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.