Unrewarded Quality Starts

I'm guessing there are a few Cy Young voters out there who know Felix had the best year of an A.L. pitcher this year, who intellectually know that wins measure things other than a pitcher's performance, and yet still want a measure that looks like a real ballgame.

We can thank a bored Philadelphia sports writer on December 26th, 1985 for inventing such a stat: the quality start.  For a refresher, that's 6 or more innings, with three or fewer earned runs.  The kind of game that a pitcher deserves to win, generally, if his teammates hold up their end of the bargain.

Well, let's go one step further, and I'll invent a new statistic here (I passed Research Design III in my doc program, so I'm good to go here).  We'll call it "Unrewarded Quality Starts".  Quality Starts minus Wins. This one is so simple, I'd get laughed out of a Baseball Prospectus chat just for uttering it.  Which may be why it makes sense.

Pitcher	Team	Quality Starts	Wins	Unrewarded QS
Hernandez	SEA	29	13	16
Weaver	LAA	26	13	13
Sabathia	NYY	25	21	4
Price	TAM	24	19	5
Verlander	DET	22	18	4
Lester	BOS	20	19	1
Buchholz	BOS	19	17	2
Lee	TEX	17	12	5

Data Source: ESPN.com

Gosh, there's not a lot more to say here, other than this is yet another metric on which we see that Jared Weaver is underrated.  Oh yeah, and Felix.

So, if you were thinking of voting for Felix, but wanted a way to justify it that bears some resemblance to actual baseball (sorry BABIP, DIPS, xFIP, and WAR, I love you, but you're too complicated)...you can justify your vote with Unrewarded Quality Starts.

And if you want to see what an Unrewarded Quality Start looks like as a real game, go to Felix's game log.

If you're dying to do something a little Sabermetric while you're there, check out his "Game Scores" (GSc).  This is a number between 1 and 100 that represents how well a pitcher pitched in a given game.  It can be thought of as the percent chance he gave his team to win. Felix had 13 starts with a game score above 50% in which he "earned" a loss or no-decision.  For contrast, Sabathia had 3.  Reverse these, and Felix has 23 wins right now, and we're debating whether or not his Cy Young victory will be unanimous.