A new formula to bring pitcher wins back to life in 2025 - ESPN

There have been 2,664 pitchers who have made at least 30 career starts since 1901.

Three of those pitchers — or one out of every 888 — own a career ERA below 2.00. Two of them are Hall of Fame deadball era greats: Ed Walsh (1.82) and Addie Joss (1.89). The third is Pittsburgh Pirates superstar Paul Skenes.

The chances of Skenes, who has made just 39 career starts, remaining in that class are slim. That's nothing against him. It's the reality of math and the era in which he plays. The careers of Joss and Walsh overlapped in the American League from 1904 to 1910, when the aggregate ERA was 2.61. The collective ERA in the majors since Skenes debuted is 4.04.

This season, Skenes' 1.85 ERA leads the majors, and he's first among all pitchers in bWAR (4.4). The latter figure is actually tops among all National League players, period. The current numbers generated by my AXE system and the futures at ESPN BET both mark Skenes as a solid favorite to win his first NL Cy Young Award.

Incidentally, Skenes' won-loss record for the woeful Pirates is a meager 4-6. Should we care?

Won-loss records for pitchers are no longer part of the evaluative conversation, so if your response to the previous question was «no» then congratulations for paying attention. If your response was anything else, then it's almost certainly because you're in a fantasy league that still uses pitcher wins, not because you think Skenes' record actually tells us anything about his true value.

But what if I could tell you this and prove it: Skenes' real won-loss record is 11-5, the win total tied for the third-most in the majors. I'm going to explain how I got there, but first, let me explain why I think it matters.

Just to illustrate how starting pitchers were