Are you saying he was lucky over 500 starts?

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I'm saying a guy that was routinely giving up 4 or more runs in that era wasn't great. Most people don't believe that he should be a HoFer.

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Chris Sale would say Colon was better that season.

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Chris Sale is being a great teammate. I would probably say the same thing if I were in his shoes. Excuses only make you feel better. That being said Stevie Wonder can see he is arguably a top 5 pitcher and would have more wins if our offense was better.

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Last time I checked a relief pitcher was a pitcher or do you have some crazy theory on why they are not pitchers. If so, please keep it to yourself. Also, i'm pretty sure Felix Hernandez was a starting pitcher unless again you have some crazy theory on guys named Felix.

As for Cy Young, I wasn't around to see him play, so you have the advantage here. But he was good enough for them to name an award after him for the best pitchers in the league. Couldn't have been that bad. Maybe he didn't sign your baseball as a kid or something?

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I don't know whether he should be a Hall of Famer or not. I don't have a vote. But if you think his ERA was bad for the time in which he pitched, you don't know enough about baseball to be in a discussion with me.

What league did Ben Sheets pitch in? What league did Bartolo Colon pitch in? What was the AL vs. NL record in '04-'06? How many pitchers did Sheets strike out?



Would that kind of thinking have caused you to select Sheets over Colon? How would that have worked out?

You're kind of all over the place.

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Do you really not understand the difference between a starter and a reliever and why one might view their W/L records differently?

I never said Cy Young was "bad", but if you think he's the best pitcher ever, you're obviously basing it on his W/L record, which is the very definition of irony, besides making you unqualified to have this conversation.

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The difference between the NL and AL wasn't 2.31 runs a game. You're trying awfully hard to hold onto to a terrible thought. Sheets didn't strike out 120 pitchers in his 30 starts. Like I said ONLY you could look at that stat line and say Colon or any other pitcher with similar numbers was better that season. It takes a very stubborn man to hold onto a very dumb thought. As I said earlier no scout or player personnel guy would ever evaluate pitchers solely on their W/L record but you're stuck on it.

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BTW why shouldn't it matter if a relief pitcher lose a game or not? What STAT do you use to determine if a reliever is good? Saves?

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And yet, evaluating them by their W/L records would have led one to the correct conclusion that Colon is a far superior pitcher to Ben Sheets.

The fact that you can't grasp that they complied their numbers in completely different environments says a lot about your grasp of the subject matter. For example, I never suggested Sheets struck out 120 pitchers, but he struck out a whole bunch more than Colon did, along with a lot of weak seven and eight hole NL hitters. Their numbers are completely unrelated as they were not created against the same batters. Is that really so difficult to understand?

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Why is it assumed only NL teams have weak 7 and 8 hitters? Last time I checked plenty of AL teams do too.

I think WHIP is the most important number for a reliever, especially a closer. At that point in the game, particularly in a save situation, it's critical to keep men off base. That isn't such a concern for someone like Mark Buehrle who has led his league in hits allowed at least a couple of times in what were very successful seasons.

For a closer, a win is really as bad as a loss in most cases as it suggests a blown save. Ideally, a closer would have a 0-0 record.

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We're comparing two pitchers in the 2004 season. Everyone here is such an expert on baseball that he can regurgitate stats from Fangraphs, but apparently most don't know how much stronger the AL was than the NL in that time frame. 2004 was the beginning of a run of dominance for one league over the other that hadn't been seen since the NL was quicker to embrace blacks and Hispanics in the 50s.

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We're talking about a season. Regardless of who they faced the talent wasn't 2.31 runs a game better. You asked how many pitchers he struck out and I just pointed out it wasn't 120. That was the difference in their strikeout numbers.

There is a reason no scout evaluates a pitcher solely on W/L. That is also the reason that Felix Hernandez won the Cy Young award even though he only won 13 games and 2 other pitchers won 21 the same year. BTW Hernandez pitched in the AL.

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I love that article. I think I know how you would have voted. You would have also made the argument that he shouldn't have given up any runs in the games they were shut out.
http://m.espn.go.com/mlb/story?storyId= ... rc=desktop

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Do you not see the irony in the fact that you are so acutely aware of the "support" provided by Felix Hernandez's inept offense, yet you remain willfully ignorant of the differences between the offenses faced by Colon and Sheets in 2004?

Somehow, whatever the amount of runs that are required to get Bartolo Colon the "W", he usually comes out on top. You apparently would have us believe that he is simply one of God's favorite creatures with fortune beyond any reasonable expectation smiling down upon him.

Besides which, I'm not sure why you think Hernandez supports your argument and not mine when his career win percentage is like .570 or something.

People read shit on the Internet and they're so eager to accept it, to be the guy "in the know". Like FIP, for example. The silly concept that beyond walks, strikeouts and homers, all pitchers are equal. As if a guy like Mark Buehrle isn't attempting to affect where each ball is batted and doing so more effectively than John Danks. Here is a guy with a perfect game and another near perfect game wherein he faced the minimum, both games featuring a minimal amount of strikeouts, and the conventional wisdom is that this is simply a very, very, very lucky man who was the beneficiary of extreme luck on balls in play, not once, mind you, but TWICE!!!!!! It would really make a person who believes such a thing seem mentally challenged, except for the fact that one can find article upon article by self-declared "experts" to support such an absurd position.

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I see you struggling. You've told us all that W/L determines if a pitcher had a good season/career. I've said that no one else but you would do that. Now you want to put Felix Hernandez's Cy Young in your column even though 2 AL pitchers won 8 more games. Is it W/L numbers tell you if a player had a good season or career? It appears that you want to focus on career totals now.

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Wasn't it Sammy Sosa who walked to spoil the perfect game, and then proceeded to get picked off?

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I'm not struggling in the slightest. I know what I know. You're all over the place. You've even told us that a guy with a 148 adjusted ERA wasn't very good.

I don't blame you. Yours is the popular viewpoint. "Analyzing" numbers (and picking and choosing them) without any regard for how they fit in the actual game context. It's the same kind of philosophy that made people think Adam Dunn was a good player. I can go on the Internet and find arguments for putting him in the Hall of Fame. You can find pages full of equations developed by "experts" explaining why Dunn is great. Not one of those experts is willing to refund the money Reinsdorf wasted on him or refund Aggravated Bob's ticket money that he used to watch Dunn kill two contending teams during his White Sox tenure. Sure, his numbers can be impressive without context, when playing for teams where nothing is expected. But in the heat of a pennant race vs. contenders in crucial situations he's going to wind up striking out and looking helpless against a mediocre loogy. That's who he really is. And the "experts" don't apologize. They're on to their next bit of silliness like arguing that Ben Zobrist is better than Pujols or that Dwight Evans was a superior batter to Jim Rice. It's a view of the game that will lead future fans to look at Baseball Reference and authoritatively state that Joel horlen was greater than Catfish Hunter or that Jose DeLeon was better than Jack McDowell when anyone who actually saw them play at the time knows how utterly absurd such a thought really is.

That's the thing about baseball- the "when" is critically important. Because the "experts" haven't figured out a way to measure "clutch" performance, they prefer to insist it does not exist. But I would suggest that the respective W/L records of Sheets and Colon illustrate very well the clutch component in one man's game and the lack of such in another's. Sheets has good strikeouts, but he has a very bad "when".

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Yes.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don

Maybe he struck out Colon a few times?

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I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Fair point I think. But consider this: you are tossing bean bags into buckets that are lined up at different distances from where you stand. You complete your turn and now wait for your opponent to take his turn. However, his buckets are (1) lined up differently than yours, and while the number of buckets matches yours, some could also (2) smaller or bigger than your set, making his challenge markedly different than yours, easier at times and more difficult during others, but fundamentally different nonetheless.

You score x against your set over nine alternating turns, he scores y over nine turns. Win or lose implies competition against a similar set of circumstances, so is it fair to say you lost or won against your opponent given the measurably different challenges you both faced when compared against each other?

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JORR I am going to need you to stay focused. You have now begun arguing things I have never said. Are you against advanced stats? When I just looked at some of my baseball cards I got as a kid I didn't see an adjusted ERA category.

I've been focused exclusively on your very bad belief that W/L is the only way you should evaluate a pitcher. Is this evaluation good for a season or a career? You were absolute in your belief that it shows who had a good season and career but now it appears that you are wavering a little and want to focus solely on career W/L numbers.

Even if you believe pitching in the AL caused Colon's ERA to be 2.31 runs a game higher than Sheets in 2004 you can also find NL guys with winning records that didn't have as great a year as Sheets.

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I think JORR believes W/L is still the ultimate stat not only for a career, or a season, but for an individual start.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

Well yeah, everybody would rather have a win than whatever "dominant" performance ends in a loss.

A team win. And a pitcher that gives his team the best chance to win.

Not a pitcher that happened to get a win because his offense bailed him out.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

Are you suggesting Ben Sheets gives his team a better chance to win than Bartolo Colon? Because something has obviously gone very wrong.

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That year in 2004? Yes, duh.

What the fuck good is a "best chance to win" if you lose and the other guy wins? If you keep giving your team a "best chance to win" and you don't, maybe you're not giving your team 5the "best chance to win." You get a participation trophy or something?