When War Comes Easier Than Wins

The Pirates beat the Phillies 2-1 on Sunday, and near as I can tell everyone was pissed about it. The Phillies, a would-be World Series contender, had just gotten swept by a team they’d been hoping to do some damage against, and dropped to 1-9 in their previous 10 games. The Pirates, for their part, had just gotten one over (three over, actually) on their intrastate rival, but Paul Skenes didn’t get the win.

The biggest, scariest pitcher in the league had gone 7 2/3 innings, allowing only one unearned run, but had left the game while it was tied in the top of the eighth. That left the NL Cy Young frontrunner with an ERA of 1.88 in 91 innings, but a record of just 4-6. Is it important for Skenes to get the win? Not exactly. But the incongruity between record and performance was just another reminder of how little support this disappointing team is giving the generational talent that had fallen into its lap.

Skenes is the class of the Pirates rotation, but he’s not the only talented pitcher the Bucs have. Even with Jared Jones and Johan Oviedo in the shop getting their elbows worked on, Mitch Keller is having a solid season. Keller is top 25 in the league in innings and WAR, and despite some indifferent strikeout numbers, he’s kept the ball in the yard and scratched out a 4.13 ERA — that’s a 100 ERA- on the dot — with a 3.27 FIP.

Skenes would be within his rights to feel aggrieved at having only four wins, but if you offered Keller that total of victories, he’d bite your hand off. The big Iowan is 1-8.

WAR and pitcher wins can sometimes get called by the same shorthand, but the former is much harder to earn than the latter. I actually don’t think it’s possible for a pitcher to earn a full win above replacement, by our site’s formula or any other, in a single nine-inning game.

Since 1901, there have been 9,018 individual rate-leaderboard-qualified seasons for starting pitchers (i.e. one inning pitched per team game). The average win total for a qualified pitcher over that time is 13; the average WAR is just 2.9. The single-season WAR record is 11.6, set by Pedro Martinez in 1999.

The number of 10-WAR pitcher seasons in major league history might surprise you; it surprised me. Over the past 125 seasons, there have only been either six or seven, depending on how you round the figure off. Actually, I think you’ll probably be able to guess most of the pitchers involved, if not the specific season.

So yeah, that’s just a list of popular answers to the question, “Who’s the best pitcher of all time?” And Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, Tom Seaver, Warren Spahn… none of those guys ever posted 10 WAR in a season.

By comparison, 7,006 out of 9,018 qualified pitchers in AL/NL history have won 10 games. There have been 812 20-win seasons, 126 25-win seasons, and 21 30-win seasons. The record for wins in a season is 41, set by Jack Chesbro of the New York Highlanders in 1904. That’s probably the most unbreakable major record in the book. (At least for a starting pitcher. Put me in charge of the Dodgers and give me permission to run Ben Casparius into the ground, and I bet we could make a run at 40-plus wins out of the pen.)

Since 1901, AL and NL qualified pitchers have produced about four and a half wins for every win above replacement. And while WAR can go negative, it’s very uncommon for a pitcher to throw enough to qualify for the ERA title while performing below replacement level. Only 88 times — or roughly once every 100 individual player seasons — has a qualified pitcher finished with negative WAR.

What does this have to do with Keller? Well, entering his start on Tuesday night, Keller has one win and 1.6 WAR. That is a massive, massive historical aberration. The number of qualified pitcher seasons with more WAR than wins is the same as the number of 10-WAR pitcher seasons (if you round Koufax up): seven.

And even that total is inflated by the fact that four of those pitcher seasons — Keller, Luis Severino, Dylan Cease, and Kyle Freeland — are taking place this year. By the time you read this, that number might’ve already come down. Keller and Cease pitch Tuesday night, Freeland on Wednesday. A win for any of them would bring their win total above their WAR, where it belongs.

Even this early in the season, having four qualified starters with a negative AR (what I’m calling WAR minus wins, because if you subtract a “W” from “WAR” you get “AR,” get it?) is unusual.

There were two qualified negative-AR starters at this point last year, none in 2023, and one in 2022. Over the past 10 162-game seasons, June 10 of each year brought just nine such pitchers, total. The modal number per season is one. We haven’t had four negative-AR pitchers on June 10 since 2010.

That means only three qualified pitchers have gone through the full 162 (actually, the full 154 in two cases) with more WAR than wins.

It takes a special set of circumstances to pull something like that off. Nabors took the most obvious route by pitching for one of the worst teams in baseball history: the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, who went 36-117-1.

The A’s had won three World Series in four years earlier that decade behind the $100,000 Infield and a rotation led by Hall of Famers Charles Bender and Eddie Plank. By 1916, Bender and Plank had jumped to the Federal League, and Connie Mack sold off Eddie Collins, Jack Barry, and Home Run Baker, the latter after a full-season contract holdout.

Collins went to the White Sox for $50,000, Baker to the Yankees for $37,500, and Barry to the Red Sox for $10,000. Which left only $2,500 worth of value in the Athletics infield, and it showed in the standings.

Nabors threw 212 2/3 innings — just over three-quarters of his career major league total — in 1916, and wasn’t very good. He walked more batters than he struck out, and posted an ERA- of 110. But he didn’t get much help. The A’s scored just 447 runs all year, the lowest in the AL by almost 100, and posted the worst fielding percentage in the majors.

Nabors won his third start of the season with a complete game against Boston on April 22, then went winless in his final 37 appearances of the year. And it’s not like he kept getting vultured; the A’s went 4-35-1 when Nabors pitched in 1916. The whole team just stunk.

The 1978 Mets were in a mighty post-contention, post-teardown hangover, much like the 1916 A’s. You’ll no doubt remember Koosman as the no. 2 starter behind Seaver on the Mets teams that won the World Series in 1969 and the NL pennant in 1973. In fact, Koosman was just as good as Seaver during both postseason runs; the Mets went 6-0 when he started.

But by 1978, the Miracle Mets had been disbanded. Tommie Agee had retired; Nolan Ryan had gone on to superstardom in California; Gil Hodges was long dead. Seaver himself had been traded to the Reds the season before, leaving the 35-year-old Koosman as one of two members of the championship team still kicking around in Queens.

Koosman had a pretty good season in 1978, but he got absolutely no help. He had to pitch all nine innings in two of his three wins, and come to think of it I shouldn’t say “all nine innings.” Koosman pitched more than nine innings on three occasions, and the Mets lost all three times. On August 21, Koosman struck out 13 batters in 10 innings and didn’t allow a run; the Mets lost in 11. Ten days later, he threw 11 innings, allowed three runs, and the Mets lost 4-3.

Koosman pitched eight or more innings on 10 occasions in 1978, and apart from those two complete-game victories, the Mets lost every single time. In none of those eight losses did they score more than three runs.

So we’ve got a bad pitcher on a world-historically bad team, and a good pitcher pitching pretty well and throwing a huge volume of innings on a normal last-place team. Keller in 2025 is basically Koosman in 1978, adjusted for inflation.

Then there’s Houtteman. The 1948 Tigers were also a team on the downswing. Detroit had won the World Series in 1945, and finished second in the AL in 1943, 1944, 1946, and 1947. But they went 78-76 in 1948. Hal Newhouser led the league in wins. Virgil Trucks, Dizzy Trout, and Stubby Overmire combined to go 27-31, which is only significant because I wanted to mention those three names. Not enough guys named Virgil, Dizzy, and Stubby in the league these days, if you ask me.

The all-time single-season and career WAR leader among players named Dizzy, by the way, is Trout, not Dizzy Dean. Though Mike Trout has Dizzy covered in both categories with room to spare.

Anyway, Art Houtteman was a local kid who had gotten into 13 games in relief for the 1945 championship team when he was only 17. (World War II, man. Many downstream effects.) By the time 1948 rolled around, Houtteman was in his age-20 season, and had evolved into the Tigers’, well, their Ben Casparius.

Detroit had one Hall of Fame starter (Newhouser), two Hall of Very Good starters (Trucks and Trout), and an OK no. 4 in Fred Hutchinson. Houtteman made 20 starts, mostly early in the year, including an 11-inning, one-run complete-game win on June 16. This came one outing and five days after he picked up the win by throwing 3 2/3 innings of scoreless relief against the Washington Senators.

Those were the only two games Houtteman won all year. Houtteman threw six or more innings on 13 occasions; the Tigers lost 11 of those games, and Houtteman himself was charged with nine of the 11 losses. And while Houtteman wasn’t terrible, he doesn’t have as strong a grievance against his teammates as Koosman.

The 20-year-old Houtteman went 1-14 in 20 starts, with a 5.01 ERA. The Tigers gave him at least three runs of support in 15 of those 20 starts — not stellar offensive production, but good enough to win more than one game.

After Houtteman lasted just five outs against the A’s on July 31, manager Steve O’Neill moved him to the bullpen. Houtteman made just two starts in the final two months of the season. And the Tigers needed the help; outside of their top four starters, they had seven pitchers (including Houtteman) throw at least 10 innings in 1948. Only one had a better-than-average ERA, and even then only by seven hundredths of a run.

Houtteman’s ERA as a reliever was more than a run lower than it was as a starter, and he managed to save 10 games in 23 relief appearances. But he finished with a 2-16 record, in a season in which he produced 2.7 WAR in just 164 1/3 innings.

What Houtteman has in common with Keller, Cease, Severino, and Freeman is that his FIP ended up nearly a run below his ERA. (Freeland, the biggest outlier, is currently rocking a 3.54 FIP and a 5.19 ERA.) An ERA-FIP misalignment obviously offers a path to a negative-AR season that’s unique to FIP-based WAR.

Three pitchers in 125 years isn’t a lot, but for comparison I took Stathead search for a spin and came up with two negative-AR pitchers this year (Severino and Yusei Kikuchi), and only one qualified pitcher with more WAR than wins: Eddie Smith of the 1937 A’s.

Pitching for a team that went 54-97-3, Smith threw 196 2/3 innings with an ERA of 3.94 and a FIP of 5.02. That’s 1.5 WAR, but 4.2 bWAR, which gets him over the bar with his record of 4-17.

What does this mean? Well, it’s a fun bit of trivia, mostly. But also: The Pirates need to start giving Keller some run support. Or not. If Keller ends the year with more WAR than wins, he’ll have done something far more special than anything Skenes could have ever dreamt of.