Posted by burnsy483 on 12/4/2012 10:44:00 AM (view original):
To those who picked "worthless" - your team has a big game, and your options are 2 pitchers. You have A) 14-14, 3.20 ERA or B) 20-8, 3.35 ERA. Who are you picking?
Since you wouldn't know how many runs your team would score that day, common sense says to pick they guy who gave up fewer runs per 9IP over the course of the season.
What are you gonna do, pick the guy who gave up more runs because your team happened to score more runs on the days he pitched that year? Are you hoping your team will continue the anomoly of scoring more when a certain pitcher is on the mound? Are you going to make some bullshit rebuttal detailing how, even though he gave up more runs, he 'kept em in the close ones, did enough to get the win' yadda yadda yadda? If you want to isolate who to start based on their performance, you pick the guy who consistently gave up fewer runs. If one guy gave up more runs but had a dramatically better w-l record, as in this case, Captain Obvious says maybe teammates played a big role in the story.
W-L record is the least useful stat, by far, to evaluate a pitcher's performance. Even Mike's 'best case scenario' of a good w-l record from a guy on a bad team requires knowing more than his w-l record (ie, Mike's questions place the pitcher's w-l record in the context of his team's w-l record).
Closers routinely have crappy records, like 1-5 or 0-4. If you use w-l, you'd have to say they suck... but they might have went 46/50 in saves with a 0.95 ERA.
Take two guys who were 12-9, and who played on different teams in the same season. Who was better? You have zero idea. There is no way to tell from w-l record. Period. Using w-l only sheds exactly zero light on their performance, aside from stuff like, "He was probably not the worst pitcher in the history of MLB."
Any way you slice it, you need more info than w-l to evaluate a pitcher. In that sense, it has ZERO worth as a useful stat to evaluate performance. None. Zilch. Nada. No stat tells the whole story, but w-l tells nothing. If a guy went 12-12, was he good? Bad? Average? No way to tell.