FJM’ing FJM? Don’t Mind If I Do

I realize the following post may be sacrilegious, but it’s one I feel needs to be written. Fire Joe Morgan is one of the best blogs of all time, but let’s not kid ourselves – lately it is slipping. To me, yesterday’s post exemplifies just how far the site’s quality has fallen.

The premise: Richard Griffin wrote a post defending the win statistic for pitchers. He thinks it’s the best way to measure a pitcher’s worth because “the team goal is victories.” Now obviously this is wrong in so many ways, and FJM is ready to tell us why. We get it; wins are a stupid way to measure a pitcher’s value. But the way Junior tried to dissect Griffin’s prose is just flat wrong on so many levels. Let’s dig in.
Sure enough, this season’s ERA is more than half a run higher than [Burnett's] career ERA and his WHIP is also much higher than normal. His strikeout numbers are good, but they’re only slightly better than his career K/9 (innings) ratio, and are actually lower than last year’s K/9 numbers. In fact, his win-loss record and games started numbers are the only numbers that are noticeably better than what he’s put up over the last 5 years. [snip]

My question is this: when was it decided that a context-specific stat like wins is the determining factor in declaring a “career year”, especially when Burnett’s ERA and WHIP seem to suggest it’s actually his worst? Or is it maybe that the “career year” stat is the number that we don’t see – namely, A.J.’s usual 5-10 games lost to injury?

First, the above is an email from one of Griffin’s readers asking why this is a career year for Burnett. Griffin reliably responds that it’s because he’s a winner, leading Junior to say this:

This is, presumably, the same reason that between the pitching Hernandezes, Livan (10-8, 5.48 ERA) is having a better season than Felix (8-8, 3.28 ERA). Don’t you understand baseball is a team sport, Felix, you selfish prima donna?

Of course no one really believes that, but yeah he’s really giving it to Griffin! Go get ‘em, Junior.

I will slice it using Win Shares. It has the word “win” in it, and like you said, baseball is about winning.

2006 9.8
2007 12.1
2008 9.4

Win Shares is a terrible statistic. It’s so heavily dependent on team defense that it really tells you very little about how the individual pitcher actually performed. It’s a meaningless tool to use in player evaluation. The FJM guys should be much better than this.

Burnett’s biggest contribution this year compared to years past is that barring injury, he’ll pitch more innings than he ever has as a Blue Jay. But come on: a lot of those innings have been horrendous. Guy had a 6.07 ERA in April and a 5.06 ERA in June. Heck, even though he’s sort of turned things around, his ERA in August is 4.96.

Small. Sample. Size. Give me a fucking break. Chase Utley had a .780 OPS in July. Superstar? I think not. Dude fucking sucks!!eleventy!

A better, more nuanced argument here would be that although Burnett’s 4.58 ERA is unsightly, he has made 14 very strong starts where he allowed 2 or fewer runs. Whether through skill or through luck, he managed to cluster a lot of the runs he’s allowed this year into three or four absolutely horrendous outings. And I guess that’s more valuable than allowing 4 runs every time out.

Here is the biggest problem I have with the entire post. Is the 4.58 ERA unsightly? I suppose, although it’s basically league average. But ERA is not how you should evaluate pitchers. Again, it all comes back to defense and BABIP. If you have a great defense behind you to turn hits into outs, you’ll look much better as a pitcher. If you have a defense that blows cock (Cincinnati comes to mind) or just get unfortunate on balls in play, you’ll look like a bad pitcher. This is not hard, FJM. ERA is a shitty metric. Quit relying on it. If you want to tear down someone else’s argument, you have do it correctly. You’ve managed to set the bar high for yourself based on your past excellent (and funny) work. Stop with the shitty analysis.

FWIW, there is a metric that allows us to evaluate how a pitcher does INDEPENDENT of his defense. Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) essentially tells us what a pitcher’s ERA would be if he were “luck-neutral” and not tied to the whims of BABIP. How does A.J. Burnett look on those metrics? Since coming to Toronto, his FIPs have been:

2006 — 3.84

2007 — 4.44

2008 — 3.68

Well, look at that. Lo and behold, it HAS been a career year for Burnett in a Blue Jay uniform. He’s just been extremely unlucky, giving him an “unsightly” 4.58 ERA. This shit is not hard.

Junior did have some final words for us:

My proposal: we give the win a new name. We call it the DORK. We call a loss a BLORK. Thus, pitchers now have DORK-BLORK records instead of win-loss records. Won’t Richard Griffin feel manly when he extols Andy Sonnanstine’s heroic 13-6 DORK-BLORK record? Sonnanstine knows how to DORK, yes he does! Derek Lowe is 10-11? Needs to put his team on his back and lead them to the DORK. I don’t care how close some of his BLORKs are, because hey, the bottom line is: you play to DORK the game.

Hilarious.