Justin Verlander, circa 2011. (Photo by Mark Cunningham/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
The tenth anniversary of former Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander’s second no-hitter is coming up on May 7. This isn’t a story about that game. It is, however, a story about Verlander’s best start in 2011.
Game Score is a metric that was created by influential statistician Bill James as a way to determine how effectively a starting pitcher performed in a game. His formula is still used by Baseball-Reference. Tom Tango, another notable numbers guru (who now serves as MLB Advanced Media’s Senior Database Architect of Stats), came up with a modified version of Game Score that is used by FanGraphs.