Koufax vs.... Hudson??

A tweet from Jonah Keri today made me look this up to be sure, but it's true: as of this moment the career W/L records of Sandy Koufax and Tim Hudson are identical (165-87). A quick trip to Baseball-Reference.com gives you some additional interesting comparison points:

- both have exactly 12 years of MLB time in. [Of course, Hudson's stats are more consistent.]

- Koufax has 52 more games pitched (397-345), but 30 fewer starts (314-344). [This is because of Koufax's relief pitching - he finished 44 games and has 9 saves!]

- because of the different eras, there's no comparison on CG or shutouts (Koufax 137/40, Hudson 23/11).

- Koufax, however, has only 36 more career innings (or 1.6%) more than Hudson.

- no comparison on strikeouts, naturally ... but hit batsmen are interesting. Koufax - 18. Hudson - 84!

- finally, the most interesting point. Koufax has a much lower career ERA, 2.76 to 3.42. But when you look at ERA+ (which measures ERA compared to league ERA) they're very close. Koufax 131, Hudson 128.

Before going through this exercise, I'd have said you were nuts to mention these two in the same sentence. Looking at the numbers, I'm not so sure. The W/L is a cool coincidence... but maybe more respect is due Mr. Hudson.

HR vs. strikeouts

This post on baseball-reference.com is great, listing seasons in which a player had fewer strikeouts than HR (and at least 20 HR). The post points out that it's only been done 45 times in total and twice since 1956 (Brett in 1980, Bonds in 2004), but two other things hit me - (1) the number of legendary Yankees appearing multiple times on this list (Dickey, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra) and (2) Ted Kluszewski did it four seasons in a row from 1953-1956 - 40, 49, 47 and 35 HR and 34, 35, 40 and 31 strikeouts respectively. Adam Dunn, you have something to shoot for!