I’m going to write some articles about wins.
I realize that this makes me a Luddite in the toaster-oven factory, but I’m a bit annoyed at all the shade getting thrown on the humble ‘win’ statistic. Acknowledging all of the flaws with the statistic that make Brian Kenney’s blood boil, I wonder if we’ve gone too far in disregarding wins.
Take Warren Spahn.
(No, seriously: take him. Please. He won’t leave my living room.)
Warren Spahn has 363 wins. That means that there were 363 games where Warren Spahn pitched at least five innings, and left the game with the lead (or saw his teammates pull ahead in the bottom half of the inning), and saw his team win.
I don’t know about you, but I like knowing that. I don’t credit it with too much: I don’t say that those 363 wins make Warren Spahn the best left-handed pitcher in baseball. I realize that he pitched poorly in a lot of those games, and I realize that he pitched well in games where he gets credited with a loss. I know it’s not the exacting measure of how great a pitcher he was.
But...I don’t know what statistic better captures Warren Spahn.
‘Winning 20 Games’ is another stupid metric. Okay, it’s not a metric, but a concept: Good Pitchers Win Twenty Games.
This concept has given us plenty of bad Cy Young Awards (LaMarr Hoyt, Bob Welch, Mike Flannagan, Mike McCormick, Dwight Gooden). It’s led to some terrible contracts (Barry Zito). It should probably be banished from the lexicon of any reasonable person.
Except when we’re talking about Warren Spahn, because Spahn won twenty games like clockwork. He won twenty like it was his job. He actually thought it was his job: every year he’d try to get to twenty. Most years he did.
Look at this. This is stat-sexy:
Year
|
Wins
|
Loses
|
ERA
|
IP
|
1947
|
21
|
10
|
2.33
|
289.2
|
1948
|
15
|
12
|
3.71
|
257
|
1949
|
21
|
14
|
3.07
|
302.1
|
1950
|
21
|
17
|
3.16
|
293
|
1951
|
22
|
14
|
2.98
|
310.2
|
1952
|
14
|
19
|
2.98
|
290
|
1953
|
23
|
7
|
2.10
|
265.2
|
1954
|
21
|
12
|
3.14
|
283.1
|
1955
|
17
|
14
|
3.26
|
245.2
|
1956
|
20
|
11
|
2.78
|
281.1
|
1957
|
21
|
11
|
2.69
|
271
|
1958
|
22
|
11
|
3.07
|
290
|
1959
|
21
|
15
|
2.96
|
292
|
1960
|
21
|
10
|
3.50
|
267.2
|
1961
|
21
|
13
|
3.02
|
262.2
|
1962
|
18
|
14
|
3.04
|
269.1
|
1963
|
23
|
7
|
2.60
|
259.2
|
Winning twenty games is perhaps meaningless...but it looks great on the back of a baseball card.
Warren Spahn is my grandfather’s trump card: the guy he'll bring up if I get a little too excited about a current player:
Me: Jon Lester’s looking pretty good tonight.
Him: How many times has Lester won 20 games?
Me: I don’t know. Once? Never?
Him: (Long pause) Humph.
He doesn’t even have to say it...that ‘humph’ is my grandfather’s implicit nod to Warren Spahn.
It’d be silly for me to say that the ‘win’ statistic is meaningful because my grandfather cites it. My grandfather sometimes eats crushed saltines with milk when he has a cold: I don’t think everyone should necessarily follow suit.
But there are good reasons to defend the Win statistic:
- Many people have used the statistic to judge pitchers in the past. It’s shaped who is in the Hall-of-Fame, who’s won the big awards. It’s been a part of the broad conversation about pitching for a century. When we talk about Carlton’s 1972 season, we don’t say that he had an xFIP of 2.01, or an fWAR of 12.1. We say that Lefty won 27 games for a really terrible Phillies team.
- Pitchers care about wins. Every pitcher who has crossed into the 300-win club probably cites those 300 wins first....everyone except Nolan Ryan, who might cite a few other things first.
- It is not the worst measure of a starting pitcher’s value. There’s an article on this site, written by the gentleman on the letterhead, which suggests a pitcher’s Win-Loss record as a better indicator of a pitcher’s value than ERA, WHIP, or strikeout rate. It’s not a whole lot better than those other metrics, but I haven’t seen a ‘Kill the K/9’ campaign anywhere.
- Wins can still be useful: the statistic can show us interesting things about pitchers. (This will be the subject of Part II, which will start with Don Sutton.
‘Wins’ are an imperfect statistic. This is a trait they share with every non-counting statistic that has ever existed. Any stat that requires mathematics more complicated than simply counting has a degree of imperfection: ERA, xFIP, WAR, Win Shares, and UZR ain’t perfect either. Even some of the counting stats are stupid: if you want to kill off a statistic, let’s cut off the three heads of the hydra-RBI.
Or runs scored. Let’s kill that stat.
No one ever talks about runs scored in a critical way. Why not? I’m watching the Jays/A’s game as I write this. Just a minute ago, with a runner on first, Brett Lawrie hit a grounder to first base. It was absolutely routine...an easy out. Brandon Moss fielded it and threw to second to get the lead runner. Lawrie beat out the subsequent throw to first. Routine event: fielder’s choice. Lawrie basically took the spot that his teammate earned.
The next batter homered. Lawrie was credited for the run scored. Isn’t this a little off? Shouldn’t the batter who actually got to first safely, without costing his team an out, get some of the credit?
Or let’s kill saves. Saves are a stat that is much worse than wins. If you want to talk about bad award choices, saves blows wins out of the water. Saves have taken Cy Young Awards from Nolan Ryan (1977, maybe 1987), Blyleven and Stieb (1984), Hershier (1987, maybe 1989) Maddux (1989), and Mark Prior (2003). They’ve taken MVP awards from Musial or Jackie (1950), Rickey Henderson (1981), Eddie Murray (1984), and Kirby Puckett (1991). The only relief pitcher who won an award he might’ve deserved was Rollie’s 1981 Cy Young Award.
Worse, saves cause teams to employ dumb strategies. It is a statistic that is so important to salary demands that it influenced, for a few decades, when a manager used their best bullpen arm. This is eroding slightly, but it’s a significant mark against the save. Head-in-the-sand talking heads like to rant about stats ruining baseball: the save is a statistic that actually did hurt the game.
Or let’s not kill any stats. Let’s trust that people have the capacity to juggle multiple imperfect statistics, and place value on them accordingly. This is actually happening, incidentally. Even casual fans don’t treat the ‘W’ as the benchmark of pitching greatness, just like casual fans know that the save is sort of fluky.
We should remember that Felix Hernadez (13-12) won a Cy Young Award that saw CC Sabathia (21-7) finish third in the vote. It wasn’t a close vote: Felix received 21 of 28 first-place votes. No one raised a stink about this: there wasn’t a riot in New York. We should remember, too, that we haven’t seen a relief pitcher win a major award since 2003.
I honestly think we’re ahead with wins and saves than we are with RBI. Joey Votto is still getting grief for not having enough RBI’s, and Miguel Cabrera has two MVP trophies because he dominates the Triple Crown catagories. The same isn’t true for pitchers: Kershaw didn’t lead the NL in wins in 2013, or come close to 20 victories...and he received 29 of the 30 first-place votes. Jose Fernandez finished 3rd in the vote, with 12 wins. Matt Harvey finished 4th...he had 9 wins. The AL Cy Young winner led the league in wins, but the guys who finished 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th in the voting had win totals of 13 (Darvish), 14 (Iwakuma), 14 (Sanchez), and 11 (Sale). Bartolo Colon had 18 wins and finished behind them...you’re telling me we’re overrating wins?
Jeff Samardzija has zero wins this year. He also has a 1.46 ERA and a 2.87 FIP. Very few Cubs fans are blaming Samardzija for the team’s record, and when the trade deadline comes up the Cubs are going to get plenty of offers on the luckless right-hander. The masses are no longer beholden to the ‘win’ statistic. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
Dave Fleming will post his second article on Wins in a few days, before returning to his WAR-citing, xFIP loving habits of old. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.