On August 1 – the first game after the Manny Ramirez trade – the Red Sox beat the A’s, 2-1. Tim Wakefield pitched 6.1 shutout innings, but he ended up with a no-decision. This is from MLB.com’s game summary:
“Wakefield's string of being unable to win despite quality performances continued. With two outs in the eighth, Jack Cust hit a game-tying solo shot against lefty Hideki Okajima that just cleared the Green Monster… It was the sixth time this season he [Wakefield] has left a game with a lead but hasn't had a win to show for it.”
This is a pretty common thing – starter leaves a game in line for the victory, bullpen blows the lead, offense comes back, and some reliever gets credited with the win. That exact thing has happened to Wakefield four times this year alone. Really, it’s a loophole in the way pitcher wins are determined. It makes no sense to reward a bullpen for failing to hold a lead. Relievers don’t care about getting wins anyway; if anything, they care about saves, and I always find it ironic to see a reliever record a blown save and a victory in the same game.
I’d like to propose that we correct this, that we close that loophole. It’s not the massive overhaul of the pitcher wins statistic that some have called for; rather, it’s a minor revision, an update to a very old measurement. We’ll call the new wins “Added Wins.”
An Added Win, then, is any game in which
1. The starter leaves a game eligible for the win,
2. He is not credited with the win, and
3. His team wins the game.
This does not – not – make any kind of contextual adjustments. It doesn’t create wins that aren’t there – we’re not taking Tim Wakefield, putting him on a team with a neutral offense, neutral bullpen, etc., and then figuring out a theoretical won-lost record. What we are doing is quite simply taking undeserved wins away from Red Sox relievers and returning them to Wakefield – who would have got them anyway if the relievers had done their job in the first place. The wins themselves are very much real wins, i.e., the Red Sox did indeed win those games.
By no means is this a perfect system. All the rest of the flaws in the pitcher wins statistic are still there. You still have guys giving up 8 runs in 5 innings and getting credited with the win. You still have guys pitching 8 shutout innings and walking away with a no-decision. All I’m doing is correcting one thing, closing that one loophole. To put it another way, this is not an analytical tool so much as it is an accounting adjustment.
I looked at 121 pitchers who spent all (or the vast majority) of their careers in the “Retrosheet era,” i.e. 1957 to the present. These included all the big winners, a bunch of active players, and some random others. One note – I haven’t done a reverse of this study, looking at how many wins individual relievers stole from their starters. A number of the pitchers in this study spent significant time as relievers, and I haven’t gone back and taken away those undeserved relief wins. With that disclaimer out of the way, here are the pitchers in the study with the most career Added Wins:
|
Pitcher
|
Wins
|
AW
|
Total
|
|
Roger Clemens
|
354
|
26
|
380
|
|
Tommy John
|
288
|
24
|
312
|
|
Greg Maddux
|
353
|
21
|
374
|
|
Kevin Brown
|
211
|
21
|
232
|
|
Don Sutton
|
324
|
19
|
343
|
|
Bert Blyleven
|
287
|
18
|
305
|
|
Orel Hershiser
|
204
|
18
|
222
|
|
Jamie Moyer
|
240
|
17
|
257
|
|
David Wells
|
239
|
17
|
256
|
|
Luis Tiant
|
229
|
17
|
246
|
|
Jerry Reuss
|
220
|
17
|
237
|
|
Kenny Rogers
|
218
|
17
|
235
|
|
John Smoltz
|
210
|
17
|
227
|
|
Mike Flanagan
|
167
|
17
|
184
|
With that one minor change to the rule book, Tommy John and Bert Blyleven are 300-game winners and easy Hall of Famers. The other guy in the group is Jim Kaat; he jumps from 283 wins to 295. You’ve got to figure a 295-game winner would eventually make the Hall of Fame. Luis Tiant’s chances are also improved. And Clemens and Maddux would rank 3-4 all time in career wins, rather than 8-9 as they do now.
Some other items of interest:
· Randy Johnson should have notched win #300 with his last victory in 2007. He’s got 16 Added Wins, for an adjusted career total of 310.
· Mike Mussina currently has 265 career wins. Throw in his Added Wins and he’s at 281, and looking at 300 either next year or early 2010. Not only that – Mussina, who has never won twenty in a season, should have reached that mark three times in his career. Our rule change gives him 20-win seasons in 1995, 1996, and 2002. Rather than a borderline Hall of Famer, he’d already be a no-doubter.
· Ten pitchers in the study have had multiple 20-win seasons taken from them by their bullpens. Here’s the list:
|
Pitcher
|
20W
|
Added
|
Total
|
|
Greg Maddux
|
2
|
4
|
6
|
|
Randy Johnson
|
3
|
3
|
6
|
|
Mike Mussina
|
0
|
3
|
3
|
|
Ken Holtzman
|
1
|
3
|
4
|
|
Roger Clemens
|
6
|
2
|
8
|
|
David Wells
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
|
Mark Langston
|
0
|
2
|
2
|
|
Tim Hudson
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
|
Roy Halladay
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
|
Dan Petry
|
0
|
2
|
2
|
In other words, Maddux has two 20-win seasons, but he should have four more, for a total of six. We’ve been hearing for, what, twenty years now about the demise of the 20-game winner? Make this rules adjustment, and the 20-game winner is no longer an endangered species. By my count, with this adjustment, we’d have sixteen additional 20-game winners since 2000 alone (one per league per year), plus four pitchers – Randy Johnson, Barry Zito, Roy Halladay, and Curt Schilling twice – with 24 or more victories. Johnson should have gone 26-5 in 2002, Zito 25-5 the same year.
· The most Added Wins in a season – at least, the most I’ve found – is five: Jim Perry in 1969, Joaquin Andujar in 1983, Orel Hershiser in 1998, and Tim Hudson in 2002. Perry, who actually was credited with 20 wins, should have gone 25-6 (a record that probably would have given him the Cy Young Award). Hudson’s record goes from 15-9 to 20-9.
· Hudson was particularly unlucky in 2002 and 2003. He was robbed of five wins and a 20-win season in ’02, and the next year was jilted of four wins and another 20-win year. In the four years from 2000 to 2003, here’s what Hudson’s records look like with our adjustment:
|
Year
|
W-L
|
|
2000
|
20-6
|
|
2001
|
18-9
|
|
2002
|
20-9
|
|
2003
|
20-7
|
All told, Hudson should have 162 career wins, rather than his current 146. He’s going to have Tommy John surgery and miss most of 2009; apart from that, he’d be a great 300-win candidate.
Who tends to rack up the most Added Wins? Obviously, the more complete games a pitcher throws, the fewer opportunities his bullpen will have to blow leads for him. Juan Marichal completed 206 of his 238 career starter wins (86.6%, the highest in the study). Correspondingly, he had a mere five Added Wins in his career – just 2.1 Added Wins per 100 wins as a starter, the lowest rate of any 200-game winner. On the other end of the spectrum is someone like Woody Williams, who completed only 4.7% of his starter victories and had a very high Added Win rate of 10.9.
Altogether, the pitchers in this study completed 39.5% of their wins and had a rate of 6.1 Added Wins per 100 starter wins. But as you might expect, the rates have varied considerably over time.
Pitchers in the study born between 1935 and 1944 completed almost two-thirds of their starter wins (66.4%), and they had a rate of 4.6 Added Wins per 100 starter wins.
Pitchers born between 1945 and 1954 completed just over half of their starter wins (50.6%) and had an Added Win rate of 5.7%.
Pitchers born between 1955 and 1964 completed 29.2% of their starter wins and had an Added Win rate of 7.0%.
Pitchers born between 1965 and 1974 completed 17.5% of their starter wins and had an Added Win rate of 6.6%.
Pitchers born between 1975 and 1984 completed 11.9% of their starter wins and had an Added Win rate of 7.5%.
Apart from the 1965-1974 blip, the pattern is clear – fewer complete games, more Added Wins. And it makes intuitive sense. But this general rule, which holds pretty steady in large groups, doesn’t necessarily apply to individual pitchers. For instance:
· Luis Tiant completed 67.1% of his starter wins, but had a rather high Added Win rate of 7.8.
· Earl Wilson completed nearly half his starter wins – 48.7% – but had a very high Added Win rate of 9.2.
· Mike Flanagan had about the same completion rate (46.1%), but his Added Win rate was even higher, 10.3%.
· On the other hand, some of the lowest Added Win rates in the study come from pitchers who hardly ever pitch complete games. Justin Verlander and Kelvim Escobar have Added Win rates under 2.5, but neither has completed even 10% of their starter wins.
· Want someone with a longer career? Andy Pettitte has completed a measly 8.5% of his starter wins, but his Added Win rate is a very low 3.8.
· Other pitchers with low completion rates and low Added Win rates include Roy Oswalt, Carlos Zambrano, Pedro Martinez, Brandon Webb, Mike Hampton, and Mark Buehrle.
I haven’t done an exhaustive study, so I don’t know what the causes of these trends are. Completion rate – and innings per start, which I didn’t check – are probably the most important factors, but they aren’t the only ones. Bullpen quality plays a role, as does offensive support – you want a good offense if you’re going to take the lead, blow it, and then come back to win.
With this relatively minor rule adjustment, we’d have several more Hall of Famers (Blyleven, John, probably Kaat, and possibly Tiant). We’d have more 300-game winners and loads more 20-win seasons. The rules governing pitcher wins have been around since, what, the Middle Ages, right? They were written when pitchers completed almost all of their starts – back in the day when men were men, when catchers didn’t wear gloves and major league baseball was played on fields that would make today’s Little Leaguers weep. They’re about due for a makeover.