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Originally Posted by TotalEnd98
It's not really venomous. It's an understanding that W-L is a largely team-dependant statistic and has very little predictive value and low correlation to talent. Sure, we know that a pitcher who won 350 games was probably brilliant, and one who won 35 was likely not. You can use W-L for that just fine. But if you're trying to tell the talent difference between two pitchers, one who's won 250 and one who's won 225, you better be looking at something other than those wins.
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I have to disagree with this, too. On a year-to-year basis, W-L records are, yes, very dependent on a pitcher's run support. However, over the course of a career, those things seem to even out. The list of the best W-L records in baseball history is, generally speaking, also a list of the best players ever to play. There are exceptions (Whitey Ford, I guess, although he was a very good pitcher), but they're of the "this guy should have been .580 but he was .600 instead" variety. In fact, if I had to pick between career ERA and career W-L to figure out which pitchers were better, I'd take the latter any day of the week.
And ironically enough, Mussina's W-L record is something that statheads could use on the non-stathead crowd, because in truth it is very, very good.