From 1946 to 1950, Boston Braves moundsmen Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain were two of the top five starting pitchers in all of baseball. Sain, who went on to great renown as the game's greatest pitching coach during the 1960s and 1970s, won 20 or more games in four of those five years. Spahn would go on to win 363 games. In 1947, at the tender age of 26, he won the ERA and WHIP titles in the National League, and led the league in both shutouts and innings pitched.
Unfortunately, Spahn and Sain had relatively little support in Boston for most of their five seasons together. In only one, the miracle pennant year of 1948, did they finish higher than third place. That was also the only year in which they had the fewest runs allowed in the eight-team National League.
The lack of depth on Boston's pitching staff (in 1949, in particular) led local sportswriters to coin the famous refrain, "Spahn and Sain, and pray for rain."
The implicit message of that motto--that two great pitchers aren't enough to make a great rotation--is as true today as it was then. The best teams in Major League Baseball boast four or five quality starting arms. Any others who might hope to compete need at least three solid hurlers at the front of their rotations.
With that premise in mind, here are the ten best top threes among MLB rotations. To formulate the rankings, I ranked the top 150 starting pitchers in baseball, and totaled up the ranks of each team's top three entries. Then, to account for the fact that a good number three isn't quite as important as a good ace, I weighted each team's top entry twice as heavily as their third, and their second 1.5 times as much.
Where does your team fall? Which clubs are well-suited to the shortened rotations of October, and which have the best chance to make it there in the first place? Read on.
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