Sean Meslar- Student Choice #1

It's baseball season once again, and seeing as how my beloved Red Sox aren't giving me much to talk about, I've decided to talk about a few myths regarding baseball statistics. The biggest cardinal sin that a baseball fan can make in my mind is to evaluate the quality of a starting pitcher by the number of wins and losses. I will concede that, in general, good pitchers win many games and bad pitcher lose many games, but over the course of a season in which a pitcher will get at most around thirty starts, and likely fewer decisions, a number of factors can complicate a fair evaluation through wins and losses. The first and most undeniable is run support, even a perfect game is not guaranteed as a win for a starting pitcher; one can only be the winning pitcher of record as a starter if you leave the game with the lead having pitched five or more innings. If your team does not support you by scoring any runs, you will not win games and this is of course in no way indicative of your performance as a pitcher, thus we should seek out more relevant statistics. Second, using wins and losses is just as much a measure of the quality of the opposing pitcher as it is the pitcher in question. Consider if I were to give up 6 runs over the course of my five innings pitched, this is not by any standard a good performance, but if the opposing starting pitcher were to concede 7 runs, I would be eligible to be the winning pitcher in the game. Finally, and this gets into a slightly more advanced form of baseball statistics, wins and losses are always determined by the number of runs scored, which is not always indicative of the quality of a pitcher. Even if a pitcher concedes a high number of runs, this could be attributable to a small ball park, a poor defense or an unfairly stacked opposition; through the use of advanced statistics like ERA+, we can seek to eliminate varying factors and focus in on the quality of pitchers themselves. However, there is some hope for the general baseball community if recent history is any guide; last season's American League Cy Young award winner, Felix Hernandez won only thirteen games as opposed to third place finisher C.C. Sabathia's 21. Through informed use of accurate statistics, the voters for the award picker the right man and looked past the useless indications of wins and losses.