Player’s View: Kill the Win?
The MLB Network’s Brian Kenny wants to “Kill the Win.” As a FanGraphs reader, you’re certainly familiar with – and quite possibly supportive of – his stance. The stat is often misleading, and slowly but surely it’s becoming less of a barometer when assessing an individual pitcher’s performance. But should the win be “killed”? I recently posed that question to nine pitchers, two pitching coaches and a pitcher-turned-broadcaster. Here are their responses:
Chris Archer, Rays: “I don’t know if it should be killed. The emphasis behind it isn’t as great as people make it out to be. I think true baseball gurus, and players and management, know. It’s how a lot of fans may judge someone, but we know there’s not so much behind the importance of (an individual pitcher’s) win.”
Craig Breslow, Red Sox: “I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Unless we’re going to kill every single statistic, then we should spare the win. I don’t think you can make a good argument for killing a statistic for not telling the whole story. You just to have to explain it doesn’t give a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of a pitcher.”
Kevin Gausman, Orioles: “I don’t think you can just get rid of it. What if a starting pitcher has an unbelievable year and wins 25 or 30 games? He definitely had an effect on why his team won those games. That would probably be my biggest argument against getting rid of it.”
Miguel Gonzalez, Orioles: “You can’t control much about it, but I’m not sure I’d want to get rid of the stat. It’s just part of the game, and always has been.”
Mark Langston, Angels broadcaster: “A win maybe doesn’t equate to the performance, but it’s the history of the game and you’re not going to change the history of the game. It’s always been about wins, and that statistic has been attached. I believe in tradition. Statistical information is leaning against the weight of a win, but to me it’s still a factor. As a pitcher, getting the win is part of your motivation to be out there.”
Colby Lewis, Rangers: “It’s a lot different now, because starters don’t pitch as deep as they used to. It’s one of those things where sometimes your team scores for you, and you get the win. Sometimes you pitch well and your offense doesn’t show up, and you get a loss. Regardless of your wins and losses, when you look at your stats at the end of the year, you know if you pitched well, or not. But I’d still like to have it.”
Mike Maddux, Rangers pitching coach: “You’d have to amend a lot of numbers if we got rid of it. That’s the barometer we’re measured on. People get to the Hall of Fame by accumulated statistics. I don’t think anybody has gotten there because they said, ‘Hey, he was a good player.’ It’s because he did something statistically, and the win is the carrot on the end of the stick. In every box score there’s a W in front of one person’s name. To take that away from a pitcher would be take a brick out of the wall.”
Jake Odorizzi, Rays: “There are a lot of variables that go into a win, so it’s a stat you can’t really look too much into. Wins are nice – they’re the sexy stat – but peripheral stats show more than wins and losses. I wouldn’t get rid of it, though. They’ve been there since the start of baseball, and somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose.”
Jered Weaver, Angels: “It’s something that’s been around as long as baseball has been around. Why change it? All these numbers, and all these thoughts everybody has, is kind of getting out of control. (Wins and losses not matching performance) is just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.”
Carl Willis, Red Sox pitching coach: “I don’t think it needs to be killed. A pitcher is only in control of so much – you can throw a great game and lose 1-0 – but he’s still out there trying to get a win. There are some motivational aspects to it.”
C.J. Wilson, Angels: “You want to win as many games as you can, but you obviously can’t control wins as much as you can control other statistical things. I’ve won games giving up five runs. Unless a pitcher is routinely getting hosed by his offense, I don’t think he’s going to want to kill it. I can understand why, if you’re in a fantasy league, you don’t want wins to be a limiting factor to how your team does. But baseball is about real wins, so it’s a real stat. A win also doesn’t assume anything, unlike a sabermetric stat like xFIP. If you’re going to kill a classic stat, the classic guys should be able to kill one of the saber stats. It’s all about context.”
Jordan Zimmermann, Nationals: “Wins and losses for a pitcher don’t really matter. For me, it’s more about innings pitched, WHIP and ERA. You can go out there and and give up one run in seven innings and get the loss. Wins and losses aren’t a big deal for me. I wouldn’t get rid of them, though. Fans like it. Those are numbers they look for and want to see.”
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
So almost every reason given comes down to tradition, popularity or motivation. None of those are very compelling or valid. Tradition is just a terrible reason for anything if it’s the only reason you have, and if there are good reasons not to do it. Popularity is fleeting and can be changed. Over time, if the stats changed, fans would come to accept it. Motivation is the same, but for players. Hopefully pitchers would come to be motivated by something better than a deeply flawed stat.
” None of those are very compelling or valid”
You misspelled ‘ALL’
Tradition is very important in baseball.
There is NOTHING wrong with the WIN statistic per se. The only problem is people assuming in means something different than it actually does.
This seems like a basic miscommunication about, or failure to make explicit, what the two of you are arguing. If you read “reasons” as “reasons **to use wins as an evaluative or predictive metric**” then it’s clear that the arguments are largely very bad. Whereas if you mean “reasons **to talk about pitchers’ wins at all**” then it’s arguable just as you say that tradition or whatever else are real, reasonable grounds for an argument.
The problem is it often means the exact opposite of what it’s tell you it means.
Ah, tradition. Tradition is typically formed through trial and error by the experiences of many, many generations. It forms because the tradition works, or at least it appears to work. It’s kinda like science except not as formal or rigorous. See problem, test problem, solve problem, note it down for next time.
This is not to say tradition is always correct. Sometimes what appeared to be the solution to some problem was not really the solution at all, getting the cause and effect wrong in some way. And sometimes traditions that were perfectly valid for their time and place no longer work in a different context. Traditions should be questioned.
That said to reject tradition out of hand is a poor reasoning. If you can put forth a reasoned argument that the tradition is wrong and needs to be rejected, then you may argue the point. However, if you do not really understand why the tradition exists and are simply rejecting it out of hand, then, frankly, you literally have no idea what you are talking about. No one should listen to you.
As for popularity, baseball is entertainment. Popularity is extremely important in entertainment. You have made a terrible error.
This argument always reminds me of the “can I” versus “may I”
The only people who give a s**t about it are the ones that are on their high horse assuming that THEY know more than everyone else and want to do something BOLD to demonstrate their beautiful, unique intellect…
The reality is that even most casual baseball fans have an appropriate context for a “win” in 2015. So even though the “may I” crowd will continue to try to abolish the win, everyone else will just continue to roll their eyes and understand that everyone knows what “can I” really means…
“The reality is that even most casual baseball fans have an appropriate context for a “win” in 2015. ”
Do you really think so? It seems that every year when the Cy Young voting rolls around, the “OMG my guy won 20 games!” crowd comes out of the woodwork.
I think even that crowd is more or less biased towards their own teams player rather than actually people who buy in to the “Wins are an extremely important stat” idea.
Of all of the comments above, I think Breslow has it most right when he says “I don’t think you can make a good argument for killing a statistic for not telling the whole story.”
For instance, you can say the same thing about OBP ( it’s not park adjusted, it doesn’t take into consideration the pitchers the batter was facing ).
Nearly every statistic has some component that results in deviation of that statistic from measuring true greatness. This isn’t the shotput.
FIP doesn’t assume anything, and this is one of the more bone-headed beliefs about stats like FIP.
Mike Maddux is priming himself for a career in management with his generic nonsense language.
aren’t FIP and xFIP different? he referenced xFIP in the quote.
There was a correction made immediately after Norm’s comment.I double-checked tape and Wilson didn’t say “FIP and xFIP.” He said FIP but then corrected to xFIP. I was guilty of mis-hearing his sentence when transcribing comment. My bad.
he said xFIP assumes something, which it does. namely, that a homer should have been given up when it wasn’t: http://www.fangraphs.com/library/pitching/xfip/
fip does make assumptions. It assumes a direct relationship between hr, bb, and k. It also adds a fixed number to the end of the equation. Sounds like a few assumptions to me. Fip might be somewhat logical, but it was not handed down by the God of baseball as binding fact.
Long live the win. Sports are about winning.
It assumes a direct relationship between HR, BB, and K? What does that mean?
The fixed number it adds is just to scale it to ERA to make it easier for us to evaluate. However, it’s a relative stat, in that it’s only meaningful relative to the other values that other pitchers have, so adding a constant to everyone’s value doesn’t change anything.
“Long live the win. Sports are about winning.”
This is of course dumb, but the way the name confuses dumb people into this conflation is probably the single most important factor in the pitching win’s long-term popularity.
Well said Roger. If you called them “donuts” and measured them in exactly the same way that wins are measured, people would be all, “that’s confusing, they won 11-2 but because he came out with an injury in the 499th while ahead 9-1, he doesn’t get a donut?! But but but they won the game!!” or “that closer gave up 4 runs, blew a save, and still got a donut?! That ain’t right!!”
(interestingly CC Sabathia has led the league in donuts since Rich Garces’ heyday. Prince Fielder, Pablo Sandoval, and Matt Adams are saddened by their exclusion.)
Erp. That was supposed to be 4th inning, not 499th. NO WONDER he got hurt…
(Dusty Baker: “I don’t see what the problem is.”)
FIP assumes pitchers have no control over balls in play.
It would be more correct to say that FIP ignores balls in play, and ranks pitchers based on their combinations of K, BB, and HR allowed. Statistics don’t inherently make assumptions. Saying “FIP assumes all balls in play are equal” is akin to saying “BB/9 (or insert other stat) assumes all balls in play are equal.” Well of course they don’t, because they don’t care what happened aside from the thing they’re measuring!
If you were to use FIP to say that Pitcher X is better than Pitcher Y, then you would be making that assumption. Thus calculating Fangraphs’ WAR is an example of this assumption in practice. But as long as we’re aware of it, we’ll be fine. That’s why in every Fangraphs article about Matt Cain circa 2012, the author mentions that we made an assumption that may not hold in calculating his WAR, and because of that we should mentally round up his WAR to account for his ability to suppress damage on balls in play.
That’s why no one here ever told you to use a ranked list of WAR (or any other stat) to make a definitive statement that one player is better than a certain other player. Sometimes, you just have to realize that each statistic is a distinct too in your toolbox, and you have to decide for yourself which combination of tools are appropriate, and how to use them together to find the answer you seek.
That’s RE: to both comments above (especially the guy who has no clue about FIP; there’s no “relationship” between K, BB and HR themselves, but they are known to relate with runs scored in a certain way which is why we can combine them all into one index value).
Thats not fully correct, the creator of FIP stated in its intro that he believes pitchers have no control over where a ball is put in play
That Tom Tango said that we couldn’t prove that pitchers had the ability to control balls in play has no bearing on whether or not FIP “assumes” anything.
FIP is a stat. It does not assume anything. It starts with league average earned runs per plate appearance, then credits the pitcher with a certain run value for each strikeout and debits for each BB and HR. As you can see, it doesn’t care about balls in play.
If you use it to rank this pitcher higher than that pitcher in value, then it is YOU who is making the assumption that all batted balls have equal value. We’re already way beyond that sort of thinking though, what with all the work being done with batted ball data and quality-of-contact analysis.
I never said any thing at all that is being attributed to me.
Voros may have said something INITIALLY, but he walked back part of it.
Can I just say that I love the fact that all the smart dudes whose work we are all piggybacking off of and misunderstanding are actually here, contributing to the conversation. Thank you, you are the best.
Sorry that I misattributed that to you. What your views are on balls in play had nothing to do with the point I was trying to make, so I didn’t bother to check. Sorry about that!
No. A person using only FIP to evaluate pitchers is making that assumption, but FIP itself doesn’t assume that.
Like most stats and data, the interpretation is not built it. It’s up to the user to apply them responsibly and correctly.
Assistant professor Bip to the rescue!
The context of the claim is “a Win doesn’t assume anything; xFIP does”.
If you’re going to reach to say he meant “FIP assumes pitchers have no control over balls in play”, then he’s mistaken in saying that a Win doesn’t assume anything. In fact, a Win assumes a lot, lot more.
Probably true regarding FIP, but xFIP definitively does assume a league average HR/FB%.
I still don’t know if “assume” is an accurate description of what xFIP is doing, but I take your point. xFIP is certainly more of a deliberate construction than FIP.
I think maybe Wilson was saying that FIP/xFIP assumes a run scoring context. You have to bring in historical data to determine that context and the get event weights. Pitcher wins, on the other hand, are context free.
Of course, context sensitive is more powerful than context free, just ask Noam Chomsky.
What exactly is a win assuming? The problem is clearly people reading far more into statistics than is actually there.
You don’t have to kill the win you have to correct how a win is awarded. One very simple step in that direction; if a starter completes five innings and leaves the game with the lead he gets the win no matter how many times his bullpen coughed up that lead, of course his team has to win the game. It’s sheer insanity that a reliever can blow a 3 run lead in 2/3 of an inning and then be awarded the win. You can’t say a starter must complete five innings to qualify for a win but a reliever can get one out and be rewarded with a win its just stupid.
I know someone has come up with a formula that more or less does this unless the starter is terrible or a relief pitcher is really, really good in which case it goes to one of the relievers. Makes sense to me.
How Wins and Losses have been awarded over the years has changed somewhat. Minor tweaking is not inappropriate.
I have always had a problem with the 5 inning rule. No reason not to give a starter a win after 4 innings in a lot of situations.
People need to look at these stats in context though. Wins go right along with losses, holds, blown saves and saves. What is really needed is a ‘blown lead’ stat to denote pitchers who ruin your night.
Throughout baseball history the WIN has been awarded to the ‘pitcher of record’ or the pitcher on the mound when the deciding runs are scored. It has never been about who pitched ‘best’ just who was on the mound when the game was ultimately decided.
Yes, thank you. The win stat is not intended – nor likely ever was intended – to be used as a predicative measure of performance. It simply acts as a marker to document what happened in a particular game, much like saying “This album came out while Reagan was in the White House.”
Generally speaking, if a guy wins 20 games, he had a good season. Not necessarily the best season, but a good season. Over the course of a career, reaching bench marks of 200, 250, 300 wins is an indication of the kind of career a guy has had. Of course there are more precise numbers to evaluate his performance. W/L record is not meant to be an evaluation tool. There are some dinosaurs left who still believe it should be used in that way, but the stat will outlive them and will carry on within the proper context.
You don’t have to “KILL” the win. Just get rid of it next to the pitchers name!! That is the real problem here.You can always have the W and L stat for sure. The problem is that every time a pitchers name is shown on TV the 2 stats that are ALWAYS attached are W-L record and ERA. It is deceiving to the fans on how good guys like Cole Hammels (just one example) really are. There needs to be another stat that is attached to the pitchers name. I know people aren’t high on the Quality Start stat because it comes out to a 4.50 ERA but if they could make the qualifications harder than it would be a much better stat to attach than W and L.
-Brandon BIS
Television/media is a reflection of viewers (with admittedly some lag) – suggesting a correction to how they report results is not an effective tool.
But if the broadcasts just stopped using it and used other things instead, then people would just get used to that.
Of course it is an effective tool. The media controls everything about how a casual fan views any sport. If the casual fan turns on ESPN and sees a picture of a pitcher with a 4-8 record next to him they will definitely think that pitcher sucks but could be one of the best pitchers in the league. We will never “KILL” the Win stat it just wont happen. But if we stop showing and reporting it and come up with something new that shows most accurately how well a pitcher is doing that would work.
What is wrong with showing the record? Sure the betting line would be more informative, but W-L is still more useful than ‘quality starts’ ‘ERA’ or ‘xFIP’ when it comes to getting a quick and dirty look at just how well the opposing team has performed with that starter on the mound.
“when it comes to getting a quick and dirty look at just how well the opposing team has performed with that starter on the mound.”
Well if that is the reason, then why show a proxy for that rather than just simply that. It doesn’t a degree from Hogwarts to come up with the Phillies being 6-4 when Hamels starts this year.
If any of these statements were a FanGraphs comment, they’d be down voted so much. Holy moly.
Aren’t most of these guys saying that Pitcher Wins have little value so we should de-emphasize them, but we might as well keep tracking for historical them because it costs us nothing to do so?
Sound’s like a perfectly reasonable viewpoint to me!
*them for historical value.
Must still be drunk from the long weekend? Damn you BeerGraphs!
Re-reading them now that I’ve had a few cups of coffee, I can see where you (and everyone else) is coming from. I’m just not a fan at all of using wins/losses to evaluate a pitcher’s performance, so some of these statements (Maddux and Gausman in particular) pushed my buttons.
Also, re: being drunk from a long weekend; I think you’re allowed to continue being drunk for 2…possibly 3 weeks after the weekend. I’m not sure though; I’m still waiting to hear back from my lawyer on that one.
You are correct.
2-3 weeks after the weekend? You don’t mean 2-3 days after the weekend?
Because if you’re remaining drunk for 2-3 weeks after every weekend, well, that’s quite a life you lead.
In my defense, Yirmiyahu, I am a Phillies fan.
These baseball guys feel exactly about the stat as I do. It’s not a very good barometer for individual pitcher performance, but it is part of the fabric of the game, so it’s fine to keep it as long as you understand that it tells a partial story. Baseball players understand that ultimately you wear stats lightly, even in baseball. The game is described (to various degrees of accuracy) by stats, but it isn’t stats.
Amen.
Well said. I think to most people who want to “kill the win”, it’s already dead. The people who havent killed it dont want it dead.
It’s just up to the individual, there is no hard, fast rule for whats important and what isnt. You can come up with mathematical or logical reasons why xFIP/FIP/SIERRA etc may be better than “classic” stats, but bottom line is some people simply dont care. Its kinda like the steroid thing. Some people (self included) really dont care much to degrade Bonds, Clemens etc because they did roids. I still view them based on what they did and on what I perceive their “true” talent to have been. Others wont recognize anything they did.
Tradition always has to be considered. While theres a push to acquire younger fans, and younger people hate traditions as a whole today, but the tradition is one of the main things that keeps the 35-50 crowd still watching. That is still a VERY important demographic for MLB.
The reason I’d like to see it “killed” is so that I’d stop hearing about it. There are probably at least a hundred things I’d rather hear about a pitcher than this, but the old school folks keep trotting it out there. I grant that its place is literally cemented into baseball, as for example on a plaque on the Hall of Fame’s wall. But before a game, when introducing the pitchers, I don’t want to hear about who has how many wins. If “killing the win” gets them to talk about something predictive, then I am all for it. If you want to leave it as an artifact in a dusty tome rather than deleting it from history, that too is fine.
Ahhh, the old “get off my lawn” argument. I completely agree, if something mildly aggravates me without doing any real damage or mandating that I participate, nobody should be able to do it.
I’m saying that it’s a bit of an impediment to useful discourse, so why not get rid of it? Do you see value in it?
does “I don’t see value in it” = “it should be disposed of”?
If your argument is that its very existence impedes human progress by way of focusing the public attention on a destructive thought process, I would respond that its harmful nature is inconsequential in light of the utility that it brings to some people. What is the real harm? That some fans don’t understand the game properly? That some front office personnel may make incorrect determinations with regard to personnel decisions (*cough* RAJ *cough*)? That when you argue with some people about relative player and team strengths, your arguments don’t resonate because your opponent isn’t educated in the same metrics as you are?
I would challenge you to come up with reasons that it should be disposed of, in addition to fairly considering any possible negative consequences, as opposed to disabusing notions that it should be kept.
That being said, I think the player responses range from pretty spot on (Zimmerman) to “I’m glad he gets paid for throwing things” (Gaussman).
[1] I think anyone that works in the business or social sectors is aware that “tradition” as a primary reason for doing anything is less than ideal. Just because we’ve always made the same mistake or used the same familiar inferior process, doesn’t mean we have to keep using once something better comes along.
[2] If those are really the players’ quotes and not just badly clipped statements or poorly parsed incomplete thoughts, then statical progression has some serious obnstacles to overcome. Good lord. These guys know that you were talking about only the situation of a pitcher being assigned “the win” and you weren’t talking about doing away with the “team win”, right?
I mean, really?
Of note: When Wilson said “If you’re going to kill a classic stat…” he was essentially echoing Breslow (you shouldn’t kill a stat for not telling the whole story, because no individual stat does). That was clear in our conversation, but maybe less so here in print.
CC11: I think you read them and heard what you wanted to hear. I would argue most of the responses met/exceeded expectations with only Gausman as being disappointing.
On CJ (for whom I have no affinity, I can assure you), I think his comment was that more stats are better so why take one away that has historically meant so much? There is certainly no harm in keeping ANY stat.
It’s possible that I heard what I wanted to hear.
My perception going in, as a former college pitcher, is that we/they are well aware of the pros/cons of pitching wins and understand that being assigned the win or loss is parts pitching/defense performance and part run scoring.
When I read the comments I was more surprised by the absence of the dismissal of pitching wins.
I’m assuming when it’s said “Kill the Win” that the translation is “Kill the Importance” tied to it. The only way that likely happens is if we stop keeping track of it (from Kenney’s perspective).
Get a grip. Almost every single response in the article suggested that everyone in the game knows pitcher wins dont matter.
Why do you have some absurd agenda to push trying to force every fan to view the win exactly like you do? Fans will be fans. Some will get it, some won’t.
Telling “CircleChange11” to “get a grip”. LOL, well done, intentional or not.
Hey, easy. I’m just voicin an opinion like everyone else. I’m guessin nothing in this thread changed anyone’s mind. No agenda, just preferences.
I don’t get the emphasis on “tradition”, but none of the pitchers mention how today’s pitcher’s can “get the win” by only pitching 6 innings and then having the bullpen “get the save” over the next 3 innings.
I get the starting pitcher getting the win or loss in the era when they started and finished most of the games (if not all of the games), but i just thought is was funny that the players are talking about tradition as a means of keeping the emphasis on the stat, but the traditional starting pitcher (complete games, 4-man rotations, etc) has changed dramatically.
none of them mentioned keeping the ’emphasis’ on the win. most admitted the flaw in it and alluded to lack of context surrounding the W counts
Probably all the more reason a baseball purist would want one less thing to change. Too much has already changed from that perspective.
Tradition allows modern day baseball players to have a similar context to players from 100 years ago. It helps knit the history together. Valuable thing to have, not just for baseball but for societies in general.
A pitcher with 300 wins means something.
What does it mean, specifically?
That number was established as the “benchmark” when [1] pitchers routinely threw complete games, being the sole pitcher the team used in the game .. and [2] when pitchers were making 35-40 starts a season (if not more in the early 1900s).
How does the number compare to the modern era with fewer starts and/or fewer complete games? The number of pitchers contributing to each win or loss has increased dramatically.
I don;t think anyone is really comparing modern pitchers to Cy Young, Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, etc in terms of “career wins”. I think that’s one area that many fans have accepted … that career pitcher wins is a different situation now than it was then. I think it’s understood that pitchers now have a reduced % of their total starts result in w-l decisions for the SP.
For much of baseball history the starting pitcher was going to see the game through, regardless.
“This is what’s great about sports. This is what the greatest thing about sports is. You play to win the game. Hello? You play – to win – the game. You don’t play it to just play it. That’s the great thing about sports. You play to win. And I don’t care if you don’t have any wins, you’re going to play to win. When you start telling me it doesn’t matter, then retire. Get out. Because it matters.”
We’ve had plenty of columns on FanGraphs and elsewhere pointing out how a team’s won/loss record isn’t necessarily indicative of their performance, so are we going to remove team record as well and replace it with Pythagorean Expectation or some other calculation that we believe more accurately represents that performance? Of course not. You play to win the game.
Yes, that’s exactly what we should do. Heck, it’s a slippery slope we couldn’t possibly prevent. Why fight it?
If individual pitchers are unable to be assigned a team result, then we have to stop recording wins and losses based on the actual outcome of the game and definitely use “expected runs scored versus expected runs allowed”. At some point, we can just get to the point of the players not even playing the game because we can track similar players and teams from the past and project the modern player’s individual game results and accumulate season stats.
It’s going to save a lot of time.
Our only other option is keep assigning the “pitcher of record” the team win or loss, regardless of how much that pitcher accounted for the actual win or loss. There’s no other choice. If we don;t have pitcher wins and losses, then I as a fan, have absolutely no way of knowing if the pitcher is good or not. Nevermind I don’t know Michael Jordan’s career win-loss record, or even Tim Duncan’s, not Patrick Kane’s, not Aaron Rogers, etc … and I can’t tell if these guys are good or not.
=)
CircleChange11, it seems like responding with a heavy dose of sarcasm means you realize I’m correct about how the same reasoning used to decry pitchers’ wins could apply to team wins, and therefore the absurdity of the demand to get rid of the statistic. Wins don’t need to change. The only thing that needs to change is the public’s understanding of the statistic’s meaning and context, something that has clearly already started to happen.
Yes, sarcasm and just having fun …
meet Mr. False Dichotomy
“If you’re going to kill a classic stat, the classic guys should be able to kill one of the saber stats.”
a stat for a stat makes the whole world fat – gandhi
Easy to say for someone who recorded a 17 and 7 record on the back of a 3.93 xFIP.
Congrats, you just completely proved his point. Wilson has outpitched his xFIP pretty consistently throughout his career. There is reason to believe that something about his pitching may lead to a HR/FB ratio lower than that of the average pitcher. Your comment demonstrates exactly what he was saying.
In ~1400 innings, CJ Wilson has ‘outpitched’ his xFIP by six percentage points.
arc, the difference between giving 3.71 runs per 9 innings and 3.91 runs per 9 innings, over 1358 innings, would be about 30 runs. Not at all insignificant, especially when you remember that he was a closer for half of his career and a lot of that performance came in high leverage innings (average pitcher has a pLI of about 1, he has a career pLI of 1.08).
He also appears to have improved on this since he was younger. Since 2009, which gives a pretty large 1150 inning sample size, he has a 3.51 ERA vs a 3.88 xFIP, good for a difference of about 37 runs, which is again, far from insignificant.
Okay. Granted he allowed a lower than average HR/FB but he also had 5.24/game run support and Mike Trout manning center field which really helps.
Well, yeah. He said as much in the quote.
Maybe “win” needs its own little ignor button. That way, everyone who doesn’t care which pitcher “won” the game will be free to analyze the stats that really matter. Probably could do the same things for team wins and losses, too…for those who’d rather focus on which team played better than which team won.
I like the new stats, I really do, and have followed since the early 1980s when this stuff started coming out up to the shiny new DRA. But no, keep the win because we have more than a century of data and part of the attraction of baseball is its history. It is easy enough to do, it’s not like we don’t have enough hard drive space on a server somewhere. Keeping the “W” for pitchers exactly how it’s been recorded will make for some comparisons, probably for the more casual fans and there are more of them. With time, the importance of wins will diminish even further on their own and we need not get condescending about it. I would suggest though for the old print media, that given 5 man rotations, that 16 wins become the new 20. I want to see headlines about “Felix winning his 16th.”
I still hear people talking about a quarterback’s record in terms of wins and losses. It came up again when discussing Tim Tebow’s latest come back. I don’t pay attention to pitching wins, but I don’t think they are going anywhere for a while.
Tebow is a good example because it reminds us that there are a lot of misleading statistics. While his supporters pointed to wins, something he certainly contributed to but isn’t the best measure of his performance, his detractors were equally guilty of dismissing him based on his completion percentage. Using yards per pass attempt or adjusted yards per pass attempt would have been better, as Tebow’s embarrassingly low completion percentage was due in part to playing in an offense that threw a high percentage of deep passes. In those statistics Tebow ranked 27th and 20th, showing him to be a below average starting quarterback. but hardly the disaster he was made out to be.
Those statistics also conveniently leave out his atrocious sack rate and near-historic fumbling issues, both of which are far “stickier” for QBs historically than the exceptional interception rate that boosts Tebow’s AY/A.
It’s not really true that the only reason people criticized his play was his poor completion percentage. Some did, but others saw other problems in his play.
No stat is perfect on its own. Everything has noise to it. There’s a reason FIP isn’t perfect. The same way wOBA isn’t a perfect measure of a player’s season, without context. Wins aren’t meant to be a perfect encapsulation of a player’s overall year. They’re a statistic. You can use any stat so long as you can acknowledge the flaws. I can use batting average as an argument, so long as I acknowledge that it doesn’t account for walks and weights hits all the same.
Just because there are statistics that better parallel a player’s true talent level, or predict the future better, doesn’t mean that we should just remove all statistics previous to it.
Wins has a very relevant place in historical context. It’s a barometer that was used to measure previous talents, so just for the sake of congruence between the past and today, it’s unnecessary to “kill” it.
If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean that we have to remove it from the public sphere, just to suit you or your preferences.
Very poor headline. “Players View: Kill the Win” implies the opposite of what they’re actually saying here. Brian Kenney’s mantra that all sportswriters overvalue the win is tired and just plain wrong. The vast majority of close followers of the game place the win in proper perspective. Move on, Brian.
I came to make the same comment – really enjoyed reading the pitchers’ comments, but the headline “Players View: Kill the Win” is highly misleading, and implies the complete opposite of their collective point of view.
Players’ View: Don’t kill the win
Players’ View: Why kill the win?
Players’ View: Kill the win?
Good night and stay classy. I’m Ron Burgundy?
“Player’s View” is the name of the series. “Player’s View: Does Lineup Protection Exist” and “Players View: No-hitter Silent Treatment” have run within the last month. I ran a number of these two years ago and have brought the series back this summer.
A ? after Kill the Win in the title would clear it up.
That Mike Maddux comment is so absurd in so many ways.
Tyler Clippard has 4 saves all season, Tolleson has 4 saves in a week.
Better yet, kill the save!
Hilarious that CJ Wilson out of all people insults xFIP
Speaking of Tyler Clippard, Clippard had 11 wins in 2010, without making a single start. He also won the All-Star Game. He averaged a win for every 8.1 innings pitched that season.
I know this will get a bunch of downvotes for being about my fantasy team, but it was so fun owning him that season and getting all those wins from a reliever!
Tradition: One of my last favorite explanations for anything. For all the fans/coaches/players who support any stat on such a flawed basis, I would so like to ask if we should re-segregate baseball. Then, after they inevitably respond with disgust, I would be forced to retort: “But what’s more traditional than all white baseball?”
This sort of comment is not only unhelpful, it’s grossly ignorant of the sport’s history. While black players were unfairly excluded from baseball for sixty years, you’re ignoring the contributions Latin players made to the sport during those decades.
It’s not only unhelpful and ignorant, but ___________
Feel free to fill in any of the multitude of possible additions below…
It just seems like people are in a comfort zone of a having a record next to a pitcher’s name and before their stat line. I think the support and importance that is put on the win represents that sort of stodgy attitude that drives younger people away from baseball. I don’t necessarily think it’s dangerous, but to just keep it around because you don’t feel like removing it or because you are used to it is silly in my opinion. If MLB and Rob Manfred got rid of the win, I think it might create the kind of buzz that baseball needs. I think the changes that they’ve made are nice but it would be nice to make headlines in a progressive way for baseball. I think that there is a little tiny threat of baseball becoming like hockey eventually, where it’s more of a niche fan base. Keeping around the win could be one of those things that contributes to that.
Oh please, younger people who are being ‘driven away from the game’ don’t have an understanding of the unimportance of a win the begin with.
I know, I was trying to word my comment carefully. What I mean is that the reluctance to move on from a statistic that can sometimes be very misleading is representative of the way that a lot of MLB thinks. It’s just one example of a bigger problem that is only just now starting to be addressed.
Logical… informed… reasonable… Oh, god… this “Kill the Wins” thing has all the makings of some liberal conspiracy! Quick! Launch a campaign against the “War on Wins”!!! America isn’t safe!! The “War on Wins” must be stopped before common sense prevails!!
In other words, we’re wasting our time. I’d love to get rid of Wins, but it’s a waste of time. The population would rather see nonsense stats on ESPN because “it’s the way we always done it.” And that’s the extent of thought that goes into it.
It’s why we measure things according to the King’s “foot” and set our alarms for Daylight Savings. Heck, there’s still an astonishingly large percentage of folks that still thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth and that climate change is some evil plot.
Face it, guys, America’s Game is keeping Wins forever.
It’s not a nonsense stat. You’re just as bad as the people who consider it to be the primary measure of a pitcher’s quality.
Nonsense! You’re just as bad as the pitchers who consider quality of the measure primary of a people to be.
YOU’RE JUST AS BAD AS THE PEOPLE WHO NEEDLESSLY PERSONALIZE THEIR DISAGREEMENTS
whooooooosh
That was the sound of a parody thread going over Roger’s head.
In Roger’s defense, parodies are designed to be humorous and/or satirical. The lack of cleverness in your attempt disguised that it was supposed to be parody.
No need to kill the win, but the only thing it “officially” counts for is as an input into salary arbitration. If you want to make an official change, ban arbitrators from considering pitcher wins in arbitration decisions in favor of a more neutral barometer like xFIP or ERA (if you insist on staying “old school”.)
I actually think this is a bigger issue for saves. On teams where the closer is arb-eligible I strongly suspect part of the rationale for hewing to traditional roles is that the manager knows he’ll damage morale if he doesn’t let the closer accumulate saves since its so important to arbitration figures.
And also gets overweighted in Hall of Fame considerations as well. Is a 300 win pitcher (and all the accolades that come with crossing that threshold) better than a 280-win pitcher? Who knows, but man it sure gets a lot of mileage in HOF debates and voting.
Surprise Surprise! The actual players don’t think the W should be killed – just that we should be sure to keep the big picture in mind. Just goes to show how far removed all this xFIP and DRA business is from what actually happens on the field.
For what it’s worth, I’ve already launched a thorough defense of judging a pitcher by his Win/Loss record here:
http://twtwsports.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-pitchers-wl-record-matters.html
It should be recommended reading for the crowd who think that we should “kill the win.” Baseball without pitcher wins would be unrecognizable; the individualist element of the game that is so central to its appeal would be gone, leading to a bunch of cop-outs and buck-passing for mediocre pitchers who can’t put the team on their back.
why do you show up here? You’re going to hate on everything because you think SABRmetrics are crap. If you think you’re going to change the minds of everyone here, you’re completely wrong. I recommend you find a different site – perhaps one where all the ignorant curmudgeons gather.
Mike Maddux’s comment is the one that really bothered me. If people like it that’s fine, leave the win alone, the game is supposed to be for the enjoyment of fans – all of the fans.
When a player is judged worthy or unworthy of hall of fame consideration based on accumulated win totals though – that is where it goes too far. My fear is that some excellent, otherwise worthy pitchers might be bypassed by the traditional leaning voters due to excessive weighting of a stat that isn’t accurately representative of their performance.
The win really is a team stat and should be considered as such. Using it as a true barometer of a player’s success is misleading and just wrong.
Some people will never really understand the importance of Winning.
Shouldn’t this have been called “Player’s View: Don’t Kill the Win”? I was expecting all of them to want to get rid of it :/
the spreadsheet crowd around here wanted to misrepresent these comments to further their radical sabermetric agenda.
Why don’t you just go away then? You clearly don’t want to be here or provide any valuable commentary to sabermetrics. All you do on every post is make some sort of Hawk Harrelson comment about “old school baseball”
I love the game, and as much I hate new-wave stats, I want to stay relevant and educated. My nephew says I need to get with the times, so I’m trying to, but I admit, team spreadsheet can be frustrating.
The most beautiful thing about baseball is that it’s a team sport based on the outcomes of individual competition. But what always gets lost in these types of articles is the fact that you are asking human beings to talk about how they are quantified. How many of us look back on our grades in school and say, “That 78% I got on my science test is a completely accurate representation of the entirety of my person!”? But that test score was a good assessment of your skills on the subject at the time. That’s what the win tells you; Was he good enough that day?
To us, as fans who care about stats in terms of predicting future outcomes, the win is an arcane statistic and doesn’t hold much weight. But we should be able to see that to the people who play the games it is important and it does matter. They are one of 25 guys going out there and competing to win. The win and the loss are representative to them of how they impacted their team. If you can’t understand that and respect that I’m not sure why you even care about baseball to start with.
If someone goes out there and gives up 8 hits and 6 walks in 5 innings without striking anyone out, but only gives up 1 run and his team wins, you damn well better believe he’s going to be proud of that. We all know, and he’d probably be the first to admit it, that it was an extremely lucky win and he needs to improve greatly to be able to be a part of the team going forward. But on that day, he was good enough and got his job done. Why do we, the fans, feel the need to take something positive away from him?
Hockey goalies get credit for wins and losses, but I certainly have no idea which goalies had deceptively strong or weak W-L percentages. That’s because the stat is not emphasized by reporters or fans.
Baseball will eventually reach that point, without killing the stat. It already has for fans like us. I haven’t looked at a “wins” leaderboard in years. Still, I’ll pay attention when I see a pitcher going for his 200th or 300th win. Though wins don’t tell much of a story, they do show a pitcher who was at least pretty good for a long time.
Killing the win stat won’t draw new fans to the game; the only people who want it gone are those who are already obsessively hooked.
Brian Kenny was freaking out last year because Altuve was being called the “batting champion”, saying that fans arguing in a bar would assume Altuve was the best hitter in the league. Please. Give the common fan more credit. Everyone knows there’s more to hitting than batting average. Altuve was the batting champion, he won the batting title, and literally no one thought he was the best hitter in the league.
Right and I suppose you don’t think that the triple crown winner is the head of British nobility until a horse beats Miguel Cabrera?
You know nothing about stats.
Just keep it. It means nothing and it’s too much trouble to buff the win loss records off the hall of fame plaques. And if you don’t like the “stat” (aka the opinion of some dude in the scorer’s box (who’s probably a white male but we’ll never because he has a secret identity)) do what I do and ignore it.
What would you do with a history book that starts in the garden of Eden? Close it and find a good one. Do the same when you read an article that references pitcher wins and losses. If you get rid of the win you will have to read entire articles and watch entire shows just to see if they’re nonsense or not. A pitcher’s win loss record is a great stat for measuring the stupidity of an article and saves the reader a lot of time.
Also baseball will be way to negative if you kill the win. Pitchers will only have losses next to their names no matter how good they are and that’s not nice.
I’ve always thought we needed more women of color as official scorers. Does Remington still write here?
I’m generally-okay with wins as a stat. They’re not explicitly measuring anything useful, but they’re at least reasonably well-correlated with things that do matter. I’d love to see this same question asked of the save, though; I think if there’s any stat that deserves vehemence it’s that one, and I’d really like to know some ‘in-game’ perspectives on it.
Head explodes.
Puts it back together.
Realizes baseball is entertainment on par with movies and television. Shrugs.
Tries to help the world become a better place.
“Tries to help the world become a better place.”
TRANSACTIONS:
05/26 – anon463 to 15-day DL (oblique strain from patting self on back to vigorously)
Head explodes.
Oh c’mon, WALK IT OFF!!
TRANASCTIONS (updated): anon463 transferred to 60-day DL (cranial fragmentation)
WIN.
C.J. Wilson pretty much nailed it. Were his paragraph a comment he probably gets 20 down votes.
I think that almost all players and fans know instinctively that a win doesn’t always mean you’ve pitched well. I don’t think that even the staunchest defender of the old-school would say that a guy who pitches the top of the 9th in a tie game, gives up 3 runs, only to have his team score 4 in the bottom of the 9th ‘deserves’ a win.
The problem isn’t with the Win/Loss stats themselves; the problem lies in using them as your primary evaluation tool.
Just because Wins are apart of history does not mean it should stay, solely based on that merit. That’s silly. Imagine if other industries used that archaic model. When you cut through the bull–does it help evaluate a pitcher’s performance? No.
Fun debate though.
Funny thing is sometimes those other industries get rid of the “archaic model”, replace it with something new, and find the “archaic model” made a lot more sense than the new thing. “New” is not always “progress.” Amusingly, sometimes “new” is actually some old thing that was thrown away a long time ago because it was terrible. Everything old is new again!
yeah for some reason I have a feeling that we’re not going to be reincorporating a pitcher’s offense into how we evaluate pitchers any time in the future.
What Breslow said.
“If you’re going to kill a classic stat, the classic guys should be able to kill one of the saber stats.”
CJ Wilson totally won this thread, lol. Can you just imagine what that would look like?
Nerds: OK, we’ll axe OPS if you throw out Saves for Shutdowns.
Meatheads: No way, everyone knows OPS is BS anyway. How about we make a rule that we can’t talk about anything that I cant calculate on a piece of paper, and then we’ll start talking about ISO%.
Nerds: Well… we do like ISO%, but that rule would take away like 95% of our stuff, I mean, you can barely tell me what Slugging % is…
Meatheads: What are you talking about?!, its… how much power a hitter has… Screw you, negotiations off, we’re keeping Wins AND Saves… wanna go watch Aroldis Chapman throw a ball 102 MPH?
Nerds: Yes, yes we do.
” we can’t talk about anything that I cant calculate on a piece of paper”
Granted, win% can only be calculated easily because someone records wins and losses for each game attributed to particular pitchers. If we can just add 100s of different physically recorded metrics and make almost everything just a simple counting stat 🙂
That said, if your paper is big enough, I think you can calculate most things 🙂
My goodness, this topic did bring out the trolls.
You know, if you are going to troll a baseball stats site, you should at least make up some phony baloney stats to insert into the conversation. Or did they tell you that there would be no math?
“If you’re going to kill a classic stat, the classic guys should be able to kill one of the saber stats.”
CJ Wilson, arbiter in the making.
What do you mean by “Kill the win” anyways? Expunge it from history, exclude it from future use, stop using it as the default way to evaluate starting pitchers or something else? “Killing the win” is the most inflamatory way to ask that question.
Better question. If you have to evaluate pitchers, which stat(s) should you use? What should show up next to the pitcher on the game summary?
Jim Johnson got 5 wins last year, because clearly he was the equal of Dellin Betances. It baffles the mind. Pitcher “wins” are garbage, but I guess if we’ve been taking dumps in the drinking water for years as a tradition, it must be best. It’s what the children like.
“Killing” the win is a drastic measure, and MLB has always steered away from drastic measures. This feels like a sensationalist piece for Fangraphs. I would propose changing how wins are measured instead. Why not just take the pitcher who accumulates the most leverage during an appearance, and assign the win based on that?
I’m kind of surprised hitter wins never came about in the same manner as pitcher wins. Whoever was “responsible” for bringing about the final lead change would get credit for the win. Whoever had the last at-bat before that lead change would get credit for a loss, unless it was in the first inning, in which case, who knows.
Game Winning RBIs?
Anyone remember those?
Interesting that there seems to be somewhat of a generational split among the pitchers quoted.
One reason the win stat isn’t going away: It’s an easy way for your agent to argue for more money.
Can we kill the Hold? Because I would be on board for that.
I think there’s some under-selling of how much importance is placed on the pitcher win going on.
Lance Lynn has been worth 1.4 WAR and is 3-4.
Michael Wacha 0.9 WAR and is 7-0.
What % of fans do you think I could convince that Lynn has had the more valuable season?
—————————————–
Let’s face it … we could come up with a VERY easy way of rating a player’s performance by either using “letter grades” or “player ratings (50-100).
We all grow up with letter grades in school and know what each % correlates to as compared to the average. We also grow up playing video games or other activities that rate players on a 100 scale, where 75 is usually average and 100 is basically “perfect”. Both systems are essentially the same and could be understood by anyone.
A person could be watching their very first game on TV and say “Who’s this guy, is he any good?” and one could respond “He’s having an 87 season, a B+” and anyone gets that it’s pretty good.
The first things broadcasters mention about a pitcher is his win-loss record, signifying that it’s the most important piece of information. Lots of people, in turn, do this.
I think we have these stats in regards to wRC+ and ERA+, but it could even be called simpler and incorporate other facets.
It can’t be that difficult. Fans got used to QBR (NFL) and Players Efficiency (NBA) pretty darn quickly.
Adding the question mark to the headline makes all the difference. Thanks David.
Nothing (stats) should ever be killed. Breslow gave the best answer. Keep it but inform the herd how meaningless it is today. Come up with a better metric though.
I would consider assigning a fraction of a W regardless of the score when the pitcher exits if hsi team wins. An average pitcher goes 6 IP. If his team wins the game, even if it was trailing or tied when he left, give him 2/3 of a W unless he gave up more than 1 run per IP (then he gets nothing). Same with losses except the exclusion is if he went 6 IP or more and gave up 2 or fewer runs (I mean runs, not ER). That’s simple enough that fans can grasp it w/o resorting to higher mathematics and win probability charts most can’t be bothered with
Many of them repeated that the Win has been around as long as baseball has, but that’s not true. A cursory google search didn’t reveal when it was invented, but surely baseball was probably played for years before someone came up with some arbitrary 5-inning measuring stick. Just like how Batting Average is also an advanced statistic that wasn’t around at the start of baseball, compared to just “Hits” or whatever, I mean we use computers to calculate it and everything.
My Google magic is stronger than yours!
http://sabr.org/research/origin-modern-pitching-win
It was more or less invented by Henry Chadwick in 1884. Took a while to catch on and the official rule was not until 1950.
I’ve followed advanced metrics going back to 1982 when I read my first Bill James Baseball Abstract. I was hooked. I bought a first-edition hard copy of John Thorn’s and Pete Palmer’s The Hidden Game of Baseball soon as it arrived at my local bookstore (ahh, yes, pre-Internet days) a few years later, big money for a new college student. Since then I’ve followed all the latest research, some interesting, some less so. I was an early reader of FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, etc. I’m about as saber-friendly and saber-savvy as can be.
My point is the only group more insufferable than the “pitcher wins matter” crowd is the “kill pitcher wins” crowd. There is no need to kill any stat. Just understand it and its limitations. There are those who humorously believe batting average should also be eliminated. If BA didn’t exist from the start of the game, the sabermetric community would have invented it.
Sadly, Brian Kenny has become the face of sabermetrics on MLBN, and thus for many fans. The work being done deserves a better spokesperson than Kenny, who brings a simple-minded tabloid mentality to discussions that were settled 30 years back. I’m not saying Kenny is simple minded. He understands the TV medium and what needs to be done to try and create interest. Perhaps there is value in what he does, but to me he’s that tiny yapping dog in the corner you just want to shut up.
While you’re right, he’s coming from a good place. Because of the history surrounding wins, they’ll probably continue to be weighted too heavily in things such as Hall of Fame voting and arbitration forever. That is where he seems to be coming from when he says to get rid of the stat completely. That’s flawed reasoning for getting rid of it, and I agree with you, but it is a voice that probably will help improve how the average fan that is watching views the game, and also one coming from a place that does make sense.
I mostly agree with you about how wishing Brian Kenny weren’t the “face of sabermetrics,” but I think his problem is that he’s just surrounded by all the other people on MLBN.
I have read dozens of times in this thread alone that “everyone knows” how limited the wins stat is. No they don’t. They really don’t. Watch MLBN for a half hour every night. Listen to people like Amsinger compare pitchers. Or Chris Russo. Or Rose and Millar.
And MLBN is for more obsessive baseball fans than the average Joe. I mean, I don’t want to “kill the win” if that means expunging it from the record books, but I am certainly tired of the media actively working to reduce my enjoyment of my favourite sport by constantly dumbing down the discourse.
Craig Breslow made excellent point. Just about every stat is flawed in some way, and doesn’t tell the whole story. Wins even less than most stats, but I don’t think that’s a reason to just kill it.
Personally, I think that wins and losses are only valuable at the extremes. Because there’s a weak correlation between wins and performance, a pitcher has to be truly an exception to achieve the consistency and luck-insurance to rack up 15 wins in a season, and even more so to do it in many seasons. When it happens, though, it’s something that is incredible. Seeing a guy like Colon pick up 10 wins a year may not be predictive, but it does tell you something about the kind of pitcher he is now and has been.
Given a choice, I would much rather kill the save.
I think CJ WIlson hit the nail on the head when he said “you obviously can’t control wins as much as you can control other statistical things.” He being a pitcher, saying he knows pitchers cannot control a W, says a lot.
In an 11-10 game, it borders on silliness to have a “winning” pitcher.
If the title had been “Kill the Win as a Talent/Evaluation Statistic?” the responses might have been different.
As a very easy indicator of result, the W/L record for pitchers will likely stick around and will probably be misapplied at times. All statistics are misapplied at times.
You get rid of something by not talking about it.
One beef with the W is a closer can give up 3 runs to blow a save opportunity and then be rewarded with a W if his team rallies. This is a case where the team won in spite of the closer, not because of him. The whole “well he was the pitcher of record when they went ahead” bit is rubbish.
It’s almost like this just happened 2 hours ago in Tampa…
I don’t hate the concept of the win. I do hate the way it’s implemented. Because it tries to be cute and take into factors when, if you believe in players being winners and losers, then the stat should reflect that.
None of this 5 inning rule for starters or team must be leading when you leave rule and all that stuff. Simply put, if the team wins, the pitcher that pitched the most should get the win. After all, the team won, and the pitcher played the biggest part of that game. If there is such a thing as intangible “winning” quality, then the win stat should reflect that. The opposite is the case. If your team lost and you pitched the most innings, effective or not, you get the loss. Because you are a loser.
Then the win can be used as a proxy for intangible winningness of a pitcher. Which, even if it makes no sense for the fangraphs crowd, at least measures “something.” As it currently stands, a reliever comes in during a tie game, pitch scoreless inning, his team scores and he gets the win for 1 inning of work. That to me has always made much less sense than assigning it to starters.
Seems to me like the people who want to just wipe the win from the record books want to change the conversation more than anything. And while there is a basis for that, they’re also kinda being a-holes considering that many on the other side acknowledge just how meaningless the stat is even if they want to leave it be. Changing the conversation would be beneficial for HOF consideration but not a whole lot else imo, but then again, if voters could figure out how to not place so much importance in the stat like many people in the comments are, then that’s a fine outcome.
Having played nearly 30 years of competitive baseball, I can tell you that there are pitchers who will there teams to victory by the very presence in the game. You cannot quantify the impact that their will to win or the confidence they engender has on their teammates, but, it is real and it influences success. My guess is that Brian Kenny has never played baseball at a high level and has no clue what this immeasurable influence has on a team’s success. Until he proves he has, I find it quite easy to dismiss most of what he says. Strap ’em on Brian, then let’s hear your opine on what statistics matter.
finally, somebody makes sense around here.
I think the basic point is being missed here from what I see in the comments. Yes FIP and xFIP assume relationships but they give a good idea of what a pitchers actual skill level is. They are a bit outdated now that there are more advance caculations such as SIERA and tERA. Regardless of which, they evaluate players at a closer level. Wins yes are great for bragging rights but they should be taken into account for evaluating skill. Wins are just cool to have and that’s about it. The players aren’t just shooting down the idea because of tradition and that you shouldn’t break, they are just saying not to overanalyze it. It kills the game.
I think the basic point is being missed here from what I see in the comments. Yes FIP and xFIP assume relationships but they give a good idea of what a pitchers actual skill level is. They are a bit outdated now that there are more advance caculations such as SIERA and tERA. Regardless of which, they evaluate players at a closer level. Wins yes are great for bragging rights but they shouldnt be taken into account for evaluating skill. Wins are just cool to have and that’s about it. The players aren’t just shooting down the idea because of tradition and that you shouldn’t break, they are just saying not to overanalyze it. It kills the game.
It’s never going to literally be wiped from the record books. And who cares? If someone wants to argue pitcher A is better than pitcher B because of Wins then that person isn’t worth arguing with in the first place.
If you can interview a bunch of players and managers and they all basically agree that it doesn’t mean much then I think we’ve made significant progress.