in ERA, innings pitched, strikeouts, and games started. All of these are traditional stats that everyone who knows baseball has no problem with. Now, it's time to get to the good stuff. Hernandez is pitching to a 3.26 xFIP (click for definition), topped by only Francisco Liriano and Jon Lester. But take into account that neither Lester or Liriano have topped 200 IP in 2010 while Hernandez has thrown 241.2. Hernandez has either been the third most valuable, or the most valuable, pitcher by WAR (Wins Above Replacement -- a sabermetric stat used to assign value to a player's performance -- takes into account both offense and defense), depending on whether you believe Baseball-Reference (BR) or Fangraphs. According to BR , Hernandez is the most valuable AL pitcher, adding 5.5 wins over a replacement level player. Fangraphs has Hernandez ranked third, behind Cliff Lee and Francisco Liriano, adding 6.1 wins. The point of all of this is not a sabermetrically charged rant, but rather a very simple point. Every method of evaluating pitchers that we have available to us ranks Felix as either the best or one of the three best pitchers in the AL this year, except wins . So what is the real problem here? That Hernandez doesn't know how to win? Or that the win statistic is completely useless in the evaluation of how well a pitcher has performed. I firmly believe in the latter. But according to Rob Parker and countless others, I'm just a "stat