped significantly. He’s needed to alter his pitch mix as hitters have learned how to hammer his slider, once his premier pitch, which has meant leaning more on a less effective sinker. He’s not locating his pitches as well. This is what you’re seeing when he fails to get out of the first inning (again). And it’s much of what can make him so maddening to watch. This is not a pitcher whose stuff is completely gone. It’s just… not all there, at least not consistently, to horrifying results.

All of which is to say: You’re not watching the worst pitching performance of all time. Except, of course, when it seems obvious that you are.

Sign up for the Five-Tool Newsletter to get all our MLB coverage in your inbox every Friday during the 2022 season.