It's Great To Be With A Wiener

It is not news that winning skews everything. The way we consider player performance -- both on a career and a game level -- is largely dependent on the final outcome, which is, of course, the result of at least 18 and usually closer to 25 different player contributions.

There are still Hall of Fame voters who detract from baseball players' career accomplishments for being unfortunate enough not to play for a World Champion. So for example, it is somehow Mike Mussina's fault that the entire Oriole lineup retired around him in the first part of his career and that the Yankees got old, slow and saddled with bad contracts in the second part.

I have heard basketball experts say that Lebron James needs to win a championship to earn the global icon status he covets. That makes sense to me because one superstar hoopster can completely change the fate of his team. But as I have noted at length, this is obviously not true in baseball: even Babe Ruth (the outfielder) only batted 1/9th of the time, never recorded a single strikeout, turned an infield double play or threw out a runner stealing second. Current statistical analysis shows that even a league MVP adds only eight wins or so to his team, relative to a replacement level player. That means that an otherwise average squad saddled by a weak link at first base, for example, could sign Albert Pujols to play that position and expect to win 89 games. Not exactly paradigm shifting.

The writeup of the Mets' May 1 win over the Phillies was headlined "Murphy, Pelfrey Lead Mets..." and described Mike Pelfrey's pitching performance as "effective." Pelfrey got through just five innings and recorded one out in the sixth before being yanked. He surrendered seven hits and three earned runs, walked four and struck out no one. Most importantly, apparently, he was credited with the win.

Let's put Pelfrey's performance in perspective. He did not achieve a "quality start." He placed a four-innning burden on his relief corps. His game ERA is 5.06. He did not have great control. He was not fooling hitters and as a result was relying entirely on his defense to record outs. Had the Mets lost, would Pelfrey's performance have been described as "effective"?

It's worth noting that the same coverage never mentioned JA Happ and Chris Condrey, who threw three shutout innings for the Phils. Their team, after all, lost. It attributed some of the Met victory to Daniel Murphy's two run jack, his only hit in five at-bats, but gave no credit to Chase Utley's seventh inning blast, which accompanied two walks in four plate appearances.

The moral of the story is this: if you want an accurate accounting of a player's performance, ignore the final score. That goes for one game, one season, one career and most of all, a pitcher's won-lost record.

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