Innings Eaters and IP/W

[DOUGHBOYS]

In real baseball, an 'innings eater' is a good thing.
We are talking about mediocrity being good.
An agents dream.
Livan Hernandez, Bruce Chen, Derek Lowe, Jake Westbrook. These pitchers have the job of lasting six innings. Not much more is expected of them.

For fantasy purposes, these guys are a cancer. For every great performance we get out of our ace, these guys will make it fade.
We look at five pitching categories in fantasy and innings ain't one of them.
In fantasy, we are trying to get more from each inning, not just the inning itself.

For right now, let's leave out peripherals. We know k/inn ratio's and babip, and k/bb and all that jazz.
But, I want to allude back to my 'Freddy the Freeloader' post and give a little more time into trying to figure out wins.
First, if we can figure out which teams will be winners in the upcoming year, that'll be the first step towards getting more wins for our fantasy teams. Remember, we're looking past peripherals.

The Yankees, Red Sox, Rays, Tigers, Rangers, Angels, Diamondbacks, Cardinals, Phils, and Braves all look like teams that can post winning records.
It's a great bet that a pitcher from one of these teams will have ip/w ratio. I know you've never seen that ratio, but it's one that I've had in my notes for years.
The thought process is that a pitcher does not have to be great to get wins. It helps, no mistake. But for some, it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Last year, the starting pitchers with the best ip/w ratio were Ivan Nova, Justin Verlander, and Zack Greinke.

Nova 165/16
Verlander 251/24
Greinke 171/16

Verlander was in a league by himself, no matter the category.
Nova and Greinke, especially Nova were the anti-innings eaters. Win-wise, they did more than any other pitcher with less innings.

In 2010-

Hughes 176/18
Buchholz 173/17

Are we seeing a trend?

2009-

Feldman 189/17
Carpenter 192/17

2008-

Mussina 200/20
Matsuzaka 167/18
Webb 226/22
Cl Lee 223/22

A Yankee pitcher has been included almost every year and none of them were named Sabathia.
None of these pitchers pitched for a losing team. Most of the offenses behind these pitchers were bashers (spell checker, I am so disappointed in you!).
Some of these pitchers did not have good WHIP's or ERA's and only toiled five or six innings in a lot of games.
But, they gave us what we crave, the win.

[bjoak]

If it's of any "value" the numbers I use when calculating wins are pitcher expected RA, bullpen expected RA, and team offensive runs expected. The chore is to figure out a run differential. So if I have a pitcher RA of 4.10, with a bullpen RA of 4.10 and a team offensive runs/9 of 4.10, the run differential would be 0 and you'd expect an average number of wins per inning. Of course, the bigger differential you can get with the offense on top, the more wins per inning you expect.