John Lackey demonstrated the use of the assigned win on Wednesday when he shutout the Twins for nine innings, only to get a no-decision when the game went into extra innings. Koji Uehara, who gave up the Twins only run, got the W when David Ortiz and Mike Napoli hit solo home runs in the bottom of the tenth inning. You can see that Lackey’s record stays the same from June 17th to June 18th, but his assigned wins go up one.

A player who lost many more wins, however is Jacob Petricka. Chris Sale took the win yesterday, giving up three runs in six innings, but the assigned win tracker rates Petricka’s one scoreless inning as more deserving of the victory. While Sale stands at 6-1 and Petricka at 0-1, the assigned win tracker has them both at 5-1.

Petricka is a pitcher that probably isn’t on the radar of a lot of fantasy owners or sabermetricans. He walks a lot of batters, and his strike out rate is not that high. He’s only allowed one home run in 56 major league innings, however. What he’s done well is keep the White Sox in the game.

• On 4/25, he stopped an early Rays rally and pitched 2 2/3 scoreless innings, the White Sox winning the game in the bottom of the ninth.
• On May 7th, he pitched two perfect innings of relief, compared to a low quality start by John Danks.
• On May 23rd, he blew a lead but did not get charged with any runs, as the White Sox came back to win against the Yankees.
• On June 9th, he had the best day of any White Sox pitcher as the bullpen managed to hold an early lead.

I’m not sure I would have assigned the Danks and Sale games to Petricka. The points system for assigned wins was designed to achieve a proper balance between starters and relievers, but maybe starters simply deserve more wins than we imagine.