Baseball, Pitcher Wins, and Life

I.

Suppose that I insult you, and you get angry at me. Does that make you an angry person?

Well, no, you say: one angry reaction doesn’t mean you’re an angry person. (Plus, you didn’t start it!) But what if you always react this way when people insult you? Well, how often does that happen? If someone insults you every day, and so you get angry at them every day, perhaps that makes you an angry person. But if you are only insulted, say, once a year, it’s a little harder to call you a (habitually) angry person. Is it necessary — is it even possible? — to separate who you are from what you do?

Perhaps we can agree that this exercise is a difficult metaphysical problem, made harder because of everyones’ subjective values around labelling people and around anger itself.

II.

Let us check in with the baseball statisticians. Their goal is simple — to separate a player’s true talent from their results. A batter hits a line drive at one hundred miles an hour – right at the third baseman. Was it a good at-bat? A pitcher gives up walk after walk, but is saved by a miraculous triple play. Did they pitch well?

In the long term, we trust that results mostly correlate with a player’s true talent level, but really those correlations can be obscured by countless variables. The quality of your opponent, the dimensions of the ballpark, an umpire’s bad eye.

The noisiest statistic is a pitcher’s wins. In the past, wins were revered, part of the “triple crown” of pitching statistics, along with strikeouts and ERA. You expected the best pitchers to win twenty games a year, and perhaps win three hundred in their career. 

Yet a pitcher might throw a very good game and get charged with the loss because his team didn’t score any runs.  And a good pitcher backed by a habitually weak offense will have an unfairly weak win-loss record. Famously, in 1974, John Matlack was the most valuable pitcher in baseball (according to modern sabermetrics) but due to a weak win-loss record, didn’t receive a single vote for the Cy Young. [0]

[0] https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/m/matlajo01.shtml

That is why, in recent times, a pitcher wins have become an unfashionable statistic. A reference to a benighted age when we didn’t really understand how to value pitchers. Who even looks at the win-loss record nowadays?

III.

But a pitcher’s win-loss record actually tells you a lot. Specifically, it helps you understand if the team actually tends to win when the pitcher is on the mound! What’s the alternative? Well, you could use modern sabermetrics to measure how good the starting pitcher REALLY is, and how good the offense is, (considering the size of the ballpark, and how fast the wind is blowing out), etc., etc., building a complex model that guesses who will win. 

…Or, you can just eyeball the pitcher’s win-loss record, and get a pretty good idea of how things tend to go for the team when that pitcher is on the mound. It’s not fair to the pitcher, especially if we “blame” the losses on the pitcher, but the win-loss record is still quite useful.

IV.

Suppose that I insult you, and you get angry at me every time. Does that make you an angry person?

…

Here are, I think, what baseball stats have to say about it:

1. We can’t judge you just by your reaction. Sure, you’re getting angry, but that must be viewed in light of your environment (which sounds particularly frustrating.) You might well be more patient than most people, even though you’re getting angry so often. We just don’t have enough information to make a complete value judgement about your behavior.

2. But we can judge the overall results — you’re getting angry a lot. When you’re the pitcher for your team, there’s a lot of emotional L’s going down. And that is a problem. Maybe there are no easy solutions, but we shouldn’t pretend that just because you’re patient (or not), the overall situation is OK. Maybe you shouldn’t be friends with me anymore since I keep insulting you.

In short — even if a habitual problem is not entirely your fault, it’s still a problem, and you should think outside the box to try to change it. 

❤