I received Bill Gilbert's mid-season report on major league candidates for triple milestones -- 30 homers, 100 RBI and a .300 batting average for batters, and 20 wins, a sub-3.00 ERA and 200 strikeouts for pitchers.
He noted that the toughest milestone to reach now is 20 wins. That gave me an opportunity to rant, through an Email, to him with my thoughts. With minor modifications, that rant follows:

The lack of pitching wins seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I'm a firm believer in sabremetrics, but I believe the sabermetricians, or perhaps the application of their teaching, have steered us wrong in the thinking that pitchers' wins aren't important. 

Evidence for "wins aren't important": 

1. Relief pitchers who enter with a lead, pitch an inning and give up a run to tie the game and receive a win when their team regains the lead.
2. Starters who pitch well for their six or seven innings, leave with the lead and watch the bullpen blow the lead. 

The whole emphasis on pitch counts and inning counts has led to the belief that pitchers' workloads should be protected at all costs. Pitchers -- and their agents -- have bought in, figuring that a couple of extra years at the end of their career could lead to a few million more dollars. 

Evidence against "wins aren't important":

1. If limiting pitch counts can prevent injuries and lengthen careers, why do there seem to be more injuries now? (There probably are more injuries/pitcher, but I don't have empirical evidence.)

2. If limiting workloads for pitchers is beneficial, why don't teams do more to limit plate appearances and innings in the field for position players? Sure, you see hitting stars come out in the last couple of innings of blowouts or for defensive replacements in close games. But when was the last time you heard "Ausmus is taking Cabrera out because he already has 4 plate appearances" in a tie game? Or "Jeter has eight chances already, so Girardi is putting in Dean Anna" in the seventh inning of a tie game? (That was before the Pirates claimed Anna on waivers.)

There are reasons why pitchers like Greg Maddux, Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan won a lot of games. 

1. They were good pitchers.

2. They pitched a lot of games, and innings.

3. They often finished what they started, so there was no worry about having a bad bullpen take away wins. You noted that Felix Hernandez hasn't won 20 games. He has, however, had a lot of wins snatched away by bad bullpens after he's left a game early.

4. Those pitchers of old also knew when to coast. "I have an 6-1 lead? Why not throw a fastball down the middle to this No. 9 hitter? He can't hurt me much anyway." (David Price did that very thing Sunday. He led 7-1, gave up two solo homers and didn't leave the game until he had walked two in a row with two out in the ninth.)

5. They knew part of their job was to win games, not "to give the team a chance to win." Hey, I can give the team a chance to win by showing up and cheering loudly, but I don't think that's as important as getting a win.

I see the problem, if it is one (and I think it is), of not having many 20-game winners getting even worse. I see highly touted prospects in the Texas League leaving start after start after 3-4-5 innings, and maybe 60-70 pitches thrown, "to keep down their innings count." Some of those starts are in the insidious practice of piggybacking two guys for 4 or 5 innings each.

Soon these pampered, overhyped and soon-to-be-overpaid pitchers will arrive in the majors, and won't even be capable of going 6-7 innings.

It makes sense that the starters are the most talented pitchers on a staff. Limiting their innings and turning those over to less-talented relievers -- and increasing numbers of relievers, because the starters will be working fewer innings -- can only reduce the number of wins for those starters.

It's likely that it will be just a few years before 20-game winners go the way of 30-game winners. When some middle reliever leads the league with 15 wins, that will be further "evidence" that wins aren't important. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The first sign of the baseball apocalypse will be when MLB changes the scoring rules to declare that a starter needs just 4 innings, or maybe even 3, to qualify for a win.

Baseball fans: Try to stay awake during Countdown to Tanaka

The Countdown to Tanaka has overshadowed what little real news there has been about Hot Stove League acquisitions.
Oh, there will be announcements about the Hall of Fame in a few minutes as I write this, and the sacred names most likely will appear farther down in this post. But that really has nothing to do with fantasy baseball.
Or if you're a relative of Ramon Hernandez, Robert Andino or Xavier Nady, you might be interested to know that they have signed minor league contracts with the Royals, Pirates and Padres. Re-signed in the case of Andino and Nady -- and possibly with Hernandez, who has been with more teams than I can remember.
Oh, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas. No Jack Morris? It helped Glavine to be associated with Maddux, but after all, Glavine was a 300-game winner in his own right. Thomas might have stayed a year or two too long, but before that he was clearly a dominant player.
In case you haven't noticed, there's a new look to the blog.
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Football. We're going through the draft for the playoff semifinals in the Andy Memorial Football League. I'll keep you posted. Remaining from my regular-season team were RB D'Angelo Williams, WRs Keenan Allen and Danny Amendola and Seattle's D/ST. My first draft pick was San Diego's QBs, which I'm hoping is Philip Rivers alone. The top four teams in the league are taking part in the championship playoffs draft. This is a scoring-only league.
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Hockey. Lately, for every point or half-point my team has gained, I have lost a corresponding point or half-point. So I'm spinning my wheels at 66 points, in third place. Currently, I'm five points behind the second-place team, which has been fluctuating more than I have.
There are areas where I can gain: 1 power play point out of the league lead, 10 penalty minutes away from a point, 7 seconds from another point in ATOI. My goalkeeping still sucks. I'm 8 wins away from another point and .18 away from the ninth-place team in goals against average. There are three teams within .055 in save percentage. The problem with being close is that there are teams similarly close behind me.
My team was plus-6 Tuesday, so I'm up to 31 points but still 19 behind the next-higher team total.
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Basketball. I made a mistake by not updating my lineup Tuesday. I was up late Monday working on fantasy baseball projections, up late Tuesday morning and as a result I missed out on Joakim Noah's double double by leaving him on the bench. I'm down 5-3 to the team immediately ahead of me in the division, and need to win at least 5-3 to move ahead of that team. Noah's strong points were not in the areas where I'm trailing, but my feeling is that you can't have too big a lead in any category. I understand that if I have 100 more assists than the rest of the league heading into the final few weeks, I could deal assists for shooting percentage or something else I'd need. (You're on notice, Ricky Rubio. Don't be surprised when you hear those trade rumors.) Though first I'd have to get ahead by 100 assists. Another problem is that it's a head-to-head league, so my final Rotisserie (R) totals have no impact on the final standings.
I'm very close in field goal percentage, steals and blocks. It should help in steals, at least, that six of the eight players in my lineup tonight are guards. I don't believe that I have lost since Week 3, and I don't intend to lose this week.