Wins are awful

By Jason Wojciechowski

In a move destined to rebound terribly on them, Bill and The Common Man have invited me to turn the remarkable trio posting here at The Platoon Advantage into a less-remarkable-because-of-subtraction-by-addition quartet. You may know me in other contexts as the proprietor (since at least 2003!) of Beaneball or the guy who overtweets at @jlwoj. I'm incredibly happy to be here, at least until I get kicked out.

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With the entire internet burning to the ground over this piece on WAR by Hippeaux at It's About the Money, Stupid, including reactions from Rob Neyer, Tom Tango, and basically everybody on Twitter questioning motivations, complaining about pseudonyms (which your very own Common Man got involved in), and generally acting like we don't all have work to do, I figure it's time to take on a real menace: Joe Posnanski thinks wins aren't that bad.

Here's the thing: I wouldn't even give this piece the time of day, except that I think it's symptomatic of a weird belief among people who I know know better regarding wins. When you read Bill James and Rob Neyer and Posnanski, you see an awful lot of win-loss records being cited. They're never used as a quality measure, exactly, as evidence that one pitcher is better than another, but still: there they are, on the page, right next to the guy's ERA and his K/BB ratio and all sorts of other vastly more useful numbers.

I think it's time to take a hard-line attitude toward pitcher wins. (And losses! Why does no one ever talk about pitcher losses?) Posnanski wrote "to praise the win not to bury it," but I'm more of a burial kind of guy. And a salt the earth afterward kind of guy. A leave no gravestone guy. So let's bury this.

Steve Berthiaume Loses a Game for the Wins Crowd

By The Common Man

The Common Man actually likes Steve Berthiaume, who he has mocked mercilessly for his decision to pick the Astros to win the NL Central. Which, by the way, is still hilarious.

That said, Bert has a good sense of humor about himself, is from Wisconsin, and has gone out of his way to embrace SweetSpot Network bloggers like The Common Man. Which is why TCM is so sad that he has to say this: Steve, you are so terribly, horribly wrong about this that it is…God, just painful.

Berthiaume lays out the argument today that we should respect Kevin Correia’s win total for the Pittsburgh Pirates, saying “let's not do a sabermetric sidestep around one simple fact: There is still only ONE stat that counts in the division standings and that's wins. And no major league pitcher has more wins than Pittsburgh's Kevin Correia.” Which, while true, ignores the fact that pitcher wins and team wins are not the same thing. In fact they are completely different definitions. All Correia has to do to get a “win” is escape the 5th inning with a lead that his bullpen doesn’t relinquish. Teams have to be ahead at the end of 9 innings. So while Correia’s team has won in 8 of his 12 starts, Roy Halladay has started 9 games that his team has won, even though he’s only credited with 7 “wins.” Ditto with Cole Hamels. Isn’t that more impressive?

But that’s not even the real point.