Among the 25 World Series champions since 2000, how did the 2001 Diamondbacks land in this spot?
Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling were both basically impossible in 2001. This was MLB’s highest offense era, in the season in which Barry Bonds hit a record 73 home runs.
Diamondbacks teammate Albie Lopez, in his 13 starts, posted an ERA of 4.00 on the nose, which made him a comfortably above-average pitcher: the league-average ERA for starters in 2001 was 4.57. Schilling finished at 2.98 over an MLB-high 256.7 innings, while Johnson bested that with an MLB-leading 2.49 ERA over 249.7 frames. The pair combined for 506.1 innings, a 2.73 ERA and 665 strikeouts. The Big Unit received all but two first-place votes for the NL Cy Young, with Schilling receiving those. The two combined for 254 of the total 288 vote points available for the award, which makes sense given Schilling had twice as valuable a season by wins above replacement as the third-place finisher, Cardinals starter Matt Morris, and was himself nearly 1.5 wins behind Johnson.
Brian Anderson and Robert Ellis finished third and fourth on the D-Backs in starts in 2001, and both were sub-replacement-level pitchers. It just didn’t matter in the long run: Johnson and Schilling pitched in a combined 70 games, in which Arizona went 52-18, a .742 winning percentage. Or, a 120-win pace. They had some wiggle room to be worse in their other games, basically, and still make the postseason. In fact, that’s what happened: they went 40-52 in games started by pitchers who weren’t Schilling and Johnson, but 92 wins was enough to win the NL West.
The Diamondbacks knew what they had and did not have when the postseason began, which is why Johnson and Schilling pitched basically constantly. Schilling started Game 1 and Game 5 of the NLDS, with Johnson taking Game 2 in between. Both pitchers started a pair of NLCS games, and between the two of them, five of the seven World Series games, with Johnson coming in relief in Game 7 from the eighth inning to the Fall Classic’s conclusion. Schilling pitched 48.1 postseason innings, which was, at the time, a record until Madison Bumgarner’s 52.2 innings in 2014. Johnson’s 41.1 innings was the third-most at the time, and is the sixth-most now. There were 155 total innings pitched by Diamondbacks’ pitchers in the 2001 postseason: Schilling and Johnson accounted for 89.2 of those, or, 58% of them. Hey, it worked in the regular season, why not try it in October?
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Their success was not solely the work of two starting pitchers, however. Luis Gonzalez led the offense with a monster year that included 57 homers, while Reggie Sanders and Mark Grace both had well above-average years. Despite these three, the offense was below-average overall, which is why it couldn’t pick up Anderson, Ellis and the other struggling starters. Johnson and Schilling slung the whole team up on their backs, though, from April through October, and became legends for it.
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