When do pitcher wins begin to matter? For example, is Rich Hill a better pitcher than Matt Harvey because he's won more games this year?

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That's why ERA, etc. is irrelevant. The high mound held down hitters. For both pitchers.

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With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

You need a larger sample. There is no great pitcher with a losing career record.

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With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Im not arguing great. I'm trying to distinguish how big a sample you need. Clearly great pitchers are going to have a large amount of wins.

Harvey has more loses in half as many seasons as Hill. Is Harvey the worse pitcher?

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Nolan Ryan is an example of a guy that lost a lot of games. 300 game winner, yes. But only cuz he pitched to the age of 46. .526 winning percentage. 324-294. Not a very impressive win percentage. Just guessing. But probably the lowest win percentage of all HOF pitchers.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/r/ryanno01.shtml

They both pitched from the same mound and each team hit from the same box.

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We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.- Eric Hoffer

Well, who do you think is better? It's not brain surgery. The guy you think is good is the guy who is good. Everyone wants the "secret" guy to prove his worth as Fantasy Theo.

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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 Elon, Tulsi, and Don

You're the guy making the argument that wins are a meaningful stat. What do Harvey and Hills win and loss record tell us about who is better?

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You're the guy making the argument that wins are a meaningful stat. What do Harvey and Hills win and loss record tell us about who is better?

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I really wonder about people that argue against this kind of thought.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

If their careers ended today they wouldn't be significantly different. They're both guys that have giant "stuff". Harvey has been plagued by injuries. Hill is ten years older and has had issues of his own. I think you know who the "better" pitcher is or you wouldn't be posing the question, but circumstances may not allow that to actually come to fruition. I figured all of that out without any "advanced" statistics.

_________________
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 Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I know who I think the better pitcher is, however Im asking you who you think is the better pitcher. your stance on W/L records leads me to think that you'd say Hill is the better pitcher as he has won more games and because Harvey has lost more games than Hill in a quarter of the amount of seasons.

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These guys both have less than 90 career starts each. Less than three full seasons worth of starts. It's not a large enough sample.

But I do think you're probably underestimating Rich Hill. He's had a strange career, but he clearly has the ability to dominant major league lineups over relatively lengthy stretches.

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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 Elon, Tulsi, and Don

How useful is the win as a stat if you need at least 90 career starts for it to become meaningful?

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That's baseball. It's a game of time and repetition. That kind of weird thinking has people putting Kris Bryant in the Hall of Fame. It just doesn't work that way. There are many guys who are capable of making the big leagues who are also capable of brilliance over a season or even several. It takes longer than that to separate those who are very good from those who are just guys who played.

Take a look at Bill Swift. Through 1992-93 his career looks remarkably like Jake Arrieta's. And in 1992-93 he was as good as Arrieta was in 2014-15. Now, I doubt Arrieta will fall off as precipitously, but he could. That's how the game is for the vast majority of guys. Most aren't Tom Seaver.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
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That's like 3 full years isn't it?

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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!

Maybe the problem is I'm looking at wins prospectively and you're looking at them retroactively. Because I can help myself here's another comparison. Dwight Gooden or Jamier Moyer, who is the better pitcher?

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The thing though is that JORR is fighting against the idea that a pitcher can only control home runs, walks, and strikeouts, and anything else is just "luck".

While JORR defends it, I don't think he believes that W/L is the only stat that matters. It just does matter.

Otherwise, you get people who honestly think Javy Vazquez was better than Mark Buehrle.

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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!

It's not just counting wins. Doc Gooden has a .635 career winning percentage. That's absolutely elite.

Obviously, with modern bullpen usage and five (and six) man rotations, the best pitchers aren't capable of winning as many games as guys did in the 50s, 60s, or 70s. It's unreasonable to expect Chris Sale (or Jose Quintana) to win 25 games or even 20 in most seasons. But if a guy is really a top pitcher, it should be easier than ever to maintain a high winning percentage. If you're really elite, you should have the lead in most games you pitch. And when you come out in the sixth or seventh, you can't take a loss yourself in the late innings. You may not get the win, but you aren't getting the loss. And that speaks to the heart of the Quintana debate. If he is really so good, how can it be that the opposing pitcher in most games does better than he does? And I've already taken apart the "weak offense" argument countless times. The Sox average four runs and change per game. So do most of their opponents. How great can Quintana be when the starters he faces usually manage to hold the White Sox further under their scoring average than Quintana can hold the other pitcher's team?

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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 Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Hill is in the ASG=great

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Right. All the statistics tell you something about the player. But a starter's W/L record tells you about how he competed in the games he pitched.

Statistical analysis necessarily treats all situations as equal and expects that the curves will smooth out. (Ironically, it's only W/L record that receives scrutiny over the same expectation.) The thing is, all situations aren't equal. This isn't science like taking 150 lab rats from the same female line and injecting them with the same amount of aspartame each day for six months and checking the results. The "when" matters very much in sports, particularly in baseball.

_________________
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 Elon, Tulsi, and Don

There are entire psychological studies on reaction to pressure. I promise you that in Theo's battery of tests he performs on draft picks, they have a hidden test for reaction to pressure. We know NFL teams have purposely caused pressurized situations for people they are interviewing to gauge ability to cope.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Hell, I knew Wilson Contrearas was a star after his first AB

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Many (fuck that, dolphin don't play that game) scouts won't even begin to judge a player at a new level until he has 400 ABs at that level.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I'm waiting for the day that the stat guys take it a step further and start claiming that you should only judge pitchers based on velocity and pitch position and completely take the batter out of the equation.

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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!

Fans have all this hand wringing over the topic.

Ask a pitcher. He will tell you it is his job to win games.

In fact, Dan asked Sale that a couple of years ago, anticipating a "W/L is a meaningless stat response. Sale straight out told him his job was to win the game every time out. Dan, as only Dan could, tried to argue the point with an MLB pitcher.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

No it's not. Not to me anyway. I would never argue that a pitcher's W/L record is a measure of how he handles the pressure of pitching 6 plus innings.

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Why not? Of course there's pressure in any competitive situation.

Additionally, with pitcher's it even goes beyond that. Many guys just don't function the same way with runners on base. They accumulate sparkling stats while delivering from the wind-up but as soon as they have to go to the stretch they come undone. In this era of low offense coming undone with men on base a couple times a game can lead to you having stats that look like Jose Quintana's.

_________________
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 Elon, Tulsi, and Don

There are MANY more factors that play into a pitcher getting a win or a loss over the course of 6 plus innings than there are in a single at bat with RISP. It's a different type of pressure. I would agree that a pitcher's batting average against with RISP is similar pressure to an at bat with RISP, and like I said before a batter's OPS with RISP is a better stat than RBI, but it doesn't render the RBI completely meaningless in measuring a hitter's effectiveness.

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I would suggest that judging a batter on his RBI is more unfair than judging a starting pitcher on his W/L record. Certain hitters have many more opportunities for RBI than others. Every starting pitcher is in control of his own destiny to start each game. Pitch better than the opposing starter and you will very rarely lose and you'll win more often than not.

Regardless, a man that drives in 100 runs or thereabout consistently in his prime is a good ballplayer rather than a lucky one.

_________________
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 Elon, Tulsi, and Don