One complaint I’ve seen about Logan Webb over the years is that he’s unable to pitch well against good teams. Which is nonsense, much like what used to be directed at Matt Cain. And his opening day clobbering at the hands of the Yankees brought that up again. I thought I would look into it again.
ogc thoughts
When I dug into Webb’s career stats vs.winning teams and compared it with his stats against under .500 teams, it does suggest what these fans suggest, that he does not rise to the level of competition: he has a 3.09 ERA vs. winning teams and a 3.66 ERA vs. losing teams. And that’s what detractors then say, “See? Can’t handle the good teams!” I could not figure out a good rebuttal to that.
But I finally figured out that there’s one thing that these people are forgetting: winning teams tend to be the best offensive teams. For example, the average runs scored for the NL teams with winning records (seven teams: Dodgers, Brewers, Cubs, Phillies, Reds, Mets, Padres) worked out to an average of 4.75 runs scored. Which, compared to Webb’s 3.66 ERA is significantly higher.
That’s not a clear apple to apple comparison. It would be better to go through season, each start, and calculate the average runs scored (and a lot of work). But this simple exercise demonstrates the wide gap between what the winning teams score and how much Webb keeps them from scoring.
In the spectrum of pitchers who give up runs to winning teams, Webb during his career is one of the much better ones, keeping them from scoring better than other pitchers do. But like all pitchers, even the best, on any day, a good offensive team is going to give him a whooping.
Still, in his career, Logan Webb has been a good to very pitcher in most of his games, and that is why Webb has been in the Top 6 in Cy Young voting the past three seasons, another sign of how the national media recognizes how good Webb is, something some of his own team’s fans can’t understand.
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