|
I don't deny he was good, but was he pure brilliance or just taken out of situations where winning and losing were equally likely and then put into situations where winning is extremely likely. Regardless of who is pitching, the team ahead in the ninth inning (99% of the Gagne's appearances) wins are all but guaranteed.
The average winning percentage for pitching in the ninth inning save situations in 2002 was (I doubt it has changed much in the last half decade):
Top 9th, lead by one: 84.2%
Bottom of the 9th, lead by one: 95.8%
Those number, obviously, go up as the lead increases to 2 or 3 runs. And therein lies what I see as the brilliance of Billy Beane: the recognition that since the difference between "average" and "pure brilliance" is so small that it is easy to manufacture extremely overvalued players and use the profit for investment in more important areas.
And if it is true that Gagne is truly useless unless starting an inning with a lead then he is even less valuable since he can only be used in a narrow situation of minimal incremental value. Where there has been some light shed on the relative unimportance of ERA and win-loss record it is amusing to see so much stock put into the even more silly save statistic.
|