TOUT WARS!

Wins are not, says Nick Minnix, in a story at Fangraphs today. He’s talking about pitchers’ wins, of course, a stat that some would say is ridiculously random, while others might say its imperfection accentuates its beauty.

Nick is clearly not sure where he stands along a spectrum that perhaps begins with cumulative Game Score, features PQS and W+Quality Starts and ends up with naked Wins alone. He is properly ruminative about this delicate question, which can provoke some fire. I suggested doing away with the Wins category at ESPN.com nearly 20 years ago and my ears still ring with the dismissive, “The game is all about winning, stupid.”

Some of the commenters about Nick’s story suggest Innings Pitched as a proxy for wins, but I think that’s barking up the wrong category. Innings pitched is a fine substitute for Strikeouts, an ability that often enough has little to do with winning or pitching effectively. A pitcher who puts up the innings is doing some important part of the job, no matter the outcomes.

A pitcher who wins, however, is likely on a decent team AND is getting the job done. He may be Masahiro Tanaka, throwing lots of strikeouts and leading the majors in wins, or he may be Mark Buehrle, who is hardly striking out anyone, and nearly matching Tanaka W for W. Or he could be the antichrist spawn of the two, the master of the unlucky, like Jeff Samardzija, striking them out but crippled by his dismal team, winning but twice thus far in 90+ innings pitched.

Nick throws down a challenge to Tout Wars to wise up and replace the Win category with something, anything, better.

We’ll see. Tout never shys from innovation, but the question here is whether there is a replacement that reflects the vagaries of the game and doesn’t simply mirror the gradations of the qualitative stats, ERA and WHIP. There is something to giving a pitcher extra credit for playing on a good team, or overcoming a bad one.