Running 2017 MLB regular season thread

Caddyshack 2 gets my vote.

 

I heard this about Jose Quintana for years. "He gets nothing to show for it." People expended an unbelievable amount of print and airtime to it.

I know it's the instinct borne by decades of W-L being (erroneously) used to gauge pitcher performance. But he has plenty to show for it. He pitched 7 2/3 innings of brilliant baseball. At this point, he is far and away the Cy Young front-runner.

Would people say Mike Trout had "little to show for it" if he went 4-for-4 with a pair of home runs in an Angels loss? Do they say that? Not as much, I don't think. Someone might write "in a loss." That's the extent.

People need to take the final step away from W-L for pitchers, once and for all. I understand the score is part of the game narrative, but we're still phrasing and focusing in ways that irk me.

 

Am I being the problem if I point out that Jake Arrieta's ERA is now lower than Jon Lester's? Arrieta has been better in four of his last five starts, with the weak one coming against the Nationals. I'm not sure if he can keep it up, but it isn't just one decent start.

 

Pinch hit for in the seventh, but still got the win:

“Ruth, formerly of Baltimore, made his debut as a local pitcher and held Cleveland to five scattered hits in the first six innings,” wrote the July 12 New York Times. “In the seventh three singles and a sacrifice netted two runs for Cleveland and tied the score.”

Ruth was lifted in the bottom of the inning for pinch hitter Duffy Lewis, who reached base and scored the go-ahead run. Boston went on to win 4-3, with Ruth picking up the win.

On This Day: Babe Ruth Makes Major League Debut

 

This is an excellent point. Seriously.

 

At least they weren't plating runs back then.

 

Don't tell that to Jay Dunn. Wins are pretty much everything to him, an unbending cause/correlation belief that "if they're good enough than ... "

 

W-L has been made obsolete by the change in roles for starting pitchers. In my lifetime even Sale might've gone into the extras on the mound, but of course no more. I wonder if someday the current stat will be replaced by the equally understandable TEAM W-L record on days pitcher X starts, as that is more relevant. If the Sox lose on a day Sale pitches, that's like 1.5 losses given how good he's been. Yesterday's L would be seen as the team's problem, not his.

 

Then why even attribute it to him?

I've said W-L is kind of like RBIs - they give you an idea of how a player's season has felt, for lack of a better word. What is the team doing around this guy? That's not useless information.

But people attribute it to the player himself. And that is useless.

(I made your exact point to someone the other day - bullpen usage has made wins obsolete, as well. It's not just sabermetrics.)

 

When I was a lad and then a young man, if a pitcher won 20 games you could look at that alone and have a very good picture as to how his season went. Now, it just means his team scored a shitpile of runs in the first five innings of most of his starts. See 2016 AL Cy Young winner Rick Porcello, who was very good but hardly dominant last year.

 

I'll give *some* credence that RBIs aren't the end-all be-all of a guy's performance but the fact remains that a guy with 118 RBIs has delivered the goods.

If we're going to start altering stat-lines to make them more indicative of whatever truth you're looking for, add RISP-RBIs to the AVG/HR/RBI slash, or some other appropriate stat.

But RBIs still says plenty about a player's performance in relation to what guys ahead of him in the order are doing.