Because that seems to suggest that Quintana has been incredibly unlucky over 152 starts (quite unlikely) rather than simply a victim of a poor offense (Possible. I don't dispute that Quintana's record would be marginally better had he pitched on a high scoring juggernaut). You seem to be saying that the Sox just don't score for Poor Jose over 152 starts.

It makes much more sense to look at what the team is capable of producing offensively. The fact that they score less than they normally do in games Quintana pitches suggests to me that perhaps conditions are at play, which is a two way street that affects Quintana's ERA and peripherals as well. At least that seems much more logical than believing that the Sox offense freakishly stagnates whenever the hitters see Quintana take the mound.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Why can you never admit you are wrong? You have been for many years about MANY things but you are elite in your mind. Fuck the White Sox when you bring this shit into play. No one cares about them other than the cluster fuck of morons that invade the upside down shell you and your garbage pail bottom feeders feed in.

Nobody cares about the Sox except Sox fans. Strong take, brother.

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

Although I watch almost every game they play because I love baseball. But really I could not care less if they win or lose. Not a fan. But I can watch the Royals or Marlins and still enjoy a baseball game.

This board would be better off if everyone was like that. Way too many fans seem much too invested in how the other side of town is doing.

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

Totally agree. I watch both teams all season long. Have the MLB package. I watch way too much baseball. But I played it. Loved it . My daughters have played. My wife was a All State pitcher in HS who threw 7 no hit games. I was good enough to take the ball and start during my HS career. Football was my thing but looking back on it should have pursued baseball. Not many 5-11 180 lb recievers with 4.9 speed go anywhere. I had the 89 fastball and knew how to pitch but when I tore my elbow up in 1988 I was done.

I wish that you could watch a ball peen hammer enter your skull

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

Well, they don't obviously, as the statistics bear out. When discussing W/L%, it is imperative to look at how the team scores when a pitcher is on the mound, because that is precisely how W/L% is calculated. It doesn't matter if the Sox are, on average, a 5 R/G team, if they don't score runs while the starter is on the mound, for whatever reason, the starter's W/L% will reflect that, because run support while on the mound is one of the determinants in W/L.

Even then, the Sox have averaged 4.09 R/G as a team over the span of Quintana's career, which is right in line with the numbers I gave for the first 3 years of his career, and not too far from the 3.94 RS/9 they've averaged specifically with him on the mound. The .15 run difference in team scoring might be explained by pitcher matchups (#2 guys in the rotation tend to match up with 1's and 2's more than 4's, 5's and spot starters) as well as team talent: the Sox just haven't fielded talented batting lineups for Quintana's career, so maybe they need to face inferior (usually) middle and late relief in order to score runs, which will coincide with Q already being out of the game, and thus out of contention for a "W". Of course, as has been explained earlier, even a .15 R/G difference can result in divergent actual run totals.

I went back to the data I collected last year, and set to massaging out the relievers and true outliers (guys at the end of their career as part-time starters, guys on truly awful expansion teams, etc.), and I came up with this:



That shows nearly 20% of a change in W/L% can be explained by a change in that pitcher's run support.

Then, I thought, what we're really arguing about is how run support can change the W/L% of a pitcher who MANY argue to be "good" irrespective of their W/L%. As such, it would make sense to further whittle down the sample to pitchers who are "good" regardless of their W/L%, to see how run support impacts their resultant W/L%. I set the high-FIP mark at 4, the reasoning being that FIP is scaled to ERA, and 4.00 is about a league-average mark in both ERA and FIP. So in essence, we want to see how run support impacts the W/L% of pitchers we think are average or better. That resulted in this:



For "peripherally good" pitchers, irrespective of their W/L%, 43% of a change in their W/L% is explained by a change in their run support, with a correlation coefficient of .66.

Quintana is, if nothing else, a peripherally good pitcher. He's actually a lot more like Clayton Kershaw than you would want to admit, as far as run support goes (Kershaw's first 20-win season came with a RS/9 of 4.67, then the next two seasons it went back down to the 4.10's, and his W/L% fell off).

EDIT: Removing the outlier that is Robbie Ray (and what a truly weird case he is) improves the linear trendline's r-squared to .40, and the polynomial trendline's r-squared to .44.

The first sentence that I highlighted is the McCarverism that I mentioned earlier. "The team that scores more runs usually wins." Of course we know that opposing teams score more than the Sox do when Quintana pitches. That's why he has a losing record.

I highlighted the second sentence to point out that you seem to be vacillating on whether a fraction of a run is a lot or a little as it suits your argument at the time.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

1. A pitcher getting a "Win" or a "Loss" is in-part contingent on how many runs his team scores while he is still in the game, discussing a team's overall run scoring (which includes a whole lot of time the pitcher isn't in the game, whether he was relieved or didn't even start) is ludicrous. If all you have is "Daaah dat's duh Maccarver" in response, then lol.

2. So you just stopped reading that second paragraph? You get funny when you're wrong.

It's ludicrous? What's ludicrous- or at best pretty goddamn unlikely- is that Quintana somehow got unlucky over 152 starts. Maybe there's another reason that his team scores less in the games he's in and maybe it's related to the fact that the other teams are scoring less than their average in those games as well.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I discussed this in the paragraph you obviously didn't read.

By the bye, any thoughts on 43% of a good pitcher's W/L% being explained by a change in their run support, or is that just something you'll ignore and hope it goes away?

I don't acknowledge the concept of "run support" at all. It's just the ERA of other pitchers in the games they faced the guy in question. If Quintana is so great, shouldn't he get more run support than his opponent at least half the time? I know he plays for a shitty team. I'm not asking him to post a .600 percentage.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I know I'm in the extreme minority with this ( so that's what it's like !) but I never get tired of this argument . Maybe after 200 starts and a 500 or below record will clear it up.

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

I'm tired of the argument but he looks like shit so far. all over the place yesterday. a decent team would've crushed him.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

I hereby revoke your privilege in criticizing the baseball thoughts of others. Thank you for your input.

Yup.

I really wish he would get traded to a team like the Cubs, Red Sox, or Astros so we can just all settle this debate within a year or two's time.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

He already did . His name is Jeff Samardzija who was surely going to have a monster year as soon as he was traded to a "good" team after all those years of toiling for teams that couldn't score runs

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

1. Jeff Samadrzija is not Jose Quintana. Quintana is solidly the better pitcher.

2. Samardzija did post a .500+ W/L% for the first time in his career last year, pitching for a team that gave him 4.2 RS/9, a good bit better than the 3.94 teams averaged for him over the previous four years. But don't let facts get in the way of your argument, go right ahead.

He was 12-11.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Maybe you'll need some help with this, but do you see that red line? Do you see where it intersects the line that extends all the way down to the "4" on the X-axis (that's the line that goes left-to-right on the bottom with all the numbers below it)? Well, For the previous four years, Samardzija was to the left of that intersection point, and if you follow that red line down, then look over to the upright line with all the decimal numbers to the left of it (that's the y-axis), you'd see this model predicts him to have a sub-.500 W/L%. Then, if you move just to the right of the upright line marked "4", where he is currently, then again look to the y-axis, you will see the model predicts him to have an .500+ W/L%. What changed, exactly, besides the run support he was getting?

That's just it. Nothing changed. He's the same mediocrity as he was on 100 loss Cub teams, as he was on a .500 Sox team, and as he was in Oakland. I'm glad he can face a few more shitty pitchers and muster one game over .500 in a 30 game sample.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

Put Quintana on a good team that can score and he'll just lose 7-6 instead of 3-2

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Except his run rupport, and miraculously his W/L%, which responded as my model suggests it would. Why did his W/L% change if the only thing that changed was his run support?

His "run support" changing just means the pitchers he faced pitched worse than he did. If that doesn't happen most of the time I don't see how you could call a guy a good pitcher.

I don't expect a guy to be a 20 game winner. The way these guys are deployed makes that very difficult. But it should also be acknowledged that much less is expected of a starting pitcher than in any other era. That's why it's ridiculous when guys like bernstein try to make a case that Kershaw is as good or better than Koufax. The innings covered matter.

What I do expect of a top pitcher in this modern era is that he have a huge winning percentage. That shouldn't be too much to ask from a supposed ace given the way starters are used these days. Koufax had the opportunity to lose his own game in the seventh, eighth, or ninth innings. Again, I don't expect today's best to have as many decisions. But they should have higher winning percentages. Because if all they have to do is cover 18 outs they should come out of the game with the lead the vast majority of the time. Quintana can't even manage that half the time.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I'm team JORR on this just because he's gone toe to toe with the entire board and never waivered. I respect that level of dedication.

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Well, it's an argument that I can't win. Because if/when Quintana goes to a team that wins 90+ games and scores a lot of runs and his ERA goes up to give him the same .500ish record that he always has, the argument will be that his ERA and peripherals show that he didn't pitch as good as he did with the Sox. Or he'll have a marginally better record like Samardzija did last year and that will be evidence that all he needed was "run support" to go 15-12 instead of 12-13. I've never said offense is immaterial, by the way. Of course if your team throws up a six spot in the first you have a better chances of winning the game. But I'm certain that Quintana pitching for any team isn't going to have W/L records radically different than he does with the Sox. He'll make the bad pitches he needs to to stay around .500.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

So the batting lineup backing him doesn't matter?



Jose Quintana doesn't score runs for the White Sox, how is he supposed to exert control over leaving with the lead?

By your asinine logic, a pitcher who never let anybody score, who pitched for a team that never scored, would be an awful pitcher.

Be fair though, JORR. It's also an argument you can't lose. There are statistics that are pretty damning to your argument, but you can just say that they don't matter because he loses to the guy across from him.

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