Just curious to the answers since they asked on The Score. If Jays are in game 7 of the WS, who do you want starting?
My pick is Johnson. Not sure I'd want a 80 mph pitcher pitching. Yes it's a knuckleball, a very good one but its sometimes risky.
You can say that any pitcher is at risk to just completely tank an outing at any given time. Even someone like Buehrle who has the workhorse/dependable tag attached to his career is going to have a clunker once and a while. When Brandon Morrow is on his game, he's every bit as dominating as just about any pitcher in baseball. So even though he's also potentially the most at-risk of anyone on the staff of falling apart (though Ricky might have something to say about that given how his 2012 went), he still might be the one guy that can give you the single best chance to win the game out of anyone. Or maybe it's Dickey, or Johnson. Or hell, even Romero or Buehrle.
That's why the only reasonable answer at this point in time is "I want the guy starting who's got the hottest hand at that point in the playoffs." It could be any one of the starters. If you
had to answer now, the "safe" choice is probably Buehrle given his track record. But an equal case can be made that if you want the guy who has the best chance to go out and dominate, thus putting the least burden possible on the offence, it could be any of Morrow, Johnson, or Dickey.
I also don't know if I agree with the sentiment that the knuckler is any more or less risky on a game-to-game basis than any other pitcher's arsenal. Looking at his game log from last year, he only had one really big implosion (losing late in the year to Atlanta he gave up 8 runs on 8 hits in 4.1 innings. The Mets eventually lost 14-6). The rest of the time his losses were the kind of stat line you'd expect out of any decent pitcher in the situation. 5 or 6 innings, 8-10 hits, 4-6 runs. And of course there were games where the offence sucked and wasted a good outing, and ones where he didn't do well, but the offence picked him up and won the game in spite of a less-than-stellar performance on the mound.
Really, he was a model of consistency last year. He never walked more than 4 batters in a game. He gave up 10+ hits only 3 times (10 twice and 11 once. And the Mets won 2 of those games, FWIW.) Except for the Braves blowout, he was never charged with more than 5 runs against and never got less than 5 innings into the game (he did have a game vs the dodgers where he pitched just 1 inning, but it was in relief for some reason). And if you look at his 2010 and 2011 game logs, it's a similar scenario.
That seems to paint a picture that his knuckler doesn't just desert him and turn him into a glorified BP pitching machine at the drop of a hat. His bad outings weren't great by any means, but they weren't
that bad. They certainly weren't even 2012 Ricky Romero bad, which is what you'd expect if he were prone to the occasional case of the knuckleball just vanishing from his arsenal for a game. You'd expect that he wouldn't make it past an inning or two, that he'd give up a ton of walks or that he would get absolutely crushed. But none of that happened any more than it would to a more traditionally equipped pitcher of his calibre.
