Paul Skenes: Resurrecting Pitching Wins with a New Formula?

The Paul Skenes Phenomenon: Does the Modern Era Redefine a Pitcher’s Wins?

Since 1901, a total of 2,664 pitchers have made at least 30 starts in their careers. Of these, only three have maintained an earned run average (ERA) below 2.00. Two of these pitchers are Hall of Fame legends from the dead-ball era: Ed Walsh (1.82) and Addie Joss (1.89). The third name on this prestigious list is that of Pittsburgh Pirates superstar Paul Skenes.

The possibility of Skenes, with only 39 starts in his career, remaining in this elite is reduced. This does not detract from his talent, but rather reflects the reality of the statistics and the era in which he plays. The careers of Joss and Walsh coincided in the American League between 1904 and 1910, with a collective ERA of 2.61. In contrast, the average ERA in Major League Baseball since Skenes’ debut is 4.04. In the current season, Skenes’ ERA, with 1.85, leads Major League Baseball, and he also tops the bWAR (4.4) among all pitchers. This last figure positions him as the best player in the National League overall. Both the statistics generated by the AXE system and the projections of ESPN BET point to him as the main candidate to win his first Cy Young award in the National League. Despite his brilliant individual performance, Skenes’ win-loss record with the Pirates is 4-6. Should we care about this? The answer is yes, we should pay attention to the pitchers’ wins. Victories and defeats are no longer the only evaluation factor. If your answer to the previous question was “no”, then you’ve been paying attention. If you answered something different, it’s likely because you participate in a fantasy league that still uses pitchers’ wins, and not because you believe Skenes’ record reflects his true value. But, what if I told you and could prove that Skenes’ true record is 11-5, tied for third place in major league wins? I will explain how I came to this conclusion, but first, I want to explain why I think it’s important. To illustrate how pitchers were talked about for most of baseball history, let’s take as an example the 1980 MLB preview from The Sporting News, on the page where the Pirates (defending champions at the time) were analyzed. This is what was said about their pitching:

“The Pirates won last year without a 15-game winner. The pitching staff won in bunches. Five pitchers won 10 or more games”.

The Sporting News, 1980

There were no other pitching statistics in the analysis of the pitching staff. There were no ERAs, no strikeout rates, nothing about walks. That’s how pitchers were discussed back then. Now we understand how to evaluate pitchers at a deeper level, and, even in 1980, people like Bill James were already doing it. But pitchers’ wins still meant something, as one of the baseball statistics to which James could allude as having achieved “the power of language”. That is to say: Describing a pitcher as a 20-game winner had real meaning. It was an avatar of quality, and if someone was a 20-game winner five times, that was an avatar of greatness.

Pitchers’ wins have always been an imperfect measure, but their flaws have expanded over time as the game and the responsibilities of the starting pitcher have evolved. Last season, 41.3% of the decisions went to relievers. A hundred years ago, that number was 18%.

A good win statistic eliminates a lot of contextual noise. In each game, you have two starting pitchers, on opposing teams, pitching on the same day, in the same stadium, and in the same weather conditions. While starters will never admit they are competing with each other (“my job is to get the opposing lineup out” is the standard phrase), they actually are. Their job is to pitch better than the other pitcher, because doing so means conceding fewer runs than he does, and if you do that, you win. Well, at least before the bullpens get involved, but a good win statistic would also filter out that factor. Let’s take anyone who has pitched for the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies have been around for over 30 years and it’s still extremely difficult to get the most out of their pitchers because a large part of their data has to be heavily adjusted for the context of the stadium. And, although the park effects are necessary and sophisticated, they are also estimates. The Rockies have never had a 20-game winner. The closest was Ubaldo Jiménez, who won 19 in 2010, when he also became one of two Rockies starters to surpass 7 bWAR. (The other was Kyle Freeland in 2018). Jiménez is also Colorado’s all-time ERA leader, with a mark of 3.66. All other qualified starters in Colorado franchise history are at 4.05 or higher. Therefore, when we talk about the best pitchers of the current era, the Rockies’ pitchers will almost always be left out of the conversation. Their numbers simply don’t seem revealing or comparable. Here is where a better win statistic would be so useful. Because whatever the precise effects Coors Field may have on the statistics of a game on a given day, a good win statistic would be comparing two starters on that field in almost exactly the same conditions. If we do it that way, maybe the Rockies will get some 20-game winners in their ledger.

Is a win statistic of this type possible?

A Better Way to Earn

For me, the pitcher’s win should strictly be the dominance of a starting pitcher. This ruling is clouded by the use of openers to start games and massive pitchers who are used as starters but not at the beginning of games. For now, let’s try not to think about that. The question about each game I want to answer is the following: Which starting pitcher was better in that game? The starter who becomes the answer to that question takes the victory; the other takes the defeat. And that’s it. It’s that simple. Each starter in each game gets a win or a loss and there are no no-decisions. Well, the non-decisions would still exist, because I am not proposing that we erase the traditional records of wins and losses from the books. There is too much history attached. Early Winn is remembered in part for clinging to his career in search of 300 wins, and he finished with that number exactly. Cy Young is remembered for his unbreakable career record of 511 wins. Likewise, Jack Chesbro’s claim to immortality is that he holds the modern single-season record of 41 wins. We don’t want to erase those things, we want to add to our understanding of starting pitchers.

Something I have proposed on several occasions is to use James’ game scoring method to assign wins and losses. In fact, I have followed game scoring records for several years and, for this article, I expanded my database to 1901 to see what the history might look like.

There are other methods of scoring a game, but I like James’ version for its simplicity, although the modified version created by Tom Tango for MLB.com has the same virtue. With either one, you can look at a pitching line and easily calculate the game score in your head, once you have mastered the formula. (If you can’t do that calculation, study more math). I would also try to account for short outings, in the style of an opener. I use James’ version, but I give a strong penalty for pitching less than four innings. To avoid ties, when openers finish with the same game score, you can give the W to the opener of the winning team. Awarding pitching wins this way isn’t perfect. Conditions for starters aren’t truly equal because the quality of the lineups they face won’t be the same. When Skenes beat Yoshinobu Yamamoto earlier this season, for example, his task against the Los Angeles Dodgers lineup was a bit more difficult than Yamamoto was expected to face against Skenes’ teammates. Similarly, the quality of the defenses behind opposing starters won’t be the same in a given contest. Despite those disparities, the mandate for both openers is identical: to outperform the other. And you know what? The game scoring method for assigning wins and losses to evaluate the success of that assignment works quite well.

How Game Score Victories Would Change History

Let’s call a win by game score GSW and a loss by game score GSL. Do you know who holds the single-season record in GSW? It’s Chesbro, still. In fact, his 1904 feat looks just as impressive with this method. Here are the top five seasons by GSW:

• Jack Chesbro, 40-11 (1904)
• Christy Mathewson, 35-9 (1908)
• Iron Joe McGinnity, 34-10 (1904)
• Mathewson, 34-12 (1904)
• Ed Walsh, 34-15 (1908)

They’re still all types of dead ball, of course, but that’s just the top of the leaderboard. There have been 21 seasons of 30 wins by the traditional wins method since 1901, but only three during the last 100 years: Lefty Grove (31 in 1930), Dizzy Dean (30 in 1934), and Denny McLain (31 in 1968). By the game scoring method, the list of 30-win winners grows to 36 and is not so dusty: 12 of them land in the expansion era (since 1960) and we even get two 30-win seasons during the wild card era (since 1994). Here are the most recent examples:

• 33 GSW: Sandy Koufax (twice, 1965 and 1966) and Mickey Lolich (1971)
• 32: Steve Carlton (1972, for a last-place team), Denny McLain (1968)
• 31: Koufax (1963)
• 30: Whitey Ford (1961), Juan Marichal (1968), Jim Palmer (1975), Ron Guidry (1978), Randy Johnson (twice, 2001 and 2002)

The Big Unit! Johnson won the last two of four consecutive NL Cy Young awards in 2001 and 2002, during which his combined traditional record was 45-11. His combined game score record is 60-9. When you go down the list to 29 victories, the list is just as interesting, and more recent. Here are the last five cases:

• Dwight Gooden (1985)
• Mike Scott and Roger Clemens (1986)
• Curt Schilling (2001)
• Gerrit Cole (2019)

I mean, are we having fun now or what? Imagine those seasons and the coverage that would go with their quest for 30 wins. Schilling would be trying to match Johnson to give the Arizona Diamondbacks a pair of 30-game winners. And Cole, just a few years ago, would have been competing for 30 wins in his last season for the mighty Houston Astros before free agency. Wouldn’t you have liked to have this headline on ESPN to react to that winter? Yankees sign 29-game winner Cole to a $324 million deal

None of this is the product of a fantastical what-if scenario. This is all based on what these pitchers actually did, just framed and measured a little differently. And I think it adds to their accomplishment (or lack thereof in the case of Homer Bailey’s 0-20 season in 2018) and enhances the conversation about pitching, which is now too bogged down by statistical complexities that many or even most fans roll their eyes at.

Advanced metrics would still matter a lot, of course, but bar conversations about pitching would improve a lot. I imagine sitting down somehow for another baseball conversation with my late grandfather, who was one of the people who taught me about the sport. If I told him something like: “Gerrit Cole had 7.8 WAR last year and a 28% strikeout rate”, it wouldn’t mean anything to him. But if I told him: “Gerrit Cole won 29 games last year”, he would understand and wouldn’t be fooled about what that meant. Thinking about pitchers’ victories in this way brings the past back into the conversation with the present. For all the differences between what was expected of Christy Mathewson in 1904 and Tarik Skubal in 2025, the core mission described by this framework is identical: to outdo your opponent when you step onto the mound. This becomes evident when you look at the list of those who have reached 300 career game scoring victories since 1901, a list of greats that covers all periods of the modern era… and is about to grow by one: Next, with 299: Clayton Kershaw, who will join Verlander and Scherzer as active winners of 300 games, at least by this method. By the traditional method, it is likely that none of them will reach 300. What’s up with Skenes?

There’s a reason we chose Skenes as our starting point. As mentioned, Skenes’ 4-6 mark in his first 16 starts tells you nothing about a pitcher with a 1.85 ERA. His game score record (11-5) is much more on the mark. Here’s Skenes’ game score record entering his Wednesday start against Milwaukee Brewers rookie sensation Jacob Misiorowski:

For his career, Skenes is now 30-9 by the game score method. He is 15-9 by the traditional formulation. The same number of losses, but twice as many wins. Which version is more indicative of Skenes as a pitcher? It’s a selective focus to zero in on Skenes, but his game-score record translates to this: Skenes has pitched better than his starting opponent 76.9% of the time as a major leaguer, despite the betrayal of the powerless offense behind him.

Now let’s make another list. Here are the three highest game score win percentages, with a minimum of 30 career starts, since 1901:

1. Paul Skenes, .769 (30-9)
2. Nick Maddox, .722 (52-20)
3. Smoky Joe Wood, .722 (114-44)

Wood is historically prominent, while Maddox, who pitched for the Pirates 115 years ago, is not. Still, since Maddox appeared, I have to share this late quote from his life, because it typifies the mentality of the old days: “These guys today aren’t pitchers, they’re throwers. Why, in my day, I’d throw one so fast at that guy [Ralph] Kiner that it would give him pneumonia from the wind.” Skenes is a thrower and a pitcher, a great talent in the making who is in conversation with pitchers who retired decades before he was born. If Skenes stays healthy (knocking on wood) and his career builds, we can marvel at his accolades and statistical achievements. But, will we ever say, “Skenes has the opportunity to be a 60 WAR type” and expect that to resonate? Maybe someday. But, wouldn’t it be more fun to keep track of how many 20-win seasons, or even 30-win seasons, he can accumulate? Wouldn’t it be more fun to count his progress towards 300 wins, which he’s never going to sniff by traditional wins, unless the game itself changes dramatically?

Wouldn’t it be more fun to align the present of pitching with the past of pitching? Wins have always been the currency of baseball in general, and of pitching in particular. It’s just that until now, pitching wins have been an unstable currency.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.