On Monday’s edition of MLB Now, anchor Brian Kenny once again made the case against using wins as a measure of pitcher quality. Citing recent games such as Matt Harvey’s brilliant nine-inning, one-hit no-decision, he argued that the win is an overrated statistic that doesn’t do a good job of describing the pitcher’s performance. After Kenny’s presentation, former pitcher Al Leiter came out to give a rebuttal. Leiter had an interesting take on the issue. He said that Kenny wasn’t respecting the human element of the game, and he suggested that the win statistic might actually make starters perform a little better in some key situations.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article in which I suggested that teams might benefit from going to a model that gets rid of the traditional starting pitcher. Instead of having five men who are expected to go 6-7 innings over 100 pitches, I suggested a model in which three pairs of pitchers each throw 50 pitches, and on the third day, they would pitch again, in fulfillment… I should stop there. I argued that a team that committed to that model could leverage a group of (cheap!) pitchers who were good for a couple innings, but not for six. In this way, a team could get the same sort of results that they might expect from having a bunch of pretty good starters, but for a fraction of the (David) Price.

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A little more than a week ago, Jon Heyman of CBS sent out a tweet wondering why it was that Starling Marte and Bryce Harper had the same WAR. Heyman was quoting Baseball-Reference's version of WAR, which at that moment in time showed Marte and Harper tied at 1.7 wins. Harper had clearly been the superior hitter, but drilling down, it turned out that the fielding metric used by Baseball-Reference loved Marte's defense enough (and thought Harper's was average enough) to call them equals.

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Of course. He's a pitcher.

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Two weeks ago in this space, I asked what a good pitching coach—someone like noted magician Leo Mazzone—is worth to a major-league team. I came up with an estimate that Mazzone might have been worth four wins to the Braves (and Orioles) per year during his tenure.

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Earlier today, CBS baseball writer Jon Heyman asked a rather innocuous question on Twitter.

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Last week, in an article in Sports Illustrated, Tom Verducci put forth an argument that the modern game of baseball has a problem. Hitters, he claimed, have become too passive in their approach at the plate as they attempt to drive up the pitch counts of the opposing pitcher. He mixes together a couple of case examples (Joey Votto, Jayson Werth) with some data that appear to show that hitters have become more passive in their approach over time, and are paying for it in declining run production. Maybe Joey and Jayson, and by proxy the rest of the baseball players out there, should swing the bat a little more.

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On Today's episode of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh reported on the unfortunate case of Jason Heyward, who underwent an appendectomy on Monday night in Denver.  Certainly, all of us here at Baseball Prospectus wish the J-Hey Kid a quick recovery, but maybe more could have been done to prevent Heyward from his DL trip.  Ben noted that appendix is a non-essential organ and people get along just fine without their appendix.  Why wouldn't a player just have it out during the off-season before anything happened?  Perhaps in November, teams should send each of their players to have an outpatient appendectomy?  Let's do a little cost-benefit analysis.

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Leo Mazzone is a genius. Dave Duncan can take a scrap heap veteran and turn him into something useful. Don Cooper is dreamy. Right?

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Last Thursday night, in the bottom of the sixth inning of the Dodgers-Padres game—which the Dodgers led 2-1 at the time—Zack Greinke hit Carlos Quentin with a 3-2 pitch. Words were exchanged, and Quentin (6'2", 235 lbs) charged the mound. Greinke (6'2", 195 lbs) tried to mosh with Quentin, leading with his left (non-pitching) shoulder, but Quentin had a 60-foot running start and 40 pounds’ worth of advantage. In the classic physics equation, force equals mass times acceleration. Quentin had the advantage on both counts.

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I think that we've really misunderstood pitcher BABIP over the years.

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BP World Hindquarters -- The bloggers are coming! The bloggers are coming!

Baseball Prospectus CEO Joe Hamrahi has confirmed that the entirety of the staff of Baseball Prospectus, a “web log” or “blog” website from the internet on which amateurs post articles which reduce baseball to a series of mathematical equations, has been hired by a team in Major League Baseball. “It’s kind of a weird day here at BP,” said Hamrahi. “They really wanted to get fully on board with the recent move toward analytics in baseball, and figured that instead of putting together a department, they’d just hire us.”

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