When trying to convince someone that a traditional belief is in fact wrong, you’ve got two battles to fight. Most sabrmetric baseball fans take the rational route, because, well, it’s tough to argue with the numbers. Or so we think. Many people have an irrational resistance to change, and you end up fighting an emotional battle along with the rational one. It’s not enough to win one of those, you have to win both.
When engaged in a debate about the effectiveness of pitcher wins, the emotional infantry falls back on pseudo-scientific lines such as “Well, better pitchers tend to get more wins — it’s not perfect, but it works.” But I’ve found my new surface-to-air missile: Tom Glavine’s quest for 300 wins. Tuesday night he pitched 6 innings, yielding only 1 run, but left holding only a slim 2-1 lead. His bullpen then gave up that lead, and Glavine’s still stuck on 299. How the hell should the quality of the Mets bullpen and Mets offense affect Glavine’s greatness? While Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez chase history on their own, Glavine’s left to hope his team can deliver his personal glory.
I’m hoping Glavine’s 300th comes in a 14-12 blowout win.
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Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East.
August 7th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
What is the real world meaning of a Win? (the stat a pitcher gets, not a team win) Is a pitcher Win really that intuitive? I think people assume pitcher Win = team win, when that?s totally not true.
You mean a pitcher QS (maybe in your mind a lower case “win”, like “winning the game of life”) is not a team win, right?
Because a Pitcher (upper case, statistical) “Win” is always a Team Win. That’s why I’m saying it’s an intuitive real world stat…
The team won, and he didn’t give up so many runs that his team couldn’t keep up. Some days the offense will carry him, some days he will carry the offense. Some days he lose inspite of a stellar offense output by his team, and some times he will win despite giving up a half dozen runs.
But when a pitcher gets a win (however it happens), the team gets a win. The sum total of the team’s pitchers’s wins is the teams total of wins.
Like I said, I agree that it’s not nearly a perfect stat that will have exceptions in the short term (Glavine’s game that started this thread, Clemens’s 2005 season), but it’s clearly intuitive and as “real world” of a stat as you can get.
I’ll concede that Ws for relievers are meaningless and more the result of luck and being in the right place at the right time.