MLB pitching: Four ways to restore meaning to the “win”
By Bill Felber
Among baseball statisticians, the most universally reviled statistic in the modern MLB game is the pitcher win.
There was a day when wins were the gold standard by which MLB pitchers were measured. That day, however, ended some years ago, and is unlikely ever to return.
The way the game is played today, downgrading the value of a win only makes sense. In an age when pitching strategies build upon the expectation of using three, four, or five pitchers to win any game, the concept of a starter even reaching the seventh inning is more hope than expectation. Among pitchers who made at least 20 starts last season (and there were only 119 of those spread across the 30 Major League teams), the average outing ended in the fifth inning.
Only 50 complete games were thrown in all of MLB, fewer than two per team.
In such a changed pitching environment, the natural tendency is to dismiss the concept of a win entirely. But while the mechanism for determining a win clearly has been outdated by strategies, the notion of assigning wins (as a measure of responsibility for the outcome of a game) retains some value.
Rather than excising wins from the lexicon, what is needed is a drastic updating of the mechanism by which pitcher wins (or losses, for that matter) are determined.
That updating ought to begin with four fundamental alterations of the scoring rules, each designed to restore the relevance of the “win.” Let’s do into more detail on those four alterations: