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.

Kershaw pitches most of opening game Down Under

Baseball season has arrived -- in Australia, at least.
Aussie fans got to see some of what we're used to Up Above. Included were a rain delay, a wind-blown home run and what passes as a pitching gem in these days.
Dodgers LHP Clayton Kershaw went all of 6 2/3 innings in a 3-1 victory over the Diamondbacks in Sydney early this morning (tonight in Australia). I hate to be an old fart, but Juan Marichal and Don Drysdale and Ferguson Jenkins would have spit on a 6 2/3-inning opening game. I'm pretty sure Nolan Ryan still would. And you can't tell me there's no correlation between pitch counts and inning counts and the rash of pitching injuries we're seeing in the 21st century. But that's a topic for another day.
OF Scott Van Slyke hit the wind-blown homer for LA. RF Yasiel Puig, whose has been on the interstate throughout the exhibition games, went 0-for-5. How silly does all that outrage about not putting him in last year's All-Star Game seem now?
The other topic on my soapbox for today is that it's a shame today's (in the U.S.) two games aren't on a more available television outlet than just the MLB Network and mlb.tv. Especially if you're going to take the games to another continent, you owe it to your domestic fan base to get their baseball juices flowing.
The Dodgers and Diamondbacks have another game Sunday afternoon in Australia (10 p.m. EDT tonight), with LHP Hyun-Jin Ryu (he's getting good enough that I know can type his name without having to look up which vowels go where) against Arizona RHP Trevor Cahill. You can probably follow it on Gameday. I'll probably check in to see what the simulated hitters' background at Sydney Cricket Grounds looks like.
In a way it's a good thing that I neither have the MLB Network in our Uverse package, nor have mlb.tv for this year yet. I'm supposed to be getting a discounted package as a sometime official scorer, but I haven't heard back on my request. But by being part of the other half for now, I see that it's an injustice to the universe of baseball fans. Does baseball actually think that we wouldn't buy the mlb.tv package if we could get two games from a foreign land relatively for free. What about the other 2,400 or so games this season?
The beginning of the baseball season, on top of everything else in life, also means there's a whole lot I could be writing about that I haven't written yet.
Life has intruded on baseball a lot the last couple of weeks -- nothing bad, just a whole lot of stuff to do. Thus I haven't had or taken the time to write about Reds LHP Aroldis Chapman's frightening injury and a lot of battles for positions, spots in rotations and bullpens and other baseball concerns.
I hope to do a lot more in the next few days, even with three fantasy drafts in Sunday. Can't do that now, because I have a Stars game this afternoon. But there will be more, and I hope a return to a daily blogging schedule.
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Basketball. Our league is in the playoffs, and my team's late-season slide has continued. Through the first 5 of 14 days in the first round, I'm tied 4-4 with the team that finished fourth during the regular season. The reason that I'm tied and not ahead comes down to one word: Shooting. I trail in field goal and free throw percentage, 3-point field goals and points. All shooting.
Today's active players are three big men and G Victor Oladipo. I'm hoping the big guys get plenty of put-back opportunities to improve my 43% shooting, without sucking at the foul line. Even Carmelo Anthony scored just 21 points Friday, when the high scorer among my 10 active players was Amar'e Stoudemire with 22. Belated props (does anyone say that anymore) to Ricky Rubio on his triple double Wednesday. That certainly helped my team in assists and rebounds. I'm also leading in steals and killing in blocks.
Most of the basketball news these days is about the NCAA tournament. I'm in three pick-'em pools and another that pays off for each game after those phony first four. It's like a traditional Super Bowl pool, based on the final score -- with my square representing the same score (I think winner ending in 7, loser ending in 3) for all 66 opportunities, including halftime of the Final Four games. So it's 66 chances to "win" among 100 contestants -- even if winning means getting half of my money back for a first-round win and I think breaking even with a Round of 32 win. I split up the upsets for my pick-'em pools, so that I've had most of the upsets. I don't know whether it will be good to have those evenly distributed among the three or to have one entry heavy with correctly picked upsets. Hedging my bets, I went mostly with chalk in the most expensive pool, figuring that I might not win as much but at least I wouldn't lose as much by playing it safe.
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Hockey. I'm confused about the game limits in my league. While I've been rationing my playing time, the team directly ahead of me in second place already has exceeded the games limit. The only place I've been able to find for a clarification has been a message board on espy.com. I don't expect an answer, and I don't expect to move up in the standings after being in third place for months.