I'm guessing you are a believer in the results being all that matters.Shouldn't they be? Who's going to sit around at the end of the season and say "Well, we're 74 -88, but it was a lot of bad luck!" At some point, the results have to outweigh everything else. Sure, DD and Hoffman have had horrible luck. I agree that the useful metrics would indicate that they haven't pitched as poorly as the numbers seem to show on the surface. But the end result is.......they're 15-24 and sliding. The season's a quarter of the way over. Is it over for them? No, but they're in a pretty deep hole at this point. Baseball, as with any business, is results oriented. As it should be. The stats are great predictive tools, but being able to predict something, and seeing it happen are two different things. I don't care if DD has a 4.5-ish FIP at the end of the season if he has a 6 ERA and a 7-14 record, the results say he had a bad season. An unlucky season, but I'm less concerned *at this moment* about what the peripherals suggest DD *should* do based on what he's actually doing. Fans have the luxury of only caring about what has already happened. The powers that be have to estimate who are the best players available at any given moment throughout the entire season. Sometimes the results perfectly reflect that, sometimes they sort of do and sometimes they don't at all.