- Jun 18, 2023
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To be fair, every stat is meaningless when facing a vastly different range of opponents. My DD swing miss% is much higher against easier teams.
Wins -loss gets a bad rap. Not a good short term metric. If you look at the top 15 pitching war leaders, and the top 15 career wins leaders they are fairly close.
When competition is relative equal, like travel ball should be, pitcher win-loss vs team win- loss would probably a go too. Era, whip, depends more on who is keeping stats.
I mean, absolutely. and power hitters hit more home runs against weaker competition, and pitchers on teams with bad defense give up more unearned runs.
And often in these levels of softball the samples are pretty small too. You're looking backwards, sure a good team that's winning will have a pitcher with a lot of wins. But transport that pitcher onto a random team and you know next to nothing about how many wins they'll get in the next season.
If they strike people out though, you know that have some ability. Maybe it's all over-matched velocity that won't play up to a higher level, but If I'm picking a pitcher off a pile with just some stats to go by, I'll look for strike%, strikeouts, low walks, etc long before I even glance at w-l. (velocity, break, spin and all that if you got it too)