Seattle-Toronto: An Historic Game Even Without Ichiro and Bautista

It's safe to say that the Toronto Blue Jays 1-0 victory over the Seattle Mariners yesterday afternoon was one of the greatest, most historic, random games in MLB history.

To start, Toronto outfielder Jose Bautista's first-inning home run was his 50th of the season, a number that has diminished somewhat in recent years but still draws a certain amount of awe each time it happens.

Then, Ichiro Suzuki did something truly historic when he recorded his 200th hit, making it a record 10 seasons in a row that the Japanese sensation has reached that milestone.  Some are already calling this record one of the most unbreakable in all of baseball.

But most importantly, however, Thursday's game might have signaled a major shift in the philosophy of how we view pitchers, specifically the importance (or lack thereof) of a pitcher's win-loss record.

For most of the season, stat heads across the country have agreed that Seattle's Felix Hernandez has been the best pitcher in the American League, if not all of baseball.  Pick a stat (traditional or sabermetric), and chances are that Felix's name appears at or near the top. 

The only exception to this is his win-loss record; a stat that is of dubious value yet traditionally has decided the Cy Young Award.

Now, the idea that a pitcher's win-loss record is meaningless is hardly new. Stat geeks such as myself have been hammering this point home for many years now.  And to be fair, the trend toward devaluing a pitcher's win-loss record has been going on for some time (Pedro Martinez in 1997 and Zach Greinke last season are perhaps the best examples). But we had yet to see an event that caused even the most hardheaded baseball "expert" to question the value of the stat.

Until yesterday, that is.

Thanks to the history made by Bautista and Ichiro, everybody was paying quite a bit of attention to a September game with no playoff implications.  And because of this, the entire country saw a textbook example of just how much a pitcher's win-loss record is out of a pitcher's control.

King Felix held the Blue Jays to two hits and one run (on Bautista's homer in the first) in an eight-inning complete game.  However, it was an eight-inning complete game because the Mariners inept offense (the worst the AL has seen against the league since the 1999 Twins) failed to put up any runs, giving Toronto a 1-0 victory and dropping Felix to 12-12 on the season.

Amazingly, this might be the best thing that could have happened to Felix's Cy Young candidacy. 

People who have been touting Felix's case for several weeks now—from Rob Neyer to Larry Stone to the good people at Fangraphs—suddenly found their opinions echoed by a wide spectrum of the baseball world.  This wasn't even Felix's best game of the season—in fact, he's had at least 11 that were superior—and yet his dominance in a losing effort riled everybody up. 

People are taking a look at the numbers Felix has some control over (Innings, K/BB, FIP, WAR, and to a lesser extent ERA and WHIP) and comparing that to what he has zero control over (namely, his AL-worst 3.09 run support per game and 14 total runs scored in his 12 losses) and coming to the obvious conclusion: A pitcher's win-loss record is meaningless.

Thursday's game between Seattle and Toronto represented three historic moments for Major League Baseball.  The first two will live on in baseball's record books.  The third represents a seismic shift in baseball thinking.  All of them are very welcome developments.

Not bad for a mid-September game between two teams that have long been out of playoff contention.