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Old 01-27-2020, 01:19 AM   #1
ddold
Minors (Rookie Ball)
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 33
The fallacy of pitching wins as a measure of value

Meet Pete Williams. Pete's pretty much everything a team would look for in a backup catcher. He's above average behind the plate (2.2 ZR, 1.065 EFF and a 3.92 CERA) and handles the bat well enough that he won't kill you on days you rest the starter (career 85 OPS+). Pete is an all around swell guy to have on the team; highly adaptable according to his player personality, although no fans inside or outside of New York care about him at all. Which really seems odd as in addition to being your typical gritty AAAA-type catcher, Pete is also the winningest pitcher in the MLBD over the last two seasons.

Pete has gone 41-7 over the last two years, topping the NL and equal best overall in the league. The guy he is tied with was a Cy Young winner on a team that has won 241 games the last two seasons. The guy 4 wins back is also a Cy Young winner, and the next guy in line was 2nd in the CY voting and threw a no-hitter.

Thing is, Pete's not that great a pitcher. He's a bit above average overall (92 FIP-), but from a pure talent perspective he is definitely a better catcher than reliever. But Pete has excelled at being in there often (156 appearances as an RP, 5th most in the league behind 3 of his teammates) in situations where he can't really screw it up too badly (LI 0.93). He is in the ideal situation for a pitcher to 'earn' a win by just not doing anything too horrible. The Mets are a good team (211 wins the last two years) who rely on relievers to throw 80% of the total innings. We generally run two SPs, then rotate four or five relievers in for short stints the other three days of the typical 5-man rotation.

SPs are expensive in our league, but so are good catchers so when I took over the team and realized the best catcher on the roster had been drafted as a SP before flaming out and was being used as a AAA reliever, I converted him over. I then traded for a better catcher so I figured leaving Pete as a two-way player would give me some extra flexibility in our bullpen-heavy configuration. I threw him in the pen as a long reliever to eat up garbage innings if things got out of hand and didn't pay him much attention. Until he started winning games, and kept winning games. As a long reliever, he wasn't just being used in garbage innings. He was coming in after the reliever who had started the game left, throwing an inning or two as the team took the lead with limited exposure to the opponents top hitters as they'd been dispatched by the opener, and then better relievers would come in and throw 6 innings of Holds to get Pete the win.

Bingo bango, a backup catcher is the winningest pitcher in an otherwise completely sane league (which has two open teams, if you're keen).
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Old 01-27-2020, 01:51 AM   #2
Dyzalot
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Wins, as a simple metric to look at to give you an idea how well a pitcher performed, started losing value as starters began to pitch less innings per start. In a scenario where a starter is rarely going five innings, mediocre relievers will pick up a lot of wins due to the esoteric MLB rules for scoring a win. I have no idea why a starter that goes four innings and leaves with a lead is somehow less deserving of a win than the reliever that pitches the two innings after him. I expect though that back when the rule was written, if a starter went less than five innings and the team won, it almost always meant that the pitcher who replaced him finished the game. Obviously not the case in the context of your league or current MLB.
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Old 01-27-2020, 01:14 PM   #3
ddold
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Exactly ... until there is some broader acceptance of something more complex like win shares, it's just insane how far out of whack pitching wins can get sometimes.
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Old 01-28-2020, 11:11 AM   #4
Déjà Bru
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All of this being granted, I still miss the days of 20-game winners.
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