Those Were The Days, My Friend

Not so many years ago -- even then Warren Buffett was a skajillionaire encamped in Omaha -- musical artists recorded "albums" of songs, sometimes themed, that were copied from master recordings onto pressed vinyl and sold to adoring masses in record stores. Radio stations, at intervals dictated by record companies, played individual songs from the albums to whet fans' appetites for the larger recordings. Consumers learned about music almost entirely from the radio and often purchased the albums without the benefit of hearing most of their contents.

If the music business was an apple then, today it is a platypus. We listen to streaming songscapes on our phones these days and procure, often for free, individual songs directly to our playing devices. We have innumerable options for test-driving the music before owning it. Radio has become irrelevant and is disappearing like Jimmy Hoffa.

Because baseball has evolved a lesser distance since the 1970s, say from great apes rather than from single-celled organisms, the differences have been easier to ignore. But the rise of the uber-athlete has transformed the game, and it's time to start accounting for it.

In the days of albums and radio stations, itinerant athletes with opposable winter jobs roamed the infield at 11 or 12 stones soaking wet. Many of these players arrived in Spring Training for their first calisthenics in months and even by the dog days couldn't reach the outfield wall with two swings. The local team of my youth, the 1970 Mets, one year after Amazing the world, sported a starting lineup of Jerry Grote, 185 pounds and two home runs; Ken Boswell, 175 pounds and five home runs; and Bud Harrelson, 160 pounds, one home run. Utility infielder Al Weiss, 160 pounds and one home run, backed them up.

It was a hurler's delight. The opposing moundsman could ease up against these Lilliputians, allowing pitchers the equivalent of an inning's repose every third frame. Throwing with less ferocity and resting more often allowed starters to double as finishers and accumulate innings like corporate titans with summer homes.

Ironically, everyday players today are presenting attendance issues. As this excellent article in Beyond the Box Score notes, the number of regulars appearing in 150+ games has descended below 9% for the first time since the schedule expanded to 162 games in 1961. (Fourteen times before that, with just a 154-game schedule, more than 9% of regulars reached the 150-game mark.) I leave the wherefores to wiser analysts, though the increasing prevalence of platooning, match-ups, defensive replacements and more older players requiring episodic breathers probably play a role.

The result, as author Scott Lindholm articulates in the BTBS piece, is that many of the old records will prove as resistant to change as a Congressman. Measured against a 300-win standard, or even a 20-win standard, today's pitchers will prove as endlessly wanting as the Oscars. Benchmarks for innings pitched, complete games and strikeouts; and for everyday players, consecutive games played, hits and perhaps even home runs will prove more difficult to reach than heaven for a TV preacher. Not withstanding that, like the oily religio-salesman, many of the records in question are poseurs to begin with.

You've probably noticed that the units of measurement above rarely tickle the ivories of Hall of Fame compositions in this space, and the artificial thresholds of 3,000 hits, 300 wins, 500 home runs and their ilk are as welcome here as Palmetto bugs at an oyster roast, which is a quaint Southern way of saying filthy cockroaches on performance enhancing drugs doing the cha-cha at a fancy Epicurean tradition. Going forward let's just banish them from our consciousness, even from our sub-consciousness, and lean instead on the sturdy frames of wOBA, TAv, FIP, WAR and their many cousins, step-sisters and other kin.

And then someday we'll examine why the greatest athletes in history (today's) can't stay upright the way their ballplaying ancestors could.

A New Way to Credit Pitcher Wns

Pitching wins are a team event credited to an individual who may have actually inhibited a team win. They too weakly correlate to good pitching to serve as a proxy when pitching acumen is being analyzed.

Efforts to find a single statistic that encapsulates good pitching have proved elusive and have been completely disengaged from the ultimate goal of a starting pitcher -- winning the game. They've also become a tangle of higher mathematics incomprehensible to the average fan.

Suppose we could invent one simple statistic that credited pitchers when they pitched sufficiently long and successfully to give their team a better-than-even chance of winning? That would trump mere pitching wins and be easy to use. You can see the whole discussion here in Matt Hunter's piece in Beyond the Box Score. We'll call his stat Quality Wins.

We know that since Year 2000, teams whose starting pitcher goes at least six-and-a-third innings and allows three runs or fewer win their games more than half the time. It's the reason that six-and-three is considered a quality start.

We can expand that matrix, starting with at least five innings of work, to create a continuum of Quality Win performances:

Go at least five innings. Give up two or fewer runs.
Pitch 6.3 innings and give up three runs or fewer.
Pitch eight innings and give up four runs or fewer.
Pitch 9.7 innings and give up five runs or fewer.

Keep in mind that this is runs, not earned runs. Defense is an issue on every ball hit, not just the errors.

Let's examine how that might have worked in the games of of June 14:

In the Brewers-Reds tilt, decided in the 10th inning, neither starter was credited with a win, though Cincinnati starter Bronson Arroyo earned one. He got through two outs in the eighth inning and surrendered three runs. His opponent, Kyle Lohse, pitched six full frames but allowed three runs to cross the plate, saddling Milwaukee with a better-than-even chance of losing (which they ultimately did.) He would be charged with a loss.

Chris Sale threw an eight-inning complete game for the White Sox in their 2-1 loss to Houston, allowing five hits and one walk while fanning 14. Under the Quality Win system, he gets a win for his effort. His counterpart, Eric Bedard, also earns a Quality Win for lasting six frames of one-run ball.

No Quality Win for either starter in the Phillies' come-from-behind 8-7 win over the Rockies. Kyle Kendrick and Juan Nicasio escaped without losses despite four-inning, seven-run and six-inning, five run debacles. Under the new system, each is charged with an L. 

In four other games the losing pitcher would get credited with a Quality Win and in the Indians-Nationals contest, where both starters were gone when the outcome was settled, each would be credited with a Quality Win.

In all, on this low-scoring Friday night:
Five starters charged with losses would instead get credit for pitching well and giving their team a good chance of winning.
Three hurlers who no-decisioned would instead get wins.
Three others with no decision would instead take responsibility for a loss. 
 

The seamheads would justifiably complain about various shortcomings of this statistic. 

• First, it fails to credit a pitcher any more for giving his team a 97.6% chance of winning (nine shutout innings) than for giving them a 50.5% chance (six and a third innings; three runs). 
• Second, it is divorced from actual wins, so a pitcher could be credited with 20 "wins" even if his team ultimately lost every game. (And both starters could be credited with wins or charged with losses in the same game.)  
• Third, it fails to take into account all the other elements that affect run scoring, like defense, ballpark, relief pitching, weather conditions and luck. 
• Last, it has no predictive value because it doesn't examine how the pitcher performed, just what resulted.

All true. This is not a leap towards the Holy Grail, just a refinement that gives us won-loss records that relate to actual performance. 

Since no pitching stat is foolproof, and since this is replacing pitching wins, which is nearly useless, the standard is not perfection but mere relevance and ease of use. Moreover, statheads can refine it to account for many of those issues. For example, a pitcher could be credited with only the percentage of a win he provides in every game he starts. And the stat could be adjusted for ballpark, defense, etc., just as others are. These enhancements would strengthen the "win" statistic but render it difficult to calculate. The result would be a fielding-independent stat represented not as ERA, as is currently the case, but as a won-loss record.

It's a small step, but it would expose the starters with great records despite lousy performances (I'm looking at you, Jason Hammel of Baltimore, 7-4, 5.24 with a 1.5 WHIP; would be 5-9 in Quality Wins) and exonerate high achievers with bad teammates (Chris Sale, 5-5, 2.43 and a 0.9 WHIP; would be 10-2 in Quality Wins).