Quite often when talking with baseball fans about the subject of pitching and the relative merits of certain pitchers number of wins inevitably comes up. For instance in defending Daisuke Matsuksaka of the Red Sox they'll say "He had 18 wins last season!!!!" while leaving out he played behind a crazy offense, a pretty good defense and had a crazy high and unsustainable strand rate. Another example of this was the defense of signing Jarrod Washburn to contract with double the salary and years of the next closest bidder. People would point at the 18 wins he had the year the Angels won the World Series and say that he was a gamer and "knew how to win". This is a load of horseshit. Jarrod Washburn knows how to win like Kanye West knows humility.
Tonight's game by Erik Bedard is a perfect example of the meaningless nature of wins as ascribed to MLB pitchers. Bedard had another incredibly solid start going 7 innings and while having only had two runs scored against him. His fastball wasn't as deadly as his last start but his curve sure as fuck was. Of the two runs that he "allowed" neither were his fault. The single up the middle by Miguel Cabrera that led to the first run was a function of Yuni playing too far towards 3rd base. The second run scored was due to Ichiro pulling a Dennis Miller analogy with the ball and going far over Rob Johnson's head, allowing the second run to score.
Prior to that the M's had failed to scored runs with a man on 3rd and only one goddamn, twice. First, Junior was unable to get Endy chavez in when his attempt at a sac fly failed to leave the infield and the Beltre grounded out to end the inning. The second came in a similar fashion with Yuni hitting a shallow fly and Jose Lopez, attempting to score on the play, was thrown out at home.
Due to this double edged sword of ineptitude Erik Bedard is now 0-1. Read that again 0 and fucking 1. Despite regaining his dominating form of two years ago, Bedard has only one loss to show for his effort. It wouldn't surprise me if he loses another few games as the season goes on while pitching damn good like he did today.
So you see, a misplayed fucking bloop single, combined with offensive and defensive ineptitude can cause a perfectly winnable game for a pitcher to be hung in his loss column. And yet this wins often are the major key that the average fan points to as a sign of success. Which is why the majority of the sports watching public are fucking idiots. Wake up sheeple! There are better ways to evaluate pitching performance.
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Could be worse. At least you not have to watch hockey game. Even worse than soccer.
This is very true, Jobu. To emphasize this point read my post entitled "All I know about Hockey I learned from Blades of Steel". It's an informative entry on why Hockey fucks with my head. I think you'll enjoy.
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