It’s long been an institution now, but why was the pitching wins stat conceived in the first place? If it didn’t exist and someone proposed it, I would think that someone was evil. It creates a somewhat artificial tension between pitchers and hitters that either sets good pitchers against their teammates on a poor-hitting team (e.g., the post-Bonds Giants) and/or forces them to develop tremendous self-discipline and seek alternative means of professional gratification (i.e., I just went out and did my job and gave my team a chance to win).

This does go both ways — the desire to “get a pitcher a win” by hitters can help a team bond. But these social dynamics would only have come after the fact. How did it ever get started?

Wins as a measure of a pitchers ability is stupid. There are better stats. Wins are more dependent on how your offense does than how you pitch – there are two factors in wins, runs scored (offense) and runs allowed (pitching + defense)….so yeah offense > defense in wins. We have other measures like ERA, ERA+, FIP, tRA, there’s just no reason to ever use wins to evaluate a pitchers ability or performance. That said, wins as a pitcher stat do have a use. They give us context. They describe what the end result was when that pitcher took the mound – it may not give us good information on how that pitcher performed, but it does give us good information on how the team performed, and that can be interesting information, so I don’t see a need to dismiss wins entirely.

For example, I can see Zito was a decent pitcher this season by his stats. I can then look at Zito’s W-L to get a feel for how the Giants as a team performed when he was on the mound. They did poorly, and it was probably a run support issue (which I can figure out with a quick glance). I think that’s worthwhile knowledge.

But it’s not a myth…This article isn’t even worth me reading it.