Posted by bad_luck on 12/5/2012 12:07:00 PM (view original):
Posted by mfahie on 12/5/2012 12:02:00 PM (view original):
This thread has more straw men than a corn field.
Could all the people arguing against W/L record STOP ASKING US TO JUDGE PLAYERS BY W/L RECORD ALONE? Nobody EVER claimed that it was valuable to tell two similar pitchers apart out of context.
I think I've read about 15 times in this thread "who's better, 14-8 or 13-10?". ******* STOP IT!
You have some things to learn about dialogue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gricean_maxims
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
It's not a straw man. Pro-W/L posters are arguing that W/L tells gives us something worth paying attention to. WHAT THE **** DOES IT TELL US?
If you tell me a starting pitcher had a 3.40 ERA, I can safely assume he had a solid year. If I tell you that a starting pitcher went 14-9, you have no ******* idea what kind of year he had.
It is absolutely a straw man. And you've gone and repeated it again. I would guess because you're not at all interested at seeing things from someone else's point of view, despite many people attempting in good faith to explain it to you.
Not one person is claiming that W/L BY ITSELF tells you a whole lot (though, as you already admitted, extreme W/L give you some sort of idea about what sort of season a player had, which is a step back from your original point of COMPLETELY WORTHLESS.)
But yet again, for perhaps the 20th time in the thread, you've asked about a context-free 14-9 record. NOBODY IS CLAIMING THAT IT TELLS YOU SOMETHING BY ITSELF.
Maybe I should say that again so you stop, pleaseohpleasestop. NOBODY IS CLAIMING THAT IT TELLS YOU SOMETHING BY ITSELF.
Now, if I have two players who were both somewhat average, with similar ERAs, say 3.80 and 3.73. I hope you'll agree that over the course of a season those two ERA's are more or less the same in terms of pitcher effectiveness, for all the reasons posted in this thread about how ERA is GOOD, but not PERFECT.
Let's also say they pitched a similar number of innings, pitched in similar parks, etc.
Now, one of them is 14-6, and the other is 8-13.
W/L doesn't GUARANTEE that the 14-6 pitcher was better than the 8-13 - the difference could have conceivably been luck (in particular, of course, run support). But over the course of time, the majority of the time, the 14-6 pitcher was better than the 8-13 pitcher. For a variety of reasons.
If we completely eliminate W/L from our view, we would be forced to conclude that the two pitchers were even. But W/L gives us some context to guess that maybe there's something we're not seeing that might have contributed to such a difference in record.