...and my view of Pavano is entirely based on his three excruciatingly lost years with the Yankees. The general opinion in this town is that Pavano could not take the big stage and bright lights.
Then I checked Baseball Reference, and was interested to see that Pavano never was that good. He had a good season in 2004, but before and after he was a 50/50 won-loss and high ERA pitcher.
Injuries = can't take the bright lights?
The ERA argument. For the 10,000th time, ERA is an inferior stat to FIP and xFIP. They judge generally the same things but ERA leaves the effect of defense in without taking it into account thus inflating/deflating numbers solely due to quality of plays made by defenders behind the pitcher. FIP/xFIP removes defense from the equation and simply measures the things that the pitcher actually controls. They are much more legitimate stats.
W/L. Good lord. 30 years ago W/L stats for a SP were relevant since the good ones still finished quite a few games. In the age of specialization, where absolutely no one even finishes a majority of their games, W/L is determined much more by offensive production and bullpen performance.
The stats that actually measure
PITCHER PERFORMANCE all favor Pavano putting up 4 good years while healthy including the last two as a front of the rotation starter for a playoff team.
The stats that measure
TEAM RESULTS, without adequately calculating the team performance into them, are not as favorable but are tertiary stats.
Just because you don't like the return on investment that the Yankholes got because of Pavano's injury problems that doesn't have the slightest bearing on his actual performance the last 4 years he's been healthy.
