Yes. Especially if you want King Felix to win the Cy Young Award with less than 13 Wins! Woo-hoo!
The reality is that you had one reliever get charged with 3 runs, another reliever who allowed a hit to get the game tied, a third reliever that faced one batter, and a fourth reliever that saved the game though he allowed one run.
According to MLB, Felix Hernandez gets no credit for the win, even though he did more than each of the other pitchers. He gets a “no decision”. That is, Felix decided nothing at all.
Of course, when it comes time to aggregating things at the end of the year and for a pitcher’s career, all these weird games, these exceptions, become a blur, because we figure they all cancel out, and all we are left is whatever it is that MLB is counting officially. Well, that’s all that’s left for those who subscribe to only the official record.
How about MLB takes the lead here and instead of sticking to the legal definition, they create a definition that’s a bit more flexible, not so much for my sake, but for the sake of others who don’t spend more than two seconds thinking about this, but spend two decades defending it.
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1. Harveys Wallbangersthe situation now is unsatisfying but the instances of where a pitcher gets truly screwed are limited enough from a cost/benefit perspective making a change to the current approach isn't justified. and by cost/benefit i am speaking in terms of a few pitchers getting some stray wins versus the chronic griping and complaining from pitchers who feel they were shortchanged in some manner.
and if you touch how folks get assigned wins don't you have to assign how losses get assigned? because if a team is losing 9-2 and ties it up and then in the 14th a reliever gives up a run isn't the guy who got the team in a 9-2 hole really responsible for the loss? folks may think that is a crackpot argument but pitchers will bring this up if baseball goes down the path of allowing official scorers latitude
and assigning wins would put a lot of stress on official scorers. this is way beyond errors in the infield stuff.
don't like the current approach. but boy, the alternative looks to be a sticky wicket
First, altho the rules make for silly assignments of "W"s and "L"s to relievers, I don't think anyone cares. Who tracks a bulpen guys' W-L record anyway? So I put that problem into the category of annoyance, not critical.
The real problem is starting pitchers, who often get no decisions based on either leaving in a tie game, or leavng when ahead/behind and the bullpen alows a lead change that negates their efforts. Or, the SP who only goes 4 IP and is banned from getting a decision.
Easily solution #1: change the min IP rqmt from 5 to 4. The notion that a SP has to go 5 IPs to get a W is a vestige of a very different game. Today you could have an SP go 4.1 and then five relievers combine for the rest of the game; why insist on giving someon eelse the W if the team wins? Yeah, Bob Gibson et al would whine, but it's the right thing to do in a time when it's tough to even win 20 games when you only get a max of 34 starts per year.
A little harder solution #2: Change the rules so that if an SP (who goes at least 4 or 5 IP) leaves the game with the team ahead (plus any runners he leaves on don't score to lose the lead) and the team eventually wins, the SP gets the win. Conversely, if the team is losing when he leaves and the team loses, the SP gets the loss; maybe make an exception if a reliever gives up more runs than the SP.
No, it never made any sense. Pitchers don't win or lose games, TEAMS do. The entire idea of giving a pitcher a "win" is batty.
true. and maybe the game snaps back in the other direction. (boy i hope so)
changing rules like this should always be given careful deliberation so that they still hold even as the game transforms over time.
very minor quibble in that at some point others around and very close to the game did think it made sense especially given that pitcher win totals quickly became a talking point in comparing pitchers.
other stats have come and gone and not received anywhere near this type of attention.
i understand what you are saying. just trying to provide a different perspective
Concur. It's a flawed stat, but not a useless one. If pitcher wins/losses didn't exist the first thing we'd have to do is invent it.
This
Totally and absolutely useless, probably even more useless than current W/L records.
Mariners lead the A's 7-2 after 4 innings. Omar Olivares has pitched decently, has thrown 68 pitches, and just has to complete 1 more inning to qulaify for the win. Mariners pull him and let Randy Johnson pitch 2 innings. The starter who went 4 can't get a win, but the reliever who came into a game that was pretty much already over can get one. But then, who cares about Omar Olivares? Randy Johnson, 20 game winner. That's worth celebrating.
A few years ago in an APBA league I exploited that loophole to get a 30 win season out of a middle reliever.
W L W-L% ERA GS CG ERA+ WHIPChristy Mathewson 37 11 .771 1.43 44 34 168 0.827
Hooks Wiltse* 23 14 .622 2.24 38 30 107 1.027
Doc Crandall 12 12 .500 2.93 24 13 82 1.197
There were probably a fair number of teams in that era where the major indicators for the top starters all correlated with W/L record. (Not that W% was ever free from illusion.) But with more shared work in the rotation, larger bullpens, fewer IP per start, fewer CG, the correlation dwindles (in part because you get smaller and smaller samples of run support for each starter). Now it's at a point where a .500 pitcher might well be significantly better than a .622 pitcher for the same team.
EDIT: And even then, of course, the weak Doc Crandall's .500 for a good team like the Giants is not helpfully comparable to, say, .429 for a good pitcher (Vive Lindaman) for the weak Boston Braves, obviously.
I doubt it, unless somewhere mixed into those adjustments they remove Leverage Index. Even then, WPA/LI is pretty useless too, it's just not totally and completely useless like WPA.
I'd say the biggest problem, as is often the case, is the people using it. Though the name is a close second.
The irony is that if Cook had pitched even worse and given up 2 more runs (making it 14-11 for the bottom of the 9th), Blevins would have been credited with a save and Cook likely would have gotten the win.
I was thinking that the name has steered the usage
Well, people misuse BA and RBIs (and the advanced metrics, for that matter), so I think it would have happened regardless.
If we were looking at modern baseball, with all the use of relievers we have today and an alphabet soup of stats to choose from, I don't think too many people would feel a void not having pitcher wins. Somebody might invent it, but I don't think it would get any more attention than catcher won lost record.
The extreme silliness was a few weeks ago when Ned Yost left Bruce Chen to complete the fifth, even though he had looked shaky all game, and admitted after the game that he wanted Chen to qualify for the victory. Chen blew it and the Royals lost. But we're the stat nerds.
Of course, in the very early days, when teams had just one pitcher, W-L didn't make any sense then either. The 1878 Boston Red Stockings went 41-19, so I can't imagine it had any significance to anyone that Tommy Bond went 40-19.
Which brings up the question: When did people start using pitchers' W-L records? Probably sometime after 1880.
I'm sure. I agree with Dag that pitcher wins/losses would have emerged in some form because pitchers don't go everyday, and therefore someone would have wanted to see how the team performed with different pitchers on the mound. I think they were somewhat inevitable.
By 1884, as Ed Achorn shows in his excellent book 59 in '84, Hoss Radbourn's W/L record was a big deal in the media. With the advent of full-overhand pitching, the one-man rotation was on the way out, so when Radbourn took on the role of one-man rotation that year people were suitably impressed (particularly since the team won so much).
Football does it with quarterbacks.
Baseball does it with pitchers.
Hockey does it with goalies.
Basketball doesn't do it at all.
Soccer doesn't seem to do it, either.
The difference seems to be that the first three sports have a position that (according to people) is more important than any other position on the field/ice. So the majority of the success/blame rests on their shoulders.
Those positions are also unique compared to others on the field/ice, and often have very specific tasks that aren't assigned to any other position. The only other positions like them that I would think might deserve "win/loss" credit for being "unique" would be baseball catcher, soccer goalie, and football kicker.
The interesting part for me is how the quarterback and the pitcher are only on the field for half the time. They get credit/blame if the other half (defense and offense, respectively) do/don't perform well.
At least the hockey goalie and soccer goalie are always "in play", even though they don't have (or, very little) impact on the offense.
Why?
1) While pitchers aren't the only one who have an impact on who wins or loses the game, the starting pitcher has the most impact on if his team wins/loses. He has FAR more impact. Even now he'll face 30-35 batters while a hitter will only come to the plate 4 times and have a few chances in the field. To put it another way, it sure as hell ain't random happenstance that guys like Lefty Grove and Pedro Martinez have among the best winning percentages of all-time.
2) Yes there's SNWL and all that but it's nice to have a nice, crisp, clean easy to understand counting stat. Not that SNWL is bad, it's great- but it's nice to have something basic and easy to process. (Besides, if we didn't have W-L, we sure wouldn't have SNWL).
I suppose in some ways this comes back to AROM's point about it coming from a time when the complete game was normal, and that has not been true for a long time. But even then, it starts with a bad premise: that because the pitchers probably had more of an impact on the game result than any other positions (and that is probably over-estimated), he deserves credit for the win.
and to be clear i am not 'in love' with pitcher wins. but nor do i consider them 'useless' as long as the reader understands the context
I appreciate the POV here, but I am still convinced that the only reason pitcher "wins" is a useful framework for understanding is that it's what people are used to.
A lot of stats attempt to translate an individual player's actual contribution in terms of run-scoring into contribution in terms of wins: Win Shares, SNWL, WAR. This makes sense; ultimately, a fan would like to know how a player has contributed to what matters. These concepts do not simply look at the scoreboard and then point a finger at a pitcher who happened to be there and met a few arbitrary criteria.
A player's job is to score runs for his team with the bat and his legs, and to keep the other team from scoring with his arm and glove. It's really best to keep your primary focus on these things, and not to attempt to back estimate an individual's contribution from the team's result.
I think Wins and Losses attempt (and fail) to only include things that happened in the game while the pitcher is still in the game, and if things happen afterward (or beforehand), the stats "recuse themselves" and thus the no-decision. I can understand the desire to differentiate between a SP leaving the game with his team winning and a SP leaving the game tied (but they later win). But the employment of this desire is so crappy that you may be right that it doesn't make any more sense than just giving them the result of the game.
Looking at 2011, there were 15 games in which a pitcher went 4-4 2/3 IP and allowed two runs or fewer in a game that his team won. That doesn't guarantee that the pitcher had the lead when he was removed from the game; we'd have to look on a game-by-game basis to determine that.
There were five pitchers who threw 4-4 2/3 shutout innings in such a game. One of those--Ervin Santana--left the game in a scoreless tie.
15 games is roughly 0.3% of the total number played in 2011.
I think wins provide some descriptive information about a pitcher's season. Consider 2 versions of Bob Welch's 1990 stat-line which are identical except that one does not include his Wins and Losses. Both would give you the same amount of information concerning how well he pitched that year, but the one with the 27-6 staring out at you would give you more overall context about what happened in those 35 games he started that year: You could surmise, given his low CG totals, that his bullpen was unbelievably effective at protecting his leads and that the team overall was probably excellent given that they won at least 27 of his starts. So there is some information there, and I think we shouldn't only be concerned with information that is relevant to the evaluation and projection of individual players.
In that game, Santana had more than a shutout, he had 7 strikeouts and a no-hitter. Josh Beckett also came out in before 5 innings were done, there was a long rain delay. Angels eventually won it in the 13th. I'll bet most of those cases with a pitcher removed while pitching well were rain delays, or elevated pitch counts. Vulturing wins this way, intentionally, is probably extremely rare, which is why I had to pull an example from 1997.
If you want to know how good a pitcher was, you've got ERA, ERA+, FIP, WHIP, SNWL, and a whole host of metrics to help you with that. As for W/L record - if you think it's crap, ignore it. Most of us know by now to take it with a grain (or three) of salt. Not every stat has to enlighten the world.
I agree with this. While I've taken the time to vent about some of the absurdities that result from the win rule, if I was in charge I wouldn't change anything. What's done is done.
6 ip 3 er or less QS
7 ip 3 er or less GS (good start)
8 ip 3 er or less ES (excellent start)
9 ip 3 er or less SS (superb start)
Then you could look at a pitchers season stats as percentages of his starts where he achieved these numbers.
2012 Verlander looks like this:
21 total starts: 16 QS, 14 GS, 8 ES, 4 SS or 76/67/38/19
2012 C.C. looks like this
18 starts: 11 QS, 10 GS, 5 ES, 1 SS or 61/56/33/6
Just for fun, Jonathan Sanchez
7/0/0/0
That one was easy.
edited for punctuation and spelling
The criteria aren't going to be changed.
8 IP, zero runs is better than 9 IP, 3 runs. Unless you have the Brewer closing options.
There's precedent for not changing the records, although it's been awhile since they were tinkering with things like how many balls equals a walk.
Yes, but if you did away with the 5 inning minimum you would have people start to play games. It's not worth it to try to vulture wins today. You have to have a pitcher who isn't going to throw a fit about being removed. You have to have a decent lead, and balance that with the possibility of losing the game and/or burning up your bullpen. There's no real benefit to gaming the system today, except under the rarest of circumstances.
Do away with the minimum and I think you'll see a lot of cheap 20-win seasons start to pop up.
I'm not sure what you mean, what are some examples of game situations which would produce this result?
I don't see how this would be. Do you think starting pitchers would regularly leave games before 5 innings if they could still get a win out of it? I could see a situation where a pitcher gets a ton of run support, is leading 9-0 after the third inning. Say it's September, bullpen full of callups, and burning the bullpen is not an issue. Manager pulls him after 3 and he gets a win. Under the current rule, he'd pitch 5 innings before coming out, and still get his win. Only way this leads to more wins for the starting pitcher is if the manager changes the way the pitching staff operates, and gives the guy say, 50 starts per year of 3 innings each.
If teams want to try that instead of 30 starts, 7 innings out of 5 pitchers, then I'd hate to see a silly rule about who gets credit for a win be the only obstacle to it.
I know, but I think the expanded QS concept could give you a quick and dirty idea about a pitchers effectiveness that would be miles ahead of W-L record.
Sorry, I clearly didn't phrase that well. I didn't mean that guys who would be getting 12 wins today would game the system and win 20. I was thinking of a good pitcher who gets up to 15 or 16 wins as the last month rolls around. Instead of finishing with 18 wins, the team starts him on his throw day, has him throw an inning or two, hoping to get the lead before the "real" starter comes in. So you'd have some 20-win seasons that would have been 17-18 win seasons.
Agreed. I like it as a career stat, even if I don't attach much value to it.
Humanity would have ended if they started to use WPA as the basis of anything. Anything as retarded as wpa is a step towards humanity accepting creationism, truthers/birthers and bigfoot.
I like this, and am willing to subscribe to your newsletter.
But with today's technology and computers, making things decimal based or formula based isn't nearly the hindrance it was 100+ years ago. I can see that if a system was developed today, that pitchers might get .1 wins for every inning they pitched in a game in which the team wins(with the starting pitcher getting the last remaining .1...extra innings and home wins of course being the death of a simple system which of course would just be modified by assigning a simple number based upon the percentage of the game they pitched)
To many stats ... but I think the basis for excellent or superb should be a sliding scaled based upon how much beyond a quality start you go. A superb start would be 7 innings 0 runs, 8 innings 1 run 9 innings 2 runs. A good start would be 7 innings 1 run, 8 innings 2 runs, 9 innings 3 runs. (or however you want but basically it's a performance beyond a quality start)
This my opinion as well. I love the historical record of wins - the trivia that baseball has ingrained in it's fiber. I love the continuity in baseball's statistics and would be disappointed to see the win stat "fixed" simply to appease our sensibilities.
I realize that wins are not the best analytical tool and don't use it for that.
Tm Wgs Lgs ND Wchp Ltuf Wlst Lsv QS QS% ARI 71 54 37 13 13 10 24 90 56% ATL 63 48 51 13 10 13 22 86 53% BAL 46 72 44 12 12 15 24 60 37% BOS 64 50 48 22 14 15 15 71 44% CHC 46 65 51 12 16 21 19 76 47% CHW 58 61 43 6 16 16 16 90 56% CIN 50 55 57 5 15 18 27 90 56% CLE 53 61 48 8 17 15 21 85 52% COL 53 68 41 20 16 16 18 71 44% DET 72 47 43 16 11 5 22 90 56% FLA 42 60 60 7 21 15 24 83 51% HOU 35 71 56 5 18 21 18 80 49% KCR 45 65 52 10 17 17 19 75 46% LAA 62 50 50 6 13 20 14 98 60% LAD 65 61 35 14 23 8 16 94 58% MIL 73 43 46 13 12 17 18 98 60% MIN 46 71 45 8 17 17 18 80 49% NYM 53 58 51 12 22 15 27 84 52% NYY 71 45 46 14 12 14 19 84 52% OAK 59 63 40 8 19 12 16 94 58% PHI 76 42 44 9 14 5 18 108 67% PIT 49 61 52 10 15 19 18 78 48% SDP 52 66 44 13 25 17 16 91 56% SEA 49 75 38 6 23 13 10 94 58% SFG 60 58 44 11 25 12 18 103 64% STL 62 42 58 16 11 16 28 86 53% TBR 67 56 39 11 23 11 21 99 61% TEX 74 40 48 8 11 14 16 99 61% TOR 51 61 50 11 17 18 19 81 50% WSN 49 58 54 16 20 21 17 79 49% LgAvg 57 58 47 11 17 15 19 87 53% Tm Wgs Lgs ND Wchp Ltuf Wlst Lsv QS QS% 1716 1727 1415 335 498 446 578 2597 53%http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2011-starter-pitching.shtml
Eh....there are 24 300 game winners.
If you look at say the top 25 in Pitcher Career WAR the cutoff is about 77.
The highest active pitcher is Roy Halladay with 63. If he can recover from his injuries and put up 3 more typical Halladay seasons he can get there. Possible, no easy lock.
The next guy down the list that looks like he could get there is CC...but this season is making you think thats a stretch too.
Then you have to go to 29 yr. old Verlander as the next guy with an outside shot at it.
After that...who knows....Felix, Matt Cain, Greinke...guys young enough that if they are blessed with health and can pitch for 10 more years at a high level might have a shot.
It's just as interesting a thought exercise for me as speculating about 300 wins.
Active career pitching WAR leaders
I don't see it. "Hey you just made it to 77 war" next week after a bad week "hey go out there again and make it back to 77 war"....or he could just Steve Carlton his last few years and go backwards... A milestone that can be lost, isn't really a milestone.
Mind you, the silliness of war as a pitching stat really undermines it anyway in this type of conversation.
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