Is the point thst the first group has good records because of "run support"?

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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

1) I cannot emphasize this enough - can you please stop fucking attributing comments to me that aren't mine? It's really starting to piss me off. I've never made any comment on Quintana. If you're succumbing to age-related dementia, I apologize for my vulgarity, but it's extremely frustrating when you just respond to whatever ridiculous statement you heard a homeless man on the street yell at you instead of responding to actual comments by actual people. And you do it all the time.

2) You cannot logically separate small samples and large samples in this argument. Pitchers are subject to the same rules of baseball as position players. If batting matters in one game, it matters over 162 games. This isn't physics where we have competing theories.

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My hypothetical. If somehow teams were allowed to make trades during the World Series and the Cubs just acquired Quintana , does anyone feel he would win the game the Cubs decided to start him in despite every metric ( except wins of course ) telling everyone he's one of the top 10 pitchers in baseball the last 4 years ? I sure don't .

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

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

Right.

He's a guy who MANY seem to believe is a top 5 pitcher except when presented to them that way.

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Please try and understand how a message board works. I won't get pissed at you demanding I defend a position that you're not necessarily disagreeing with and you don't get pissed about some phony "attribution" of comments to you. How about that? If you're not insisting that Quintana is a top pitcher then the "you" in question is not you.



No. For an offense to function it generally takes more than one or two batters to perform at their best within the space of that single game. The elite starting pitcher is covering over 2/3 of all the outs in the entire game. It's not uncommon for Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant to play an entire series where they look worse than Ronny Cedeno and Hee Sop Choi. It's quite uncommon for Clayton Kershaw to pitch a game where he looks worse than Mike Pelfrey.

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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

If your response isn't attributed to me, then don't quote me. Respond to someone who said what you're replying to. It's really very simple. But let's not confine the point to this specific instance. Lately, you very rarely respond to anything a person says. You might pick a specific quote or paragraph and respond to that, but they are usually peripheral points that aren't even related to the primary topic. I notice it all the time. Don't get me wrong - it's not a bad tactic nor is it that rare... but if you're going to lead some sort of intellectual argument in favor of W-L records, the least you could do is not be disingenuous with your replies. Respond to the actual arguments... don't just ignore them or pass them over and respond to some nonsensical bullshit that you've cherry picked.

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You asked me the fucking question. If you're not making the argument that Quintana is better than his record why are you demanding those answers? If we're in agreement that he's not a top pitcher maybe you should demand answers from Juice.

But I'll bite. What is the specific argument that you feel I am ducking? I think I gave a precise answer to your question.

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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

Horrible emoticon usage.

What question did I ask you?



Audience, please look at these two sentences. It is an oldie but a goodie. In the first sentence, JORR accuses me of not making the argument that Quintana is better than his record or that if I'm not, why the hell am I arguing?

In the second sentence, he moves the goal posts so that we're debating whether we're in agreement "that he's not a top pitcher".

I appreciate a good debate, and I have only ever said that Quintana is better than his record indicates... but I find the constant twisting and re-phrasing of arguments to be disingenuous.

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I love that JLN can look at FIP and determine that Shark and Scott Feldman are pretty good. Thank god they actually play the games so people can watch them and see how wrong you are.

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So you didn't watch 2012-14 Samardzija, nor any of this games this year? Or do you just not know what good pitching looks like? Considering your affinity for W/L, you probably don't.

Here is the question you asked me:





I don't see any accusation there. I'm trying to understand what your position is. Mine is that Quintana's record speaks for itself. It seems that you got your panties in a twist over my original (very clear) answer to your question which was:



It seems that you somehow read the "you" in the first paragraph to mean you as in leashyourkids when I thought it was obvious that my meaning was "if you're a person who says". Again, this isn't a private conversation between the two of us. It's occurring in an open forum. I can rephrase it if you like:

Of course they matter. But we're discussing events within the minute space of a single game vs. a pitcher that many keep insisting is among the best in baseball. If that were really the guy some are arguing he is, he has a huge advantage vs. an offense that averages .5 more runs per game than his own admittedly anemic offense.

Better?

_________________
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

Hank is right on the edge of JORR's "show me a good pitcher with a bad W/L% and I'll show you a bad pitcher because of his W/L%" silliness. There cannot exist a good pitcher with a shitty W/L% due to factors completely outside of his control, because then their whole stance is bunk, and they look even more like fools.

You look like a fool because you read somebody saying "a pitchers W/L record is meaningless" and just swallowed it whole.

I keep asking the question and I never get an answer or it's some guy who was lights out and then hung around after an injury, but I'll ask again, in 150 years of baseball who is the great pitcher with a losing career record? Isn't there just one-JUST ONE- unlucky guy?

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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

Dear god man. We saw Shark up close and personal on both sides of town. How can anyone who saw him pitch think he's pretty good. He's durable. He'll get you plenty of innings and that's important. He's not worthless by any means but there is a reason he doesn't win. It's because he's not that good.

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I've literally done the math to show you just how meaningless W/L% is, but I "swallowed it whole". This is the worst edition of "Stupid or Stubborn?" ever.



We've been over this countless times, and it always reverts back to you shifting the goalposts on what "lights out" or "great" means, usually back to "Oh yeah, well if he was so good, how come he was 'out-performed' [:roll:] by the other pitcher more than half the time [which isn't really what W/L% calculates]?"

Ok, so you don't know what good pitching looks like. Got it.

I can't believe we're back to the "I DON'T NEED FACTS TO SUPPORT MY ASSERTIONS, MY GUT TELLS ME ALL I NEED TO KNOW" foolery of mid-2000's stats-scouting arguments.

What's a baseball genius like you doing here!! Go work for Theo. You can make a fucking chart that tells me Shark is a pretty good pitcher.

My favorite part is when you showed the top five w/l guys and then said 'now keep in mind blah blah blah, somehow only the best pitchers in baseball show up on here but that's just coincidence.'

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I won't jerk off to XFIP so I must not know anything about baseball. what a condescending turd you are.

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Which list were all those guys also atop? Per start Run Support.

Arguing the extremes on this issue just makes someone come off as foolish. "W/L is meaningless" is a much more ridiculous statement than anything jorr has said.

Leash, stop trying to declare yourself as arbiter of emoticon use. It's not that serious.

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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

Without looking, can you tell me the difference between the two?

I'm sorry you take the rebuffing of earth-shattering analytical tidbits like "I watched him pitch a few games, I know he's bad" or "they're just meh" as condescending.

Every time this comes up, JORR (and now you) engage in the same goalpost shifting and Scotsman truthering centered on "EVERYONE KNOWS THIS" bullshit.

Sorry, but you're just wrong.

Who exactly here has argued that W/L is meaningless? That's one of JORR's favorite straw men. Even I could only show that 60% of it is dependent on something a pitcher has little, if any, impact on.

Strawman?

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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

Did you...did you not read the last sentence ofy post?

Or did you mean that arguing that any portion of W/L% is meaningless is ridiculous?

I did.... did read the post. You're arguing that W/L is meaningless. If I say I'm going to show someone just how dumb they are, I'm presumably arguing that they are dumb. And I could go back and find more quotes. This is far from the first time you've said it and then backtracked.

Anyway, if you don't think W/L is meaningless than I don't understand your beef with jorr. He never said it's the only meaningful stat. So you guys essentially agree on the topic and are really only arguing over a matter of degree.

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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

If you name the guy you believe is great with a career losing record over more than 300 starts I won't argue. I'm just interested to see who you think that is. We can simply let the name simmer out there and see if there is widespread agreement that a guy like Bob Friend, for example, was a "great" pitcher.

_________________
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

Look, I realize that an entire generation of baseball fans has been inoculated with two great "truths"- a starting pitcher's W/L record is meaningless and RBI are a matter of luck.

You can talk about the math all day long as you pray to the God of correlation. Just do me a favor and don't act like I don't understand the argument. I've had this discussion about a million times and this is where it inevitably goes- to the ad hominem attack that I'm some hardheaded old guy who just doesn't understand the game in the "Age of Enlightenment". Nothing can be further from the truth. I was once an actual member of SABR. I had a copy of an early Abstract that was mimeographed. I was reading the "math" back when it was actually groundbreaking rather than something that dipshits regurgitate in Facebook groups.

All of this stuff goes hand in hand with the rise of fantasy baseball and the Ivy League GMs becoming the stars rather than the guys who are hitting and pitching the baseballs. Every dumbfuck who has ever won 15 cents in a Rotisserie league wants to "discover" the great player that nobody else knows about. As if there is some magic statistic that will show him- and only him- that some turd who slashes .240/.290/.345 is actually one of the best players swinging a bat.

But back to the argument at hand, a lot of the beliefs that you hold are predicated on the theory, drawn from McCracken's research, that batted balls are random, or at least that a pitcher has minimal effect on what happens to a ball when it is struck. One would think that Mark Buehrle being the only man in history to face the minimum three times would put lie to such a "fact" considering the number of batted balls he got "lucky" with in those three games. To think anyone could be that lucky defies belief. Although Ryan Reynolds has been married to Scarlett Johansson and Blake Lively.

_________________
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

Do you really think that Kershaw and Scherzer have great winning percentages because of "run support"?

_________________
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

Not Greinke or Strasberg.

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Here's another experiment. Take the top 5 FIP pitchers with the same sample size as you did wl% and we can compare the two. I'd guess we would see most of the same names. If so, in your opinion, would that just be a huge coincidence?

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