The Kevin Correia Dilemma: Why the Win Is the Most Overrated Stat in Baseball

As baseball enters a new age of advanced sabermetric statistics, it still stubbornly clings to a pair of the oldest stats in human history: wins and losses. 

Last night, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Kevin Correia won his major-league-leading eighth game of the season as the Pirates beat the New York Mets 9-3. On ESPN's Sportscenter later that night, positioned right behind coverage of the Stanley Cup Finals and Shaquille O'Neal's retirement, the lead baseball story was the Mets-Pirates game. Why? Because of the media's obsession with an antiquated stat: the pitching win.

In today's game of baseball, almost everything about a pitcher or hitter's performance can be measured in some way. For pitchers, there are stats that can measure the percentage of pitches the batter swings at inside and outside the strike zone (O-Swing percentage and Z-Swing percentage, respectively). There is ground ball to fly ball ratios and quantifiable effectiveness of each pitch type.

For hitters, similar stats exist to show the true value of hitters beyond the stats we see on our favorite baseball cards. Over the past few years, scouting and statistical assessment of a ballplayers performance has come a long way in its ability to truly measure how good each player really is. Thus, it remains silly that in today's day and age, mass media refuses to drop its obsession with a stat such as the win that tells a very limited and misleading story about pitchers across the league.

With today's stats, the line separating luck and skill has become very defined, a far cry from its blurry past. The scorecards of yesteryear were unable to differentiate between a hard line drive to left field and a broken-bat dink over the first baseman's head. Nowadays, we can know everything we need to know about how good a pitcher is throwing. We are able to definitively say which aspects of a game are inside and outside a pitcher's locus of control.

And for pitchers, a large part of getting the W is out of their hands. Too often, we see good pitchers throw gems and get robbed of the all-important W by their offensively-challenged teammates, or we see mediocre pitchers rack up wins by the bunches because they play for high-scoring teams. Chalk up the case of Kevin Correia to the latter.

Correia is having a very nice year for a pitcher of his accomplishments and background, pitching his way to an 8-4 record with a 3.40 ERA and 1.20 WHIP. But he's not exactly pitching at the level of the "winningest pitcher in the majors." He has pitched well in those eight wins, but he is also a major beneficiary of some good old luck. The stats certainly lie, especially that gaudy win column.

The 2011 Pirates won't make any forget about the 1920's Yankees lineups—the Pirates rank 24th in the majors in runs scored with 3.8 per game—but in Correia's 13 starts, the Pirates are backing him with 4.8 runs per game, a statistical aberration that is purely a function of luck. Digging deeper, Correia's strikeout to walk ratio—the gold standard for pitchers is anything near 3:1—is a lackluster 34:17, or 2:1. Going to the sabermetrics, his xFIP, or Expected Fielding Indifferent Pitching, is 4.12. xFIP seeks to eliminate all external factors that a pitcher cannot control, such as fielding and where batted balls are dropping, and computes an ERA that is more representative of how a pitcher is actually pitching. So according to xFIP, Correia is actually pitching like a guy with a 4.12 ERA and much less than eight wins.

Thats not to say that a guy with an ERA like that cannot win games. In fact, according to YES Network's Ken Singleton during yesterday's New York Yankees-Oakland Athletics broadcast, every Yankee pitcher to start at least 25 games for the Bronx Bombers over the last 10 years has a winning record. And let's just say that staggering statistic isn't because of wealth of talented arms the Yankees have employed in recent memory. Rather, this is a result of these pitchers being backed by a top-five offense year in and year out.

Did guys like Jon Lieber, Javier Vasquez and Randy Johnson pitch like winning pitchers during their time with the Yankees? According to the outdated ways to measure pitching, yes. But with today's new and innovative stats that can analyze practically everything, these overrated Yankees hurlers seemed to be rather fortunate they had teammates like Jason Giambi and Alex Rodriguez to fill up their win columns for them.

Is Kevin Correia the best pitcher in baseball? Most would agree that he isn't. Is he an ace? For the Pirates right now, maybe. But one thing is for sure. The statistical representation of his performance this season is quite misleading. His stats beg further investigation. Winning isn't everything, at least for pitchers.