I know this is unrelated in a way, then again maybe not. I live in Italy now but have visited Taipei twice since I left there and check this forum now and again. Is another possible reason for his popularity perhaps the general opinion Wang is considered good looking? Taiwanese people are hung up on looks more than Italians and even we shallow Americans (IMO after several years in Taiwan). I met a Taiwanese lady in Rome after the World Cup, she said it was such a shame many Italian players were so handsome, ( :s ) I was like huh? She said they should be movie stars, too good looking to be soccer stars!!! My Italian friend laughed! Also I just read on Yahoo. Serena Williams is polled as the most popular sports star female) in the USA.
In Taiwan I know all those muscles and lack of a candy girl face, would not put her in the top ten in Taiwan. Most every Taiwanese person I have met, males too, since 2006 has mentioned Wang is handsome isnât he! Even the thing they have about photos from job apps. Young looking news anchors and going to English teachers classes, Oh he she is soooo attractive, (but they canât teach) Ohhh! maybe I am wrong, but it is the feeling I get. I think this is PART of the reason he is very well liked but not the major reason.
Oh I donât see much baseball these days, but Wang is pretty good.
bumping this thread as itâs the closest one to the topicâŠ
No longer superstar, but barnstorming the single-A farm teams to respark the dream. Gotta be an emotional rollercoaster ride for him and his family (2 boys as well).
âWang is seen driving alone on a road trip, bouncing around the minor leagues looking for a second chance, but he even gets cut by the Southern Maryland Blue Claws, a team probably unfamiliar to even American viewers. At this point, Wang is 35 years old, much older than most of his competition, but he simply does not want to give up.â
Looks like it has the quality of some of those ESPN-made sports documentaries.
Wang Chien-ming was always hugely overhyped. He was the product of baseball writers putting WAY too much value on the win-loss record of a pitcher instead of his actual skill as a pitcher.
His stats on even his best year (the 2006 season) were extremely meh⊠3.63 ERA was decent but not great, a bit better than the league average, 1.31 WHIP is pretty pedestrian. He basically lived on the ability to keep the ball in the park; a very low homerun rate in the couple of seasons that he was a slightly above-average pitcher. Once the homerun rate went up towards league averages in 2009, he went from being a slightly above-average pitcher to being a very below-average pitcher.
Itâs the journey heâs been on and the story being told, not necessarily the achievements heâs made or no longer can make.
I personally like documentaries over most super-hero crud thatâs coming out of Hollywood the last decade or more.
Have you ever pitched before? The purpose is to win the game isnât it?
2006 was the PED era and his HR/9 is the best that year. Of course his WHIP is highâŠhe is a contact pitcher. Criticism of a ground ball contact pitcher for his WHIP shows how much you know baseball. He doesnât want to strike people out and will rather you hit the ball on the very first pitch. I watched this guy let a hit off one pitch with a grounder that goes between infielders and then get both of them out with the next pitch with a double play. 2 pitches, 2 outs. Efficient. He lived off that style. As long as thereâs 1 out this guy couldnât care less if the bases are loaded.
3.6 ERA in 2006 is decent? Can you tell me starters that had a better one? I think only 10 in the PED era of 2006.
He wasnât as good post injury because he couldnât throw 95+ everyday anymore. The days Iâve seen him throw 95 post injury he was still really good. But he was older and injury obviously took a toll by then and couldnât consistently do that. Also now guys swing for the fences or strike out, his style of putting balls in play isnât as effective.
Also look at WAR, I think top 3 in pitchers that year as well. Numbers also donât tell the story, he kept high power teams runs low and keeps them in the game for wins.
He was top 3-5 pitcher in 2006 no doubt unbiased. And I believe he was 26-27 years old? I think he couldâve been better.
Edit
I got annoyed with this assessment from you on Wang so I pulled up numbers.
His HR/9 is .495 so that means watching him for 18 innings you might see just 1 homerun off of him. That is ridiculous for 2006.
3.63 is average? Guess who had the same, Justin Verlander. 6 guys with better ERAs in 2006 in the AL. names like Johan Santana, CC Sabathia, Roy holiday, John Lackey, Mike Mussina. Yeah just a bunch of Cy Young winners, all stars and Hall of famers, no big deal. Also basically he did it as a rookie, called up half way at 2005.
To be fair, he was banished and forgotten for a 3 years before making a roster again. I applaud him for the persistence, Iâve never heard of any former Major leaguer who was banished to the minors at like single A to AA ball make it back. They usually send some in between guys to AAA and call them up for injury replacement. But no one wanted him and put him in single AâŠand he went to see a pitching guru and got velocity back after working on it. I think thatâs pretty amazing.
He also lead the league in wins as a reliever at one point keeping them in the game for comebacks in garbage innings lol.
You underestimate the importance of keeping it in the park. Thatâs one of the few things a pitcher has control over.
His home run rate was the second lowest in 20 years. His ground ball rate was the third highest in 20 years. He was the opening day starter two years in a row for the Yankees, for goodness sake.
That he made it back to the majors at his age is remarkable.
Thatâs ridiculous. The purpose of the team is to win the game. Pitcherâs donât pitch to win games. They pitch to prevent the other team from scoring runs. If a pitcher allows 8 runs, but his team scores 9, he gets the W⊠but I certainly wouldnât say that he achieved his purpose.
How much I know about baseball? Ha⊠You are talking to a Fangraphs buff who, as a mathematics major with an emphasis in statistics, wrote papers on modeling baseball lineups using Markov chains. I know baseball.
WHIP has nothing to do with being a pitch-to-contact pitcher. There are plenty of GOOD pitch-to-contact, low-homerun groundballer guys with low WHIPs (Brandon Webb, Tim Hudson, Greg Maddux, etc.)
During Wangâs short 2-year peak, he was (as I said) an above average pitcher. He wasnât way better than averageâŠjust a little. The only stats that separated himself from the group were his wins, GB% and HR%. He truly was remarkable in being able to keep the ball on the ground. I can agree with that. But he literally had 2 years in which you could say he was above average at run suppression. His win% has a lot to do with the fact that he was pitching for a team with a monster offense that scored a lot of runs for him. He was top 10 in both 2006 and 2007 in run supportâŠand actually led all of baseball with about 6.5 runs in support in 2007. The Yankees AVERAGED 6 and a half runs per game for him. Thatâs crazy.
He was 17th in ERA in 2006. He was 25th in ERA in 2007. There are websites that have records of stats, you know?
He was 28th in WAR in 2006.
He was 26th in WAR in 2007.
Both years, he wasnât even the top pitcher in WAR on the YANKEES, much less in baseball. Mussina was significantly better in 2006 and Pettite was better in 2007.
No way. Absolutely not.
Johan Santana: 2.77 ERA, 1.00 WHIP, 6.7 WAR
Roy Oswalt: 2.98 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, 6.1 WAR
Brandon Webb (basically a FAR superior version of Wang): 3.10 ERA, 1.13 WHIP, 6.5 WAR
Roy Halladay: 3.19 ERA, 1.10 WHIP, 5.1 WAR
Chris Carpenter: 3.09 ERA, 1.07 WHIP, 5.0 WAR
Those 5 pitchers were much superior to Wang in 2006⊠and there are several more that I would rank higher as well. Wang was good in 2006-2007. I am not arguing that he wasnât. He was an above average pitcher for those two years. He should NOT have been a Cy Young contender though. His misleading win total is what got him so many votes. The fact that there were people who thought he should have won it over Santana was hilariousâŠ
Good stats. Doesnât change my opinion that Wang was a good, but WAY over-hyped pitcher for two years. Shouldnât have been close to the Cy Young discussion.
So youâre going to say the pitcher is not out there to win games? Jeez wtf was I doing out there on the mound all those times?
His WAR in 2006 was 6. Thatâs 10th out of all player. And only behind johan Santana, Brandon Webb, and Aryaryo as a pitcher.
You mean guys in the NL had better looking ERA and WHIP? I donât have time to check but werenât all of the names you listed as better pitching in the NL in 2006?
Brandon Webb has a remarkable whiff percentage, he also threw curves and a lot of change ups that got whiffs. Had a great wiff percentage. So did Greg Maddux. Those two clearly did not have the same repertoire.
You were trying to help your team win games by preventing the opposing team from scoring runs. I hate the use of W/L as a pitcher stat. Itâs a team stat.
Santana and Halladay were AL pitchers. Youâre using the Baseball Reference version of WAR, Iâm using FanGraphs.
Ok now youâre just arguing semantics, pitchers go out to win just as fielders field to win.
Yes I agree W/L isnât everything. Mike Mussina in 06 could arguably be better than WĂĄng. And we have lots of others stats that we are using just now to measure. But again, you canât just use stats or else most of the jobs in baseball will become obsolete.
I watched most of these pictures pitch in real life. Lived 30-40min from the ball park in Arlington in Texas. This was when the rangers where a joke so tickets were like 5$ and I would just go on a school day skipping class and buy the cheap seats and go down by the dugouts because no one came.
We are also left with a lot of what ifs with Wang. He was just called up halfway through 2005. Who knows what he could have been. Remember Verlander was a rookie when WĂĄng player in 06 and had the same ERA. Who knows how Wang would have turned out.
Iâm absolutely not arguing semantics. Iâm arguing a very specific point. Iâm arguing that using Win-Loss record to gauge a pitcherâs abilities is almost useless.
Verlander had a skillset that has been proven to correlate strongly with future success. Wang didnât. You can never predict exactly whatâs going to happen in baseballâŠbut if I were a betting man in 2006, I certainly would have wagered that Verlander would have a longer, more successful career than Wang.
Again, Iâm not trying to say that Wang was a BAD pitcher. He was a reasonably above-average pitcher for a couple of years. He was also hyped as a genuine Cy Young candidate, placing 2nd in 2006. That is, in my opinion, OVERHYPE due to a good W-L record in the media center of the U.S.A.
I just remember being annoyed at the time. I was living in Taiwan then (as I still do) and could not get away from Wang Chien-ming hysteria everywhere. Itâs understandable that the Taiwanese were excited that one of their own was having success on the biggest stage in baseball, but I hated the Yankees and wasnât super impressed with Wangâs skillset.
You do know that WAR means Wins Above Replacement right?
While it is true that a pitcher canât win a game without the hitters giving him support, you can still figure out how many wins a pitcher could contribute to a generic team given his stats. If a pitcher canât win games, why have WAR for pitchers at all?
You do realize that âwinsâ is not a component of WAR, right?
Okay⊠My point with the phrase âpitchers donât pitch to win gamesâ wasnât to say that a pitcherâs goal isnât for his team to win a game. I thought that was obvious⊠I guess not. My point is that a pitcherâs goal isnât to win the game ANYMORE than itâs the goal of the shortstop or the catcher or the rightfielder. But for some stupid reason, we have deemed it appropriate to affix the W/L stat to the pitcher but not to every other player. No one gives the W/L record of a third basemen⊠but we often say a pitcher has 10 wins, 8 losses.
Anyway, itâs absolutely stupid to use the fact that WAR means Wins Above Replacement as some sort of counter argument to my point that Wins are a useless metric for assessing a pitcherâs performance. If you knew anything about WAR, you would know that itâs fully possible to have the best WAR in baseball while having a horrible win/loss record.
Look at Felix Hernandez in 2010. He was the best pitcher in the AL by a very wide margin. He led the league WAR for pitchers (his WAR was 7.2, the second best was 5.6âŠnot even close). He led the league in ERA. Second-lowest WHIP in the league. 2nd in the league in strikeouts (1 k behind the leader). Led the league in innings pitched. Lowest hits per 9 in the league. He demolished the competition in pretty much every significant statistical category.
His record was 13-12. His team was awful.
Measuring a pitcherâs ability by looking at or even considering his record is dumb.
In 1987 Nolan Ryan had a 2.76 ERA, 142 ERA+, 270 Strikeouts, 2.47 FIP, 6.5 Hits/9, and a 3.10 K/BB ratio. He led the league in all of those categories.
His record was 8-16.
Measuring a pitcherâs ability by looking at or even considering his win/loss record is dumb.
No its not. Itâs not the only stats that matter. But some pitchers have a knack for putting teams in position to win. You can look at QS and other stats. But like I said, you canât always quantify a pitchers makeup with stats. For example, Iâve seen many pitchers crumble in the lights of NY. AJ Burnett comes to mind.
Iâm not arguing WĂĄng was a HOF type pitcher, but he was an Ace and a career cut short so we wonât know for sure what he would be. His pitching quality was up there with CY winners and all stars of his time. There are around 150 starting pitchers in the MLB not accounting for injuries and promotions/demotions. He finished in the top of the list in many categories so to say he was above average and pulling one of the greatest pitchers like Greg Maddux to say look to Maddux he was just average is just biased logic.
No. There are not pitchers who show some sort of âknackâ for putting their team in a position to win. There have been statistical tests run on wins that show it is a statistic that has a very high variance. It bounces around even for very good pitchers. Look at Kershaw, look at Maddux, look at Johnson⊠Look at any pitcher that has been consistently good over a period of time. Their ERA, WHIP, WAR, etc. remains fairly consistent in how above average they are⊠but their W/L records have huge amounts of variance. Itâs a terribly flawed statistic.
I understand that cumulative stats, such as wins and SO are useless when it comes to assessing player ability, however, the way you phrased it sounded like a pitcher isnât playing so that his team could win. If you said wins isnât a good indicator for pitcher ability, then I am totally on board.
Like I said in my own post
Thatâs why you divide your FIP by the Runs Per Win constant. The Formula doesnât use the stat of wins, but still tries to figure out how many more wins a pitcher can bring to a team over a replacement pitcher.