Quote:
Originally Posted by jchcollins
There has been quite a movement in the 21st century to divorce pitching stats "that matter" from wins / team performance. I'm not a huge fan of that.
Yes, those pitching stats which make more sense in terms of how a pitcher contributes to wins or at least saving runs tell more of a story than some of the broader old ones, but this is the same crowd that wants to (mostly) forget about things like Nolan Ryan's massive (2700?) BB totals.
Yes, one can make the argument that it "doesn't matter" in context of his overall career ERA, which is still pretty darn respectable at 3.19 for nearly three solid decades of pitching. But these same people who want to call Ryan "the GOAT" - what if his ERA was 2.86 like his former teammate Tom Seaver, (or Jim Palmer, who had exactly the same figure). How many wins in addition to his 324 would Ryan have had then? How much above .500 more would his overall winning percentage be?
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There's much to be said for modern analytics, and against it in favor of the older methods, but my point here is that when it comes to Ryan vs. Perry, it just doesn't matter. Any career value based analysis, using the old or the new, comes to the same thing - their values are pretty similar. For example, if we use raw ERA (the old favorite) or ERA+ (the modern favorite) or FIP (the trendier new) that evaluate the same thing, they are very close together in all 3. Hence why the Ryan fanboys have to deny the use of any statistics that speak to overall value - because none of it comes out where they demand it come out too. The only admissible stats are ones that do not speak to overall value, but to how a pitcher achieved value (like K's, BB's, hits, that tell us what kind of a hurler Ryan was and Perry was - how they got those outs and gave up those runs over the large sample)