The Most Overrated Stat in Baseball; Please Never Go by Wins

To me, there is simply nothing more annoying than hearing someone on tv linking a pitcher's abilities with the number of games he has won. With the saber metric revolution, the evidence has mounted on why it is not at all reliable in deciding a pitcher's talent. With all of the statistics that are very reliable, like FIP or ERA+, wins have become more and more irrelevant. Not to mention that as baseball's ever-changing landscape has shifted farther and farther away from pitcher's going through lineups multiple times, fewer and fewer starters are even qualifying for them.

Wins can never be used to evaluate a player's true success over a season. Every year, there are pitchers who do not get the credibility that they deserve because they only managed to win half their games. Cy Youngs are constantly given to the wrong player simply because the true best pitcher won fewer games. Jacob DeGrom is a perfect example. He is almost definitely the best pitcher in the majors this season, however he only has a 8-8 record this season. This is not because of anything that he did wrong, but rather because the team around him can't score runs and even when they do the bullpen gives them right back. However, come voting time, there is a very real possibility that the writers will decide that he is not deserving of it just because he couldn't win the right number of games.

Wins have also caused player's whole careers to be undervalued. Nolan Ryan won a phenomenal 324 games, so at first he may seem like a weird example. Many that follow his career, though, believe he should have had more over his 23 years. They think that because he only eclipsed 20 wins in two of those, he should be considered overrated and not be held in the incredibly high esteem that he always will be. His wins may not be what they could be, however that is because he only played on 5 play-off teams, and only one of those made it past one round. He never had the right talent around him, and yet people still blame him for not being able to win more. All he could do was prevent runs, and he did it well, however people seem to have decided that his team's lack of offense is his fault as they hold his win count against him.

Although they aren't viable in within any context, wins are becoming more and more irrelevant every year. In 1971, all four of the Baltimore Oriole's starters(Mike Cuellar, Pat Dobson, Jim Palmer, and Dave McNally) won 20 or more games. This year, there will not be four 20 game winners in the entire MLB. Manager's are becoming more and more aware of the effect that pitching through a lineup multiple times has on a team's chances. The more the hitters see a starter's stuff, the easier it is for them to hit it. This has meant that managers go to their bullpen a lot faster than they used to, which has greatly reduced their innings, and with that also their chances of earning the W. It has gotten to the point where 300 game winners are almost completely extinct because starters do not stay in games long enough anymore. This trend has only grown this year, as the Tampa Bay Rays began starting a reliever and then going to a pitcher who can pitch longer innings, which eliminates the idea of a starter all-together. If baseball continues in this direction, win numbers will continue to drop and thus be even less of a measure than they once were.

There are a lot of reasons to not trust wins, and they keep multiplying. As baseball continues to lean on the new-era statistics, there will be less and less reason to consider using them for anything. Hopefully, we are heading to a utopian future where statisticians stop recording them in the first place, making room for stats that actually matter. One can only dream...