Posted by bad_luck on 12/6/2012 1:05:00 PM (view original):
Posted by burnsy483 on 12/6/2012 12:53:00 PM (view original):
Posted by bad_luck on 12/6/2012 12:46:00 PM (view original):
Regarding W/L and GS, neither is useful on its own.
With other info, IP(nobody uses GS for anything other than establishing that a guy was a starter) is more important.
Ok. So you value IP as a useful statistic.
What's more likely - the 220 IP pitcher being better than the 180 IP pitcher, or, the 20-8 pitcher being better than the 16-12 pitcher?
Knowing innings alone is worth less than knowing only that a guy won 20 games. Obviously, great pitchers usually win a lot of games. Nobody is denying that.
My entire argument is that W/L record adds nothing to the stat line. At best it's useless, at worst it's misleading. See: 2012 Barry Zito, 1992 Jack Morris, 1989 Storm Davis.
"Nobody is denying that."
You've been denying that for 18 pages. "W-L record is meaningless" has been said by you numerous times. If "obviously, great pitchers usually win a lot of games" was understood by you, you wouldn't be telling us how meaningless wins are. You've said "a 15-8 record tells me nothing." It's you who have been saying that.
Do you want me to show you a list of players with misleading ERAs? There are tons of them. If I told you that a pitcher in 1996 went 13-9 with a 3.03 ERA, in 200+ innings, you'd tell me that he actually deserved a better W-L record, just knowing this information. In fact, Steve Trachsel allowed a ton of home runs, a lot of unearned runs, and stuck out next to nobody. His ERA should have been much higher.
It is not smart to look at any statistic and assume that you can be 100% certain about his performance. ERA is a better statistic overall than wins are, but wins are part of the equation, it's part of the story. Steve Carlton won 27 games for a terrible Phillies team. I've read actual stories about his season, about how much more confident the team was behind him in games he pitched, about how much better they hit because of it, of how much better they played in the field because of it.