Some followers of baseball way back in 1869 knew enough to realize that pitcher wins and losses were bullshit. So why has this erroneous habit of attributing victories and defeats to pitchers remained in vogue for an additional 152 years despite the continued improvement in ways of estimating pitching performance?
One of the errors of old-time ball-playing was that of attributing every defeat and every victory to the lack of skill, or an excess of it in the pitchers of the nines. It was never then considered that so long as chances for putting players out were offered off the pitching that the pitcher did his duty, and also that is was only when he was badly punished, that is, when the batsmen made bases off his pitching by clean hits easily, that he could be justly charged with the loss of a game.