The above link will take you to Paul Hoynes of the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s rant about pitching statistics. In short, Hoynes believes that the only statistic that matters when it comes to analyzing pitchers is wins.
Mesa, of course, disrespectfully disagrees.
On some level, I do understand the essence of Hoynes’s point. There are certainly times in games when a pitcher with a big lead may not pitch as fine as he would if he didn’t have a lead. This could lead to diminished statistics. He might pitch to contact more, acquire less strikeouts, give up more home runs, particularly solo shots. I get that sometimes it’s not fair to just look at the numbers all the time.
But on the other hand, solely looking at wins in order to judge a pitcher’s value is pretty indefensible. I could argue this point by citing studies that show batted balls turning into outs is largely random, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll simply state that it’s not at all accurate to judge how well a pitcher has pitched by how many runs his offense produced.
After all, whether or not a pitcher wins a game is very much dependent on how well his team hits, i.e. how many runs they score. In the American League, a pitcher has absolutely no control over this. In the National League, he has very little. Moreover, whether or not a pitcher “earns” a win is tied not just to how many runs his offense scores but also to when his offense scores. If a pitcher goes six innings, doesn’t give up any runs, and then is pulled in the 7th - and his team scores 9 runs in the 8th - he doesn’t win that game. Does that mean he didn’t pitch well enough? Does it mean we should place more value on a pitcher who gives up 7 runs in 6 innings but his team scores 8 runs over that same period of time, and he ends up with the win?
No, that would just be silly. And it’s very difficult for me to see how to make a convincing counter argument. That Hoynes would try to make such a statement while covering a team that is currently 12th in the American League in runs scored is a little bit befuddling.
In fact, in the case of a terrible offensive team like the Indians, which are 27 games under .500, it’s critical that the front office look for a way to evaluate its pitching staff without using wins and losses. It’s a lousy way of telling how well a guy pitched.
To take this even one step further, if it were up to me, I would abolish the wins and losses statistic for pitchers altogether. Like many other mainstream stats that are used by talking heads, old school writers, and typically lazy or merrily ignorant individuals it doesn’t paint a precise, accurate portrait of a pitcher’s impact on the game.
