I'm still trying to figure out why any one stat, I don't care what it is, is being advanced as informative in and of itself.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I don't say that. Over the course of a season 100 runs is significant. But that fraction is insignificant in the space of today's game with a Cy Young candidate on the mound (if there actually was one on the mound). And Kansas City certainly didn't establish its average run-scoring superiority over the White Sox with Mondesi and Cuthbert in the lineup. The fact that you and others twist like this isn't really great for your argument.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

That isn't what is going on. There are really two sides here.

Win/Loss means something and Win/Loss means nothing. JORR has said plenty of times that it is not the only stat that should be used. It is just a stat that should be used.

I look at it like I do "championships won". It matters. Plenty of good players don't have one. Plenty of bad players have one. It doesn't mean that it doesn't matter though.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Because page views, board traffic.

Half the time I think this is JoRR's modus operandi.

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Look, I know you're one of the bigger baseball fans here and a guy who has actually watched a lot of games. I think everyone would agree that Quintana is "good" in terms of his ability to get batters out in general. But, as a guy who is actually a fan paying attention, I'm sure you know that there are guys who shrink in crucial situations and guys who grow in them. Quintana inevitably comes to that spot in the game where he needs to make a pitch- all the great pitches he made to that point are immaterial now, the game is at the plate, right here, right now- and he comes up short. That's how he gets his record.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I will allow that it's a complimentary stat to consider, but nothing more. A long time ago it certainly was more important b/c (a) starters typically started more, and went deeper into, games , and (b) nobody knew any better.

If that's the prevailing take, more or less, that would be nice.

As to your 'championships' example, even it is terribly flawed if for no other reason than you're using an individual quantity that only comes from a collective effort, and one that may have nothing to do with a given player ... example, compare Ernie Banks (0) or, hell, even Barry Larkin (1) to Phil Rizzuto (7).

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Quintana is like a boxer who dominates every round and is leading on all scorecards when he gets knocked out in the twelfth. Everyone always thinks it will be different next time. That he won't make that mistake.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

The counter to that is that there are no individual stats that don't come from a collective effort in team sports. Even a baseball player is effected by his teammates on everything. Imagine we put Kris Bryant out there with 8 members of this board and let him face the Cardinals. His statistics will look much different too.

I mean, we might as well just say "stats are bad" for everything then.

I'm still waiting for the day where we take the batter completely out of the discussion in regards to how we judge pitchers and instead just concentrate on ball placement and speed. Hey look, Javy Vazquez is now in the hall of fame!

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

We're about three-quarters of the way to doing that now.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Placing any value on championships to measure how good a position baseball player is is absurd.

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All well and good ... but I guess I'm not comfortable asserting a direct correlation between "clutch" (aka TWTW) and W/L, and then subsequently determining from that if a pitcher is any good or not ... at least not without first examining a number of other pieces of data. It can be garnish, maybe even a side dish, but that's it.

I get the anecdotal, feely, whatever you want to call it ... I think most folks do, even the ones that won't admit to it. Hell, the genesis for a lot of this advanced stats stuff was precisely because of fickle human nature as an actor and as an observer of said actor. However, feelings and casual observations, especially from the outside like you or I would make (rather than a baseball "guy" ... a scout ... a GM ... a teammate), are way too sketchy to build anything that should be paraded around as an informed take on a guy, especially now that we 'know better' (e.g., have demonstrably greater amounts of and more objective quantification of data to employ)

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I know. It's all a crap shoot.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Yeah, Ken Griffey, Jr. sucked.

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Yes and no. There are guys that are "championship-type" players like Jeter and Pedroia. They contribute to a team in ways that aren't in the box score. But this is another no-win argument because it's not something that is easily measured. All the SABR wizards would have moved Jeter and played A-Rod at short. And I guarantee the Yankees wouldn't have won as many championships.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

But didn't they only win one championship with A-Rod?

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Right, but what is more likely over 140 starts, that a guy is incredibly, unbelievably unlucky or that there is something wrong with him?

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I will presume you're just not trying with that one ... for your sake anyway ... we'll call it an 'outlier'.

So if, as you say, "a baseball player is effected by his teammates", than I'm at a loss for how one rectifies that with a pitcher's W/L record being a direct indicator of a pitcher's value ... that is, unless the fella's running 27Ks a game ... at that point, I'll grant that W/L is probably a fine indicator of the hurler's efforts, though my eyes will probably be increasingly drawn to the K stat, but that's probably because I'm a white devil racist.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

There is other evidence that this is not true.

Why do you jump to such a binary position?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

That's the point. Baseball players aren't just Strat-O-Matic style numbers that you plug into a lineup. A-Rod is not a better player than Jeter within the context of a game. He maybe be a better individual based on numbers- obviously he is- but the game is more complicated than just putting the nine highest OPS on the field and thinking it's the best team ever.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

The bolded should read "it's completely immeasurable." If we are going to say that there are players who impact the team in immeasurable ways that lead to championships, then we'd have to say the same about managers. Neither is true or remotely objective. Individual position players, no matter how great, cannot carry a team to a championship. Baseball just isn't designed that way.

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Jorr, I would pay to hear you debate your point with Bernsie. That would be awesome. Throw in a bunch of clutch to rile him up.

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Elections have consequences.

stfu

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Don't be at a loss. W/L is one indicator of a pitchers value. The fact that he doesn't control it 100% doesn't matter just like a batter not controlling his OPS 100% doesn't matter.

If you tell me a starting pitcher wins a lot more than he loses I am more likely to think he is good. Do you disagree?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

There may be ways to measure it. And for the record, I always say "managers don't matter" as a shorthand. It's not that they actually don't matter. Clearly a ballclub is a volatile mix of talents and personalities. When I say they don't matter- and I'm sure I've said this before- I mean that they may be a fit here but not there and you'll never know if it worked until it's over and maybe not even then. You can see that a guy like Billy Martin or Guillen can shake up a moribund club, but they have a shelf life. I don't know if that means they are "good" or "bad", but I do understand some teams not wanting to deal with their bullshit.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Well, I think we have to define "great" in this context. Ted Williams is clearly greater than Derek Jeter based on numerical accomplishments. But it's not Jeter's hitting that helped carry the Yankees to championships, it's his presence, his leadership. You will rarely find a championship team that doesn't have a guy like that.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Baseball is probably the team sport where "championships won" matters the least but it doesn't mean that it has no meaning especially if we are comparing them to a player who performed so well in the playoffs that he has a major part in winning one.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Oh, come on now. Do you think David Ross will be responsible if the Cubs win it all?

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Since he became a full-time starter, Quintana has limited opponent scoring to a rate of 3.64 runs per 9. In that same time frame, Quintana is 7th-worst among qualified starters with an average RS/9 of 3.81. Since 2012, the average AL R/G mark has been 4.37, and the Sox have averaged 4.04 R/G.

Quintana has held "the League" (because I'm not going through and calculating a R/G average for only Quintana's opponents in the last 5 years, the AL's 5-year average will get us close enough) to an average of 83% of their scoring, the Sox have been held to 94% of theirs when Quintana is on the hill.

When you remove the 2012 season, the differences become even more glaring. Quintana holds "the League" to 3.56 R/9, or 81% of their scoring, and the Sox average 3.89 R/G, or are held to 96% of their average scoring by Quintana's collective opponents.

Since 2013, Quintana is 28th in the MLB among all qualified starters in limiting run scoring rate (R/9), but is 82nd in W/L%. To say that has more to do with how he "competes" than with how poorly his offense has performed for multiple years is beyond silly.

I don't think Ross is that guy. I think Rizzo is. And I don't think the Cubs will win because, well, they're the Cubs. But if they do, I think Rizzo is a critical guy regardless of how he performs on the field.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

If someone made a statement like that about Maddon, you'd be all over them.

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