The St. Louis Cardinals’ John Gant has a 1.66 ERA, a 0.737 WHIP, and a 6-0 record. A lot of modern seamheads would say “wow!” to the ERA, “double-wow!” to the WHIP, and “doesn’t matter” to the won-loss record.
“Baseball pitcher wins are a meaningless statistic,” wrote a columnist for foxsports.com in 2010, expressing a now-common viewpoint. Baseball historian Bill James, on the other hand, has stated, “If a baseball statistic is meaningless to you, that is simply because you do not know what it means.”
In other words, pitching wins mean something. What they mean, and how much they mean, is up for debate.