Although it's an Insider item, Rob Neyer has a column where he discusses the Quality Start stat with the man who created it, John Lowe, a writer for the Detroit Free Press. Lowe created the stat in 1985 when he was working for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In 1985, pitchers who had a quality start saw their teams win 67.3% of the time. In 2005, the figure was 67.4%.
For those (like myself) who don't know what a "quality start" is, Wikipedia defines it as:
"Quality Start is a relatively new baseball statistic developed by John Lowe. It attempts to gauge the number of "good" starts that a pitcher has. A start is defined to be a quality start if the pitcher pitches at least six innings and allows no more than three earned runs."
BTW - since you reported the story, and I've been sticking too much DC stuff in the comments at DT, the Brandon Watson experiment is over for now. The Nationals swapped Watson and Byrd from AAA New Orleans and the ML team this afternoon. Not clear how Robinson will use Church and Marlon Byrd, though they do make a possible platoon pair in center.
I'll just add, this is sort of ridiculous. Didn't like the initial move, but now you demote Watson after a week? Nice. And Bowden said Church lost his job b/c he got "outplayed" during ST, but Church has been awful in NO. I am sure there are other outfielders there who have been hitting better. Why don't they get the call (I know why, but those same reasons should have kept Church up in the first place). Finally, this is all well and good, but DC's problem is pitching far more than hitting . . . Reeks of Bowden doing something just to do it.
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I could be proved wrong, but I believe the Washington Nationals' percentage so far this year, including today's game, is zero.
Over the last couple of years, Jeff Weaver in particular seemed to have a knack for meeting the bare minimum requirements for a QS game after game.
"Quality Start is a relatively new baseball statistic developed by John Lowe. It attempts to gauge the number of "good" starts that a pitcher has. A start is defined to be a quality start if the pitcher pitches at least six innings and allows no more than three earned runs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_start
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