QUOTE(WHarris1 @ Jun 27, 2007 -> 02:01 AM)
There is no doubt it is misleading, and in that sense it's a perfect comparison. I guess that angle I was taking is that there is no offensive stat that can possibly compare to wins in terms of awfulness.
*cough* RBIs *cough*
And, yeah, W-L records are all but meaningless. Jeff Suppan has the same amount of wins as Johan Santana. I will grant that a pitcher's offense behind him tends to even out over the course a career- you can't luck your way to 300 wins. Still, that doesn't mean much, because there's a ton of way better statistics that can be used to judge a pitcher's career. They could completely do away with keeping track of pitchers' W-L records and I wouldn't complain.
Batting average is another stat that needs to be mentioned. It isn't nearly as worthless as RBIs or pitcher's W-L records, but it's vastly overrated. Placido Polanco hit .295 last year, but walked a grand total of seventeen times and had a mere 23 extra base hits. Adam Dunn hit .234 last year, but walked a whopping 112 times and had 64 extra-base hits, forty of which were homers. Who is more valuable? The answer is Adam Dunn, by more than 150 OPS points. But if you were to look at their batting averages, you'd get a different idea.
And this is not a statistic, but I also hate it on TV how they say stuff like "the hitter is four for seven lifetime against this pitcher," as if seven at-bats means something.