Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
leashyourkids wrote:
Just look at Quintana. It's not a good predictor of future success, and it's not the best stat within a small window.
It's not even a good descriptor of performance, because look at Quintana. Wins have him as a "losing" pitcher, tied for 44th in the league, but in reality
he's one of the best in the league at getting people out and limiting run-scoring.This is really the crux of the argument. You've read a bunch of shit that has convinced you that baseball is a non-competitive sport, that game context is meaningless, and that each player just focuses on his task and it's completely divorced from anything else. You truly believe that a pitcher's job is simply getting people out and limiting run-scoring. I don't blame you for that. It's a popular opinion. An opinion that makes people give up number 1 picks for Shelby Miller and think that Quintana is great.
A pitcher's job is not some abstract on a sheet with a bunch of numbers and averages. It only exists within the actual games he pitches. You can't take a 7 inning 2 run performance from a game that Quintana pitched where the Sox were shut out and move it to a different game where the Sox scored ten runs. A pitcher's job is to give up less runs than the guy(s) he is facing
in the games he pitches. Sometimes that means walking a hitter on purpose, something you would obviously never do if your job were actually to get him out. I now understand why you feel Vazquez was better than Buehrle. It's a disagreement over what each was actually attempting to accomplish.