I BARELY EVEN KNOW 'ER: Baseball fans complaining of All-Star snubs, check out this comparison:
Player A: 12-5, 3.02 ERA
Player B: 11-4, 3.05 ERA
Player C: 5-8, 3.05 ERA
Player D: 8-5, 3.02 ERA
Player E: 3-9, 3.02 ERA
You only have room for one of these guys on your All-Star roster. Which do you choose? Probably nobody would say Player E. It seems like a lot of the traditional baseball writers are saying Player B was jobbed. The actual selection process ended up with Player D. But who are these players with silly names?
Player B, obviously, is CC Sabathia, Player D is CJ Wilson, and the principal differences between them, if you read the "who was snubbed?" columns, are that CC Sabathia is a proven winner and CJ Wilson is less so because he has a mediocre win-loss record, and also they have different middle initials.
Meanwhile, Player C is CC Sabathia if he had Doug Fister's game-by-game run support, and Players A and E are Doug Fister (if he had CC Sabathia's game-by-game run support) and Doug Fister (stuck with his awful actual run support). You could be excused for not knowing that Doug Fister is the #5 starter for the Seattle Mariners, as in: the guy who gets the ball for the Mariners when the four better Mariners starters don't have it.
This is not to say that CC Sabathia does or doesn't deserve to be in the All-Star Game (I think he does, but I'm not outraged) or that Doug Fister does (he does not, though he has been the best #5 starter in baseball this year, so that's something). It is just to point out, again, that the two principal statistics that major news outlets use to judge starting pitchers are totally useless. If one of your stats can't tell the difference between CJ Wilson, CC Sabathia, and Doug Fister, and the other one of your stats yields completely opposite conclusions if you flip the run support (which is mostly out of the pitcher's control, except that Doug Fister actually scored the only run he got in one of his games), then your stats are useless.
In fact, the way I think about pitcher wins nowadays is that they're like paper currency. You can tell something from paper currency. If you have so much of it that you have to stack it on pallets, it's a lot, and if you have so little that you can stick it in your front pocket, you don't have enough to buy a house. But you can't compare two stacks that are of anything close to equal size without knowing the denominations of the bills, and that's precisely what you're trying to do when you're evaluating people's credentials for the Hall of Fame or the All-Star Game.
