.. you need to be {it helps tremendously to be} on a playoff-bound team to win the MVP, and you need to have enough wins to get the Cy Young ...

Joe Morgan, if he has a Cy Young vote, will never vote for an Athletic. His is still very bitter over the fact that he was turned away from purchasing the team a few years back (i believe with the Save Mart owner). The A's would have to win 130 games, have a 75 home run player, and a 28 game winner before Morgan could muster up a compliment about the team. So hearing his opinion about ERA is not suprising

"You don't send a pitcher out to the mound and say "get a good ERA." You want him to win games"

Pitching a solid game with a good ERA, K/BB, etc. is all he CAN do. I suppose Morgan thinks the pitcher can somehow control how well his team hits through his attitude, presence or some such crap. It's nonsense, I never even glance at a pitcher's W/L when I look at pitching statistics. Aaron Small from 05 and Dan Haren so far this season are glaring examples of why.

The rules about what are earned vs unearned leave a lot to be desired.  

Also the rules about attribution of inherited runners to the previous pitcher makes ERA more distorted.
And on any given night, the opposition has the same run environment as your team, so comparing the ERA for a cold night in Oakland to the ERA from Arlington in the summer is not accurate anyway.  

to determine the best pitcher.  How about this.  Which pitcher would you have wanted in a big game last year(based on 2006 stats):

Pitcher A : 18-7
Pitcher B : 12-11
Pitcher C : 13-11

Well obviously Pitcher A is the man with that great W-L record.  (now as most of you might realize by now Pitcher A is not really the best, so without further ado....)

Pitcher A is Jon Garland
Pitcher B is CC Sabathia
Pitcher C is John Lackey

I can tell you without a doubt that Garland would be a distant 3rd in any decision I made about which of those three starting pitchers I would have wanted pitching for me last year.  Look at some of the other stats these guys had (in A,B,C order)

ERA 4.51, 3.22, 3.56
WHIP 1.36, 1.17, 1.26
K/9 4.77, 8.03, 7.86

Clearly the worst across the board.  

One of my other all time favorite stat lines to show a "crappy" pitcher is this one:

Pitcher finished year 8-16.  Boy that sucks.  How about these numbers to go with it however:

212 IP, 2.76 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, 154 HA, 270 K.  This was Nolan Ryan's 1987 season with Houston.  Guess those numbers are not good enough to be a good pitcher for Morgan (if they come with a 8-16 W-L record).  

I think it's funny whenever Jon Miller diplomatically calls out Morgan on his sloppy commentary. The guy just pulls stuff out of his ass.

considering that it has a proven bias towards those who consistently come up with runners on base, something that's more or less out of the control of the batter.

If I were to have my way, RBI would be replaced by some sort of Base Conversion stat that'd look at the following things

How many possible bases can be taken by the runners on-base and the batter (maximum 10 for a grand-slam)?

Of those, how many were actually taken as a result of the at-bat?

While I haven't accounted for the added benefit of stolen bases, this at least would create BC and BCA stats that would tell me if a hitter can do the best with the situation that's presented to him.

Is it just me or does Blake look like Byrnsie?

Melinda winning American Idol is tantamount to Ichiro having a stellar professional career and then coming to America and winning Rookie of the Year.
First of all, she's 30 years old and I know that is within the rules, but to match her up agianst young singers trying to get their break is wrong.
She has had  a long, professional career.
She has back-up sung for the following  rhythm & blues and gospel singers, Cece Winan,Smokie Norful,Sandi Patty, Vickie Winans,Vanessa Bell Armstrong,Aaron Neville, Alabama, Michael Mcdonald and the list goes on.
No wonder she can sing different genres. She is a trained professional.
And.....I belive that Sally Field "you really like me" act is just that, an act.

since we're on the subject of stats, where do you guys go to find your more obscure stats.  I often want to look at breakdowns of team starter vs. bullpen stats and so on and there is nowhere I can find that has this sort of breakdown available. Thanks!

Hands down, Bobby has the best picture on this years calendar, don't you think ?....and I usually don't think his looks are all that.

Back in the days of Dave Stewart, a won-lost record did have a connection to a pitcher's quality. Sure, there were always lucky guys and hard-luck guys, but 20 wins generally did show something. Back then, I think a pitcher did have control over the final score  to some degree, and many of the best pitched as well as needed based on the runs a team gave him.

These days, wins are a fairly useless measure of anything because they depend almost entirely on the work of the bullpen, even when the starter gets the credit. Pitchers in the middle innings aren't allowed to get out of their own jams, and pitch counts remove pitchers before they start to run out of gas.

Yes, yesterday's Kennedy scenario could have easily happened in 1975 because he was tiring and needed to be replaced. But Haren's game? He would have gone another inning or two to pick up the victory or the loss, instead of having a sore-hipped reliever blow the game for him, and the team.

So few pitchers are allowed to get out of their middle-inning jams these days that the relief corps becomes over-emphasized. This is too bad, because once you get past the closer and maybe one or two set-up men (maybe one or two), these guys who control the games now are amongst the worst pitchers in the league. Even some of the best set-up guys are only set-up guys because they don't have sufficient quality pitches to run through a line-up more than once. Not to mention the Witasick phenomenon: career journeymen who go from brilliant years to stinko ones and back again and back again and back again. The Witasicks of MLB control the win column these days, and frankly, that's a damn shame.

So now, these days, wins mean nothing. I think it sucks.

Ultimately pitchers are measured by their ERA, strikeouts, and innings pitched (longevity).  Pitchers that are elite have all three (Maddux, Glavine, Clemens, Pedro, Johnson, Ryan, etc.).  In my estimation, run support and bullpen quality are out of the starting pitcher's control, especially in these days when CGs are less common.  The number of wins can certainly give an indication of how good a pitcher is, but it is more an indication of how good the team is as well as the starting pitcher.  There are so many more useful stats then wins in this era of deep bullpens and short starts.

If you had a guy with a .001 ERA but never won a game

How would that be possible (for a starting pitcher).  Even a team composed completely of Kendall-esque hitters, .408 OPS, is bound to get you a win once.

Also, Eric Gange won the Cy Young with 2 wins.  In fact he had 3 losses.  So Joe, eat my ass while you do this math, 2 < 3 = losing record.

Over the years you hear the argument of how a pitcher has to be decent to lose 20 games in a season.  The reasoning that is used is a club will not continue to have a pitcher start games if they don't feel he can give the team an opportunity to win.  Granted most of the time when a pitcher has lost 20 games it has been on a horrible team as in when Mike Maroth lost 21 games with the Tigers in 2003.

Take a look at this link and scroll down towards the bottom and you will see a list of pitchers who have lost 20 games in a season but went on to have HOF careers.  I have a feeling that their coaching staff at the time was able to look past their W/L records.
http://mvn.com/mlb-pirates/stats/20-...

Assuming the stats for the first six weeks carried through an entire season, Beckett would win the Cy Young instead of Haren and Athletics Nation would be (rightly) up in arms blaming the east coast bias, ESPN, etc etc etc.

However, let's not forget that when Zito won the Cy Young we didn't care about the fact that he won it because of his high number of wins.  Anyone that was objective could see that Pedro Martinez was the best picher in the AL that year.  

Of course, we are NOT objective because we're fans.  And that's all part of the fun of this great game of ours.

Let me preface this by saying I type all this while knocking on wood. With that said, the way this team has responded to the injuries by simply playing hard and not using them as an excuse is truly awesome. It is something I believe that has been ascent in many past A's teams. I have been very, very critical of this team from the end of last season until the start of this one, but that ends now. I still hold the owner in contempt for lying openly to all of us, but with that said, there will be no more negativity from Mas, which probably means you can expect the A's to lose 7 in a row or something like that.

Kansas City

1. D DeJesus, CF

2. M Grudzielanek, 2B

3. M Teahen, RF .296

4. E Brown, LF .209

5. A Gordon, 3B .161

6. E German, DH .298

7. J Buck, C .298

8. R Shealy, 1B .113

9. T Pena Jr., SS

Oakland

1. S Stewart, LF

2. N Swisher, DH

3. D Johnson, 1B

4. J Cust, RF .281

5. B Crosby, SS .248

6. M Ellis, 2B .242

7. M Scutaro, 3B

8. H Bocachica, CF

9. J Kendall, C .177