Cubs pitcher Kyle Farnsworth threw a total of four pitches in the one-third of an inning he completed last night against the Colorado Rockies. Two of his four pitches resulted in Colorado home runs (one was a ball, the other an out). And when the dust settled, Farnsworth was credited with the win.
Seriously.
In response to this bizzare statistical loop-hole, the Braintrust of Flipside (an oxymoron, indeed) projected out the numbers from Farnsworth’s outing last night and found this to be numerically true:
So what’s the point, you ask? The point is this: Baseball fans everywhere are eagerly awaiting the moment Greg Maddux reaches his 300th career victory. We, the Flipside staff, just want to know why this is such a big deal. We contend that a pitcher's Win/Loss record, which is the yardstick in determining a pitcher’s overall “success," is entirely irrelevant. It’s that simple.
Don’t get us wrong: the attention being paid to this shoe-in-for-the-Hall-of-Fame pitcher is most certainly warranted, as he is undoubtedly one of the game’s all-time greats. This we don’t debate.
We also don't contend that we (or you) care a whole lot about this statsistical annomaly; in fact, we concede that the topic is downright boring. But when you turn on SportsCenter hoping to catch a glimpse of a Kournikova photo-shoot, an Iverson Olympic buzzer-beater (equally as uninteresting, incidentally), or a what-NFL-player-got-convicted-of-what-today-story, it becomes enormously frustrating to have this most irrelevant milestone reapeatedly jammed down our collective throats.
How can we be so blasphemous? After all, only 21 pitchers in the history of our National Pasttime have ever won 300 games. To this we say: Who cares? Simply consider these two facts:
Simply put, there is no correlation between the effectiveness of a pitcher and the resulting win-loss decision.
And that's that!!! |
