What Makes A Pitcher Win?

Gio Gonzalez led the majors with 21 wins lat year

One of the first recorded statistics in sports was the pitcher's win, but where do those wins come from. Today we will look at what statistics correlate the most with wins. There has been a bit of a movement recently to stop considering the win an important statistic due to factors like run support and defense. But is it possible that wins come from stats like ERA and strikeouts already, and that there is no need to discount wins, but rather view them as the culmination of other statistics. The statistics that will be compared to wins today are ERA, K/9, K/BB, AVG, WHIP, BABIP, tERA, and Fastball Velocity. Stats appear in order of Correlation. 88 pitchers who qualified for the ERA tile were used in this study.
1. (ERA Earned Runs/ IP)x9
I cannot say that I am overly surprised with this one considering that it, along with wins and strikeouts, is one of the numbers in the pitching triple crown. Gio Gonzalez led the majors with 21 wins last year and had the 9th lowest ERA at 2.89. Clayton Kershaw, who led the majors with a 2.53 ERA had 14 wins. The biggest wrench in the data was Cliff Lee, who was last among the 88 pitchers with only 6 wins, but his 3.16 ERA was 15th overall. It earned the number one spot with a correlation of .64351.

2. WHIP (Walks + Hits)/ Innings Pitch
Clayton Kershaw again led the majors in this category with a 1.02 WHIP. Gonzalez placed 12th at 1.13. Jake Peavy and Cliff Lee threw curveballs in this category both placing in the top 10 but Peavy only had 11 wins and as said earlier Lee had 6. The correlation was -.55608.

3. True ERA ERA adjusted for Defense and other variables

Should have had more than 14 wins

Coming in third with a correlation of -.53644, tERA was led again by Clayton Kershaw who had a terrible offense in LA. Gio Gonzalez placed fifth with a tERA of 3.34 and Cliff Lee showed up again screwing up the data with the third lowest tERA. Jeremy Guthrie, who only had 8 wins, had the highest tERA of the 88 pitchers with 6.33.

4. Batting Average Against
Gonzalez led the majors with a .202 BA against so that might make you think that this should have the strongest correlation. Another reason that this might be seen to have a high correlation is that Cliff Lee and his 6 wins doesn't show up until 55 on this list. The problem with this is that most of the data is spread throughout with Nationals' Edwin Jackson and Ross Detweiler taking 22 and 23 with 10 wins and BA of .237.

5. Strikeouts per 9 innings
There was a huge dropoff here going from a -.52691 correlation to a .295676 correlation for K/9. Max Scherzer led with 11.08 and had 16 wins. Yu Darvish was second with 10.4 and also had 16 wins. Gonzalez was third in K/9. Clayton Richard had 14 wins but only had 4.4 K/9.

6. Batting Average Against on Balls in Play
This stat is often used to project how a player will do in following seasons or how a player will do whe traded to a new team  but it does not correlate that well with wins. In fact, the correlation is only -.27. Jared Weaver led the majors with a .241 BABIP and as second in the league with 20 wins. However, Ervin Santana, who was second in BABIP, only had 9 wins.

7. Strikeouts/ Walks
This stat really seems like it should be a strong indicator of who wins or loses but the the pitchers with the highest two K/BB, Cliff Lee and Joe Blanton only had 6 and 10 wins respectively. This again is just because Cliff Lee had a terrible offense in Philadelphia, at least when he pitched. Gonzales doesn't appear til 46 on the list, having a K/BB of 2.72.

8. Fastball Velocity

Proves You Don't need to throw hard to win

This only has a correlation of .09 and that is really to be expected. We should all know that wins has very little to do with how hard you throw the ball, but how you make it dance and where you put it. It doesn't hurt necessarily as David Price had the hardest fastball in the majors with 95.5 MPH and had 20 wins. Jeff Samardzija had the second fastest fastball but only 9 wins, mostly due to the Cubs sucking ass. Gio's fastball averaged 93 MPH. Knuckleballer RA Dickey had 20 wins with a fastball of only 83.4 MPH.