Stats Dependent on Teams: Saves vs. Wins

One of the reasons that has been cited for the recent and somewhat common move from wins to quality starts is that pitchers should be rewarded for pitching well rather than being at the whim of their offense or bullpen (Actually, no reasons have even been given for this authoritarian directive that was handed down without notice or discussion. Historically, people have liked having rules imposed on them by an tyrannical regime.). However, saves remain a vital category in this league as in many others. Do saves rely on the strength of a team in the same was as wins do? How do quality starts fit into the mix? Let us examine these questions in absurd detail.
The first question is whether wins do, in fact, rely on the strength of a team. I looked at the amount of wins from a team's starting staff versus the amount of wins that a team put up in total.

Not surprisingly, these two numbers were pretty well associated. From the last 5 years of pitching, each team win would mean an 84% chance of an individual win (the slope of the line, the number before the "x" in the equation). Moreover, this association was quite strong as the R-square was up at 0.65. No one would be surprised that when teams win, their starters win, but for fantasy purposes, this statistic becomes somewhat troubling; independently of the other pitching categories, if you pick a pitcher on a team that wins a lot, he will quite likely put up some wins. The true value of the pitcher will be watered down by the strength of the team. This would add value to pitchers like Phil Hughes in 2010 (18 wins, 4.18 ERA) and AJ Burnett in 2008 (18 wins, 4.06 ERA) who each benefitted from the dominance personified Yankees offense. The Red Sox of 2007 were able to support Tim Wakefield to an insane degree (17 wins, 4.76 ERA), as did the 2007 Rockies for Jeff Francis (17 wins, 4.22 ERA) and more recently the 2011 Tigers for Ackbar-killing Max Scherzer (15 wins, 4.43 ERA). Conversely, stat-outlier Matt Cain has seen his value diminished by his team's lack of accumen at the game upon which we are currently elocuting as in 2011, he posted a 2.96 ERA while accruing only 12 wins in 26 outings. Similarly, Jake Peavey (10 wins, 2.85 ERA in 2008, 27 games), Ryan Vogelsong (13 wins, 2.70 ERA in 2011, 30 games), and famously Felix Hernandez (13 wins, 2.27 ERA in 2010, 34 games) all were hurt by their team's lack of wins.
However, the question remains: Do quality starts have a similar association with team wins? Will we be able to pick up 4th starters on the Yankees and count on them to have quality starts? Survey says....

...not nearly as much. Each additional team win was associated with only 0.44 of a quality start, and that association was quite weak, yielding an R-square of only 0.20. While one interpretation of this data would be that when a pitchers puts up quality, his team will most likely win, this is not the case: for each quality start, a team will only have 0.45 extra wins, an association which is similarly weak at 0.20 R-square (data not shown). Indeed, by and large, it would seem that scoring quality starts rather than wins would take the team out of the equation. This brings up the interesting question, though: Are saves not similarly dependent on the team? I mean, surely, the Yankees with 100+ wins will have more saves than the Buccos. Should we drop saves as a category? Data, do you have something to say on this topic?

Strangely enough, each team win yielded only 0.44 of a save, a similar yield to quality starts. The strength of association was also right in the middle of the previous two with an R-square of 0.43. Despite this weak association, it was much stronger than the association of team wins with save opportunities (the yellow guys):

Each additional team win was associated with only 0.26 of an extra save opportunity, and that association was the weakest of the bunch with an R-square of 0.14. Indeed, it appears that teams will stumble into save opportunities and only teams that are able to convert those into wins will be able to have any association at all. In other words, save opportunities will come to every team, but the closer will have to be good in order to convert them.

The bottom line of all of this appears to be that the scoring changes are somewhat valid if the aim is to shift the focus from the team to the individual player. I guess that the armed revolt will wait another day. Perhaps that day will when FAAB is brought into the equation.....