So, let’s say I pitch for the Pirates and come in the game in the top of the 9th up 11-1. I give up 10 runs and sit down with the game tied 11-11. McCutchen bails me out by hitting a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. I get a win??? That’s bullshit.
I pitch 8 2/3 innings of a perfect game and am up 1-0. Two consecutive batters reach on errors. I leave the game with a no-hitter intact. The relief pitcher gives up a gap shot that puts us down 2-1 and the score holds. I get a loss??? That’s bullshit.
Any system you come up with is arbitrary; you’d just be substituting one set of arbitrary rules for another. The current rules might be tweeked a bit, but they are good 98% of the time. And as mentioned, there are other more sophisticated stats that are getting more attention these days.
I was under the belief that runners that reach base on errors are not the responsibility of the pitcher, so when the starter leaves the game those two runners will not count against him if they score. So the starter wouldn’t get the W, but also the Reliever would not get the Loss for the same reason. Am I wrong?
The save rule isn’t that much better. A pitcher who enters the game in the ninth and strikes out the side gets a save if his team was ahead 3-0, but not if it was ahead 4-0. Also, if a pitcher enters in the ninth with a 2-0 lead and strikes out two batters, and is then replaced by a pitcher who gives up a home run before getting the third out, the second pitcher gets the save.
Again it should be borne in mind that the rule made a lot of sense when it was created. It was created in the 19th century, however, when a pitcher was relieved only if he was really screwing the pooch.
Pitchers don’t win and lose games - teams do. That’s why I think there’s no simple way to redefine this stat to make it more meaningful. There are ways to estimate out how much of a team’s win or loss each individual player is responsible for - Bill James did this with Win Shares - but the formulas are quite complicated and the results of questionable accuracy.
Like Batting Average, which also doesn’t tell us nearly as much as some of the newer stats, it was a useful stat at the time it was created and casual baseball fans still like it.
What shocks me is how recently MLB teams put stock in that stat. Before Florida got a baseball team, I was a Royals fan. In 1990, they signed Storm Davis, fresh off a 19-7 season with the A’s. and an ERA of 4.36. The A’s went to two straight world series. Davis was a good enough pitcher to win with good run support, but not the kind of guy you wanted if you were a lower-scoring team, as the Royals were.
The hilarious part is that Davis was actually a BETTER pitcher in 1990 than in 1989 according to some more modern sabermetric measures. He gave up fewer home runs, fewer walks, and had more strikeouts. And his W-L record was 7-10.
I do like the stat though and the rules governing it are as good as they are going to get.
“Wins” is a stat that isn’t going to go away anytime soon, and the rules defining a win also are in no hope of changing. Like someone said, it does work most of the time, and even on those rare occasions it doesn’t, no one seems to mind.
Assigning a “win” is difficult for every team sport that does it. In the NFL, the “win” goes to the QB, even though football is more of a team game than any other sport I can think of. hockey gives the victory to the goalie, another strange way to track wins and losses, but the only way to do it if you are assigning a win or loss to just one player. The goalie is on the ice for the entire game, so it makes more sense than any other player.
Changing wins would entail too much re-work. Can you imagine having to go back through every game ever played to readjust wins and losses based on the new rules? You would have to do that, to make sure that Cy Young still has 511 wins. :eek: (that stat still blows me away).
Who said anything about changing wins? The problem isn’t the corner cases where a pitcher gets an undeserving win, or pitches well and doesn’t get the win. The problem is assigning a team statistic to an individual player. Giving the same stat for a CG SHO and a 5IP 5ER performance where your team scores 10 runs doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost entirely devoid of context and tells you next to nothing about a player’s performance.
I don’t understand what you mean. If the definition of a win doesn’t change, (which it won’t) then what are we talking about? If you are saying assigning a win to one player in a team sport doesn’t work, I don’t think anyone will argue that point. But since baseball as been played, there has always been a pitcher of record. They have always assigned a team win to an individual.
Your examples are good ones, but your point is lost. What would you recommend the solution to be? How would you assign a win? Are you not going to assign the wins and losses ever? Then what about saves?
Nothing in baseball really makes sense. HR’s hit in Wrigley or Colorado when the wind is blowing out are not the same as hitting one out to dead center at Yankee Stadium with the wind blowing in, but they still count the same in a players stats. 1 hit, one HR, one run scored and one RBI. But they don’t demonstrate or define the different skills and effort needed to hit one homer in an easy park vs a tough park. It’s just a home run.
I was only half listening, but I recently heard about a poor pitcher that was saddled with a loss for one inning pitched, despite allowing no hits and striking out three batters. IIRC, a batter reached first on a passed ball third strike, then stole two bases and reached home on a balk.
There is a rule, IIRC, that if a pitcher qualifies for the win but was particularly ineffective (like in the OP’s example), the official scorer can assign the win to another pitcher instead. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen this rule applied, though.
That actually only applies to relief pitchers when the starter can’t be credited with a win because he didn’t stay in the game for 5 innings. (It’s rule 10.19(c)(4).) In any case, it’s also for pitchers deemed ineffective in a brief appearance, and the OP’s full inning pitched certainly isn’t brief.