Quote:
Originally Posted by G1911
I’m fully aware that a strikeout is a credit to the pitcher (or a debit to the hitter). Not striking out is similarly a credit to the batters eye and pitch waiting.
An out is an out most of the time, the hitting metrics recognize the K has little actual value these days. If this is true, then it is not logically possible in a directly adversarial game for the K to have great value to the defense. Yet the advanced analytics for pitchers tend to focus heavily on the K, it’s a big part of why pitchers accumulate WAR faster now, because it favors the K for pitchers without an equal punishment for batters in an era where hitters don’t care about whiffing 150 times a year. This isn’t logical in a direct adversarial game if a strikeout barely hurts the hitter. It either is significant to both, or it is not significant to either when we are measuring what produces wins. Outcome A can not logically be significant to Team A’s winning odds but insignificant to Team B’s winning odds when there are two teams.
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That is because WAR is isolating the factors that are fully known to be in the pitchers control as opposed to in the control of the defense behind them....and they are giving a bigger validity factor to the pitchers that are producing a high level of K/BB ratio and home runs allowed, because they know that the pitcher is in control of those.
Basically, they are ignoring weak contact allowed by the pitcher and putting all contact in play into the hands of the defense.
They then try to add how much the defense was a factor in how many runs were allowed and that is when things go haywire because it is extremely hard to do that and you can get a lot of odd results in pitcher WAR.
WAR for pitchers is awful. It is hard enough to measure the value of a single defender, let alone measure an entire team defense and try to decipher if weak contact outs were the product of the pitcher or the defense.