The value of ‘W’
In a late-August game at Target Field, Minnesota Twins catcher Drew Butera hit a foul pop-up to Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera. It was the Twins’ final out in a losing effort, and their deficit against division-leading Detroit grew to an insurmountable 18 games.
Why is this game, a matchup between a playoff-bound Tigers team and an out-of-contention Twins squad, worth mentioning? Because that final out clinched the 20th win of the season for Tigers starter Justin Verlander. In a sport that lives off statistics and round numbers, this is a pretty big deal. It’s a prettier and bigger deal when it’s noted that Verlander is the first pitcher to hit the 20-win mark before the month of September since Curt Schilling did so for the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2002. In the modern era of pitching, with five-man rotations and specialized bullpens, achieving 20-wins has become, at least in the eyes of the many that watch the sport, the benchmark for a successful season on the mound.
But should it?
There is no sport that treats statistics and numbers as holy gospel as much as Major League Baseball. For pitchers, achieving 20 wins is considered an incredible feat, the result of multiple great performances by an individual who will no doubt be considered a favorite for the Cy Young Award. But in reality, that’s just not the case.
The 20-win plateau is an achievement established on a statistic that is based on a fallacy. That is, mainly, that the ‘win’ is earned by a pitcher. The more wins one pitcher has, the better he is than his peers. Just because Verlander has 21 wins, is he ultimately better than CC Sabathia who has 19, Jered Weaver with 16 or Felix Hernandez with 13 (the amount he had last year when he won the Cy Young?
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Well, yes, Verlander has been a better pitcher than a lot of them, but it’s not because he’s accumulated more wins. In fact, his win total is near the bottom of the list of reasons why.
Jonah Keri co-wrote Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, and has contributed to Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs, two of the most respected websites that highlight the newer age of baseball evaluation.
In a recent interview with The Good Point, Keri was asked to rank, on a scale of 1-10, the importance of wins when evaluating a pitcher’s individual performance. He answered “one”.
“For rate stats, you can choose FIP (fielding independent pitching), xFIP (expected FIP), SIERA (skill-interactive earned run average) or FRA (fair run average),” said Keri when asked to list more effective means of evaluation. “They all have value as defense-independent measures of run prevention.”
Keri’s analysis, as does most of the “new-age” analysis done on pitchers, stems from the keyboard of Voros McCracken. McCracken is the godfather of pitching statistics, having developed some of the formulas that have been able to rate pitchers outside of the mainstream statistics. Some of his fans followed in his footsteps, creating their own formulas that are able to evaluate a pitcher and predict his future performance in a way wins were never really able to do.
Verlander isn’t a Cy Young favorite because he has 21 wins. It’s his MLB-best ERA and high strikeout numbers. It’s because he has the third lowest BABIP (batting average for balls in play) in the league. It’s because his WAR, FIP and SIERA numbers are among the best of his peers. It’s because, regardless of defense behind him or the offense that hits for him, Verlander has pitched better than anyone else, and it’s those two factors, offense and defense, that create the most holes in the argument that ‘wins’ count as a legitimate statistic to evaluate pitchers. Let’s look at a couple of Verlander starts from earlier in the season. In one of the two starts, Verlander was credited with a win. In the other, a loss:
Game 1: CG, 2 ER, 6 hits, 4 Ks, 1 BB, Game Score of 70
Game 2: 6 IP, 4 ER, 8 hits, 6 Ks, 3 BB, Game Score of 43
Clearly, Game 1 was the better pitched game. It’s also the one in which he registered the loss, as his Tigers fell 2-0 to the Texas Rangers. Verlander got the win with his performance in Game 2, a relatively poor start, and that was the aforementioned No. 20.
Obviously the above is a small sample size, but it’s a fair example of how the ‘win’ stat should not be taken at face value. There are countless examples just like this one. There are too many outside factors that go into the final score of a baseball game that it’s just not logical (or fair) to place the success or failure with the pitcher.
My goal isn’t to completely disregard the win statistic; it’s merely to downgrade its importance in mainstream baseball. The ‘win’ has a place as a starting point of evaluation; it’s perfectly reasonable to think Justin Verlander is having a fantastic season because he has 20 wins to his credit. It’s not reasonable to assume he’s the best because he has more than anyone else. The amount of wins a pitcher has can’t be the main means of evaluation, and that belief works both ways.
Another Tigers starter, Doug Fister, started the season 3-12 with the Seattle Mariners, mainly because of incredibly poor run support and a litany of bad luck. The Tigers were able to see past that and acquired him before the trade deadline, and he’s gone 4-1 with a 2.64 ERA and 1.038 WHIP since. Over the course of the season, Fister has a better-than-league-average FIP, BABIP and walks-per-nine-innings.
There’s a belief that the mainstream baseball community is starting to wise up to those ideas. In 2009, Kansas City Royals starter Zack Greinke won the AL Cy Young despite only having 16 wins on the season; Tim Lincecum won the NL award with just 15 wins. The combined 31 wins represented the lowest combined number ever for two starters who won the award in the same season. Last year, Hernandez took home the AL pitching honor with a 13-win season, the lowest number ever for a non-starter in a non-strike shortened season.
“Hernandez[‘s win] was a progression.” says Keri. “Is it possible to go back to the old way of thinking? Sure, [but] if I were voting I wouldn’t want to.”
Keri certainly isn’t alone in his wishes. Many saw the wins by Hernandez, Greinke, and Lincecum as a victory for the cause of advanced metrics; that people will start to see past the ‘W’ and look for better ways to evaluate.
But let’s also give credit when deserved: getting to 20 wins is an achievement. It requires the pitcher to be great more times than not, and those who get to that number in a single season are usually the best pitchers that year. Besides, nobody looks at just wins as a means of characterizing a pitchers season or career-long performance.
Regardless, quite regularly “wins” are given too much credit, and while no statistic is perfect, this one in particular is far from it. The first statistic placed next to a pitcher on the back of a baseball card is his win total. 300 wins is a virtual lock to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame. Performance bonuses are mainly based on wins, and All-Star appearances usually follow the same logic.
Justin Verlander deserves to win the Cy Young Award, and is rightfully receiving consideration for MVP. But none of those accolades should have anything to do with his win total. In a perfect world, the ‘win’ would be considered a novelty statistic, not a benchmark. But it’s so ingrained into the culture of baseball that it’s hard to imagine the game without it. The recent awards won by Greinke, Lincecum and Hernandez have opened the door to downgrading the importance given to the ‘win’.
It’s now up to everyone else to walk through it.
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