Apologist wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Right, but Samardzija has pitched the majority of his games in very favorable conditions for pitchers and that has resulted in his low ERA and WHIP. People are insisting he's having a great season so far. Isn't that really the same thing?
Which is why we aren't arguing that.
We should probably value offense more than defense because you have to score to win, defense is hard to measure, and pitching is a significant component of defense. Which is why it's ridiculous to measure pitcher worth by an arbitrary individual statistic such as the pitcher Win.
Some guys are arguing that though. And the pitcher Win is no more arbitrary than any other statistic. One team's offense is another team's defense.
You cannot remove a player's numbers from the games in which those numbers were created. I know it's popular to say "poor Samardzija deserved to win" and that he didn't receive "run support", but the folly of such thinking should really come home for anyone who watched that game last night. A wide cross section of shitty relievers "pitched great" last night too. Or did they? What's more likely? That Jake Petricka, Matt Lindstrom, et al were all dominant on the same night or that the game conditions made scoring near impossible?