JV wrote:

Not that Garcia was great or anything, but Boggs getting a W today is just wrong.

Boggs kind of got screwed by the grounds crew.  He had to wait an extra 15 minutes while they dumped wagon loads of some kind of drying dirt on the field.  That game should have been called in the middle of the 6th.

APRTW wrote:

JV wrote:

Not that Garcia was great or anything, but Boggs getting a W today is just wrong.

Boggs kind of got screwed by the grounds crew.  He had to wait an extra 15 minutes while they dumped wagon loads of some kind of drying dirt on the field.  That game should have been called in the middle of the 6th.

I was keeping track of the game on my wife's Blackberry as we were coming down the Mass. Turnpike, wondering what the delay was.
If they had called the game then, the score would have reverted to the end of the fifth and the Cardinals would have lost.

artie_fufkin wrote:

APRTW wrote:

JV wrote:

Not that Garcia was great or anything, but Boggs getting a W today is just wrong.

Boggs kind of got screwed by the grounds crew.  He had to wait an extra 15 minutes while they dumped wagon loads of some kind of drying dirt on the field.  That game should have been called in the middle of the 6th.

I was keeping track of the game on my wife's Blackberry as we were coming down the Mass. Turnpike, wondering what the delay was.
If they had called the game then, the score would have reverted to the end of the fifth and the Cardinals would have lost.

Okay that would have been a bad idea but really the infield was a muddy mess.

artie_fufkin wrote:

Team accomplishments are forgotten.

pitcher W's are an individual award.

Max wrote:

artie_fufkin wrote:

Team accomplishments are forgotten.

pitcher W's are an individual award.

Right. It's better to lose a game 1-0 than be 'awarded' some meaningless statistic in a game your team wins 5-4.
Max, are you really Keith Law?

artie_fufkin wrote:

Max wrote:

artie_fufkin wrote:

Team accomplishments are forgotten.

pitcher W's are an individual award.

Right. It's better to lose a game 1-0 than be 'awarded' some meaningless statistic in a game your team wins 5-4.
Max, are you really Keith Law?

This is why I think it's pointless and doesn't tell me anything: why do we award pitchers a "win" when it takes an entire team? Why don't we assign wins and losses to players, too?

Pitchers decisions are a relic from the 19th century. Henry Chadwick arbitrarily came up with it. And Chadwick is not Thomas Jefferson; his work is not eternal.

"why do we award pitchers a "win" when it takes an entire team?"

I think the answer lies somewhere in the notion team standings are listed in a bigger font than the individual statistics in the newspaper.
Let me ask you this, Max. If wins are an arbitrary stat, how did Greg Maddux keep coming up with at least 19 of them for something like a dozen straight seasons? Did he have the most incredible run of luck in the history of Western civilization, (in which case he ought to have been playing roulette in Las Vegas), or was his skill level higher than most of the other pitchers in the National League?

"In fairness to Max, I'm the one who said it."

Sorry, Max.

"It's arbritary because it's decided that a pitcher only needs to go into the fifth inning to qualify. Why? Why the fifth inning?"

Maybe the same reason a rainout is a do-over before the fifth, and a rainout after the fifth is a legitimate game.

"Maybe Old Hoss Radbourn got sick after two outs in the fifth inning"

Don't be messin' with Ol' Hoss. He was a mean SOB. And I'll wager 90 percent of his wins were games he pitched at least nine innings.

"As for Greg Maddux, he racked up decisions mostly because he pitched more innings and finished more games than anyone in baseball at the time."

Read: "He was better than almost everyone else, thus he accumulated more wins."

"Having one of the best lineups and bullpens during that time didn't hurt either."

Really? Including the year he won 20 with a fourth place Cubs team that had Bob Scanlan closing?
Maybe, and I'm just spitballing here, Maddux won 20 games that year because he was a good pitcher. Better than say, Frank Castillo, who in almost the same number of starts won half as many games with the same lineup and the same bullpen that season.