Best lefty off all time? My vote is Koufax!

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Spahn won …. wait for it.... 250+ games after age 30 lol. Of course, everyone here knows wins don't matter. And he didn't refuse to pitch on Yom Kippur or (as far as I know) make the cover of LIFE.

This brings to mind another question. Okay, lets say wins don't matter, they are heavily overrated but let's just completely dismiss them entirely. How many pitchers have 363 or more total decisions but are only "above average, at best"? Maybe a handful at most.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

This brings to mind another question. Okay, lets say wins don't matter, they are heavily overrated but let's just completely dismiss them entirely. How many pitchers have 363 or more total decisions but are only "above average, at best"? Maybe a handful at most.

To be sure, in a short stretch, pitchers can win games without being very good and lose games while being outstanding. But over a long period of time, it being baseball, these things I think tend to average out. So wins at least in the complete game era end up being at least a decent proxy for a combination of longevity and quality even if other metrics are even better.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

To be sure, in a short stretch, pitchers can win games without being very good and lose games while being outstanding. But over a long period of time, it being baseball, these things I think tend to average out. So wins at least in the complete game era end up being at least a decent proxy for a combination of longevity and quality even if other metrics are even better.

Personally, I agree. I think wins are a pretty decent stat in the complete game era, not as good as many others or ERA, but hardly without value. In today's game, I think the win is a nearly meaningless statistic.

nobody won 300 games without being an excellent pitcher. No one won 200 games without being pretty darn good. There's some edge cases of good pitchers on bad teams having a bad record (Bob Friend stands out off the top of my mind), but a pitcher with a lot of wins correlates well to the other value stats.