Lets leave the goalposts where they are. 200 starts and a losing record from a good pitcher.

I still don't understand, you're on record saying that Chan Ho Park is a really good pitcher. It's a JORR approved fact, he's a really good pitcher.

Yet Park, this really good pitcher in a career span that mirrors Matlack and Gubicza and was LONGER than Cain, wasn't even worth 1/2 of what those guys were. So again, if Park is a really good pitcher, as proffered by JORR, then certainly at the very lease Matlack and Gubicza and Cain were good pitchers.

Lets me know when you find them.

Run support is a thing. Pitcher A gives up 2 runs or less in more than 60% of his starts but loses half of those games because his offense averaged less that 2 runs in those starts. Pitcher B gives up 4 runs in 60% of his starts but has a winning record because his offense averaged 6.5 runs in those starts. You believe pitcher B is better than pitcher A. I don't.

_________________
Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Why does it seem like the next board schism is going to be over Jose Quintana.

I'm following JORR to chicagowinners.com 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!

This is great stuff. And I love being right.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

Here's another stupid chart



I love being right too.

Well, you're misquoting me all over the place. I believe I said Park was really good from 1997-2001, which he most certainly was. Cain was really good too, albeit for a shorter time frame. You seem to want to ignore the bad stretches of these pitchers. I'm not ignoring Park's decline but he was still competitive even running on fumes.

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Here's one problem we're having. Whether you acknowledge it or not, you're a WAR zombie. You accept that nice little number as a measure of a player's value without the slightest question. That's why I posed the question about Phil Niekro.

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Let me make it really simple. The White Sox offense averages 4 runs and change per game. The majority of the offenses Quintana faces average 4 runs and a little more change per game. Why is it that so many unremarkable pitchers can hold the White Sox further under their season average of runs scored than The Great Quintana can hold the opposing team under theirs?

_________________
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Either you're to dumb to know what you posted or a liar, you chose:



Nothing in here about being really good from 1997-2001, just the flat statement that he was a really good pitcher.



You're already starting to move the goalposts here, but still nothing about being very good from 1997-2001, just that he had ten seasons where he was good in almost all of them. This assertion is quickly debunked by showing he was shittier in more seasons that he was good or very good.



Again, nothing about being a very good pitcher from 1997-2001, you're still on the him being a good starting pitcher for 10 years, which I clearly showed he was not.

So it's clear that I'm not misquoting you. You're either a dufus or a liar, take you pick. You've asserted that Chan Ho Park is alternatively a "really good pitcher" and that he was a "good" pitcher as a starter for 10 years. Again, this is the JORR seal of "good" approval, as shown multiple times in posts above. Now I'll go back to this:

I still don't understand, you're on record saying that Chan Ho Park is a really good pitcher. It's a JORR approved fact, he's a really good pitcher.

Yet Park, this really good pitcher in a career span that mirrors Matlack and Gubicza and was LONGER than Cain, wasn't even worth 1/2 of what those guys were. So again, if Park is a really good pitcher, as proffered by JORR, then certainly at the very lease Matlack and Gubicza and Cain were good pitchers.

Here it is, you disingenuous cocksucker:

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
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With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Here's what you don't realize. I'm not using WAR to state that Player X who has a WAR of 30.1 is definitely better than Player Y who has a WAR of 29.7. I'm not using WAR in that way.

Again, I've said before that WAR isn't perfect, but it's a good way to quickly compare the careers of players, especially players with similar career duration.

You said that Chan Ho Park is a "really good pitcher". He has a career WAR of 18.2. Lets say that WAR is off by 30% and say that Park really was worth 23 WAR.

Matt Cain is another man who pitched in the major leagues, he has a career WAR of 30.9. Lets say that WAR is off by 30% and say that Cain was really worth 21 WAR.

They are still comparable players with similar values over their careers. So even adjusting for a wildly drastic over/undervalue for the guys, Cain is still a similar pitcher to the very good Chan Ho Park, hence Cain is at least a good pitcher.

Lets not even start on Gubicza and Matlack who you could apply a 50% reduction and still have them be in the same value range as Park.

Based on what? The stat that says Wilbur Wood had more value than Clayton Kershaw and that only nine pitchers in baseball history had more value than Phil Niekro?

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Right, but again, you re-assert that he was a good starting pitcher from 96-05, the second time you asserted that 10 year period of "good" starting pitching.

I'm not interested in his career WAR. There are too many variables, too much noise, and that's even without going across eras. Unless you are going to sit here and tell me that Phil Niekro had more value than Warren Spahn and Bob Gibson.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
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Yeah, I'm not backing away from that.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
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I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

So you haven't found that pitcher?

_________________
Be well

GO BEARS!!!

This isn't even accurate (ranked by best seasons):

Park's Peak: Cain Peak:
132 ERA+ 4.23 FIP 5 WAR 147 ERA+ 3.89 FIP 6.3 WAR
115 ERA+ 4.22 FIP 3.5 WAR 126 ERA+ 3.40 FIP 3.9 WAR
114 ERA+ 3.89 FIP 4.1 WAR 124 ERA+ 3.65 FIP 4.5 WAR
109 ERA+ 3.82 FIP 3.0 WAR 121 ERA+ 2.91 FIP 3.7 WAR
82 ERA+ 5.18 FIP 0.2 WAR 117 ERA+ 3.91 FIP 4.6 WAR

So when you stack what you call Park's "really good" years against Cain's top 5 seasons, you'll see that across the board Cain's seasons are better or at least equal to Park's for the period of time in which you assert that Park was a "really good" pitcher. In short you can't pick a short enough time frame in which Park was better than Cain.

So lets try this again. How can Park, who was alternatively good, very good, good for x number of years, very good for Y number of years or whatever bullshit you happen to be peddling in that post, how can Park, who by comparison wasn't as good as Cain at his peak or over the duration but is classified by JORR as an official "good" pitcher not lead to the conclusion that Cain is a good pitcher at the very least.

Park = JORR official good pitcher
Cain > Park
Cain = JORR official good pitcher

So whether you take a whole career, which includes bad seasons, or look at the peak which is presumably only good seasons (not surprised that your bullshit you throw included that truely awful 1999 season for Park) Cain was as good if not better than Park.

Cain and Park overlapped and played in the same era.

I'm giving a 50% reduction on both Gubicza and Matlack. Trust me pal, that clears out plenty of noise.

Ok, I'll try this one more time. Cain, Gubicza and Matlack all pitched better in their careers than Park. Especially if you consider that Park was a "good" starting pitcher for 10 years even though he was below league average (and well below in many of those years) in better than 50% of those seasons. If you look at every other measure other than W/L percentage (again that is what we are trying to correlate to here so we can't use it as a data point) the conclusion would be pretty clear that Cain, Gubicza, and Matlack were as good or better than Park.

Again, I don't know why this is the hill you want to die on. Are there pitchers with 200 career starts and a losing record, yet still were good pitchers? Yes. Are there a lot of them? No.

It just seems silly and pathetic at this point. You picked the parameters. Sorry if your artificial parameters didn't produce the data that you wanted.

The R squared is very low in the top chart, meaning a very very low correlation between W/L and R/S. So that top chart actually says there is almost no correlation between the two. In stats language it says that the independent variable describes about 13% of the outcome for the dependent variable in a regression analysis. If someone with a better stats background wants to step in because I am 15 years removed from high level stats classes, feel free to better explain this or correct me.

_________________
Hawaii (fuck) You

Ok, and it sucks to have to keep making the same post but you aren't backing away from the statement yet won't flesh out the details. So lets try again:

Here are Park's top eight seasons as a starting pitcher by games started:

2001: 35 Starts 218 K's 114 ERA+
1998: 34 Starts 191 K's 109 ERA+
2000: 34 Starts 217 K's 132 ERA+
1999: 33 Starts 174 K's 82 ERA+ (yuk)
1997: 29 Starts 166 K's 115 ERA +

You'll probably want to avert your eyes Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark Style

2005: 29 Starts 113 K's 76 ERA+ (hint, this sucks)
2002: 25 Starts 121 K's 83 ERA+ (hint, this is awful)
2006: 21 Starts 96 K's 84 ERA+ (hint, whatever is marginally above awful, this is it)

If you want to stretch it to 10 it does not help (see I know what "about" means, unlike yourself).

2004: 16 Starts 63 K's 92 ERA+ (a career renaissance!)
1996: 10 Starts 119 K's 107 ERA+ (not a bad season for a relief pitcher, which what he primarily was here.

So yeah, it's painfully obvious that you can't find about ten seasons where Park was a good starting pitcher. In fact if you take out the 1996 season, where he was primarily a reliever, you've got nine starting pitching seasons (again, I know what about means) and in 5 of them (that's more than 50%) he had a worse than average ERA.

So please detail which of these seasons Park was a "good pitcher".

OK, lets try this, why don't you suggest 3-4 stats that you do find acceptable for comparing pitchers of the same or different eras. And remember because we are trying to isolate a positive W/L record as it correlates to good pitchers you can't chose that stat, or a derivative of that stat.

Almost all pitchers have ups and downs. I'm not really sure what you're attempting to get at here other than trying to play some silly "gotcha" game. Park had a good career. At times he was dominating. Cain was dominating as well at times, in fact moreso than Park. But it was relatively short-lived and he appears to have gone into decline sooner, due, no doubt, to his injury. If you believe Park was lucky in posting his .560 winning percentage we"ll just have to disagree.

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See that's just it. I think all the other averages and aggregates tell you about the guy's abilities but not how he deployed them. A pitcher can only pitch the games he's in. And in each of those games there is another starting pitcher attempting to do the same thing he is. Sometimes his offense is better, sometimes it's worse, but in most cases the difference is a fraction of a run, something that can't be scored in the actual game the two men are pitching. So why, if Jose Quintana is so great like many numbers suggest he is, is he unable to hold the offenses he faces to further under their run scoring average than the ostensibly lesser pitchers he is facing hold the White Sox offense under theirs?

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1. I'm not playing gotcha games, you are asserting things and I'm just asking you to back them up with data, or a better explanation using facts. This isn't a gotcha thing, it's just me not willing to blindly accept the bullshit that you shovel around here all the time.

2. I agree that Park had a good career, I've never said otherwise.

3. I agree that Cain was dominating, that's the hallmark of a good pitcher. Dominating at times.

4. Cain's dominance was longer than Parks as shown here:



5. Cain didn't go into decline sooner than Park, in fact he was better for longer as evidenced by these two posts:





6. I never said anything about if Park was lucky or unlucky to get the wins that he did. All I have ever said is that Matt Cain was a good pitcher. All you ever said, and reaffirmed a bunch of times, is that Park was a "good" pitcher at the least or potentially "really good". The above just shows that for a lot of data points Cain was as good if not better than Park, something you admit to an extent yourself when you say that Cain was more dominant. Not only was he more dominant he was better for longer.

7. Again, I don't know why you are picking this fight over Cain. You threw out what I thought was an interesting question, good starter with 200 starts and a losing record. I thought I would find a bunch, and was surprised that I did not. But I did find some. Instead of acknowledging there are a few outliers to that data set you've spent the whole afternoon arguing that Matt Cain was a worse pitcher than Chan Ho Park. I mean it's silly really when you look at every stat other than the one we are isolating for.

Uh, you realize guys get the numbers by deploying their skills in the game right? You know that people didn't run a computer simulation to come up with how many batters Matt Cain struck out in a game.

I'm giving you free reign here dude, pick a few stats and we can stack up Cain next to Park.

Okay, I'd rather have the discussion like this than to be sniping at each other and calling each other aardvarks and motherfuckers. I don't want to beat you over the head. I'm looking for the right answer. Some of the disconnect is those two years where Cain was 15-30 with some otherwise good numbers. And I know the Giants weren't good in those seasons. I'm willing to grant that there is some degree of bad luck there, but not to the point where a good pitcher loses 2/3 of his decisions.

Cain obviously has a better peak than Park, but I don't think he's had a better career if you compare them side by side.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
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With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Pick the stats other than W/L to judge them by.

I'm letting you PICK THE STATS!!!!!

No, I understand, obviously the numbers are the numbers. But strikeouts in and of themselves aren't anything other than a tool a guy uses to be a good pitcher. The ability to wipe a batter out is an edge, a head start if you will. But he's not striking out batters in a vacuum. It's only relevant in game context. This is what leads JLN to say Vazquez was better than Buehrle, an argument I understand but vehemently disagree with.

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This is where someone keen on regression analysis would be helpful, because the fact that over such a sample size, a non-zero R-squared remained is likely statistically significant (though I'm not calculating a p-value for this data set, even if I knew how). Still and all, something almost completely out of the pitcher's control (how much run support he gets) can explain 13% of a change in his W/L%...that's pretty striking.