I'm not even sure now if we agree on what we're trying to assess here. I think what most of us are trying to get at is not just how many games did a given pitcher win (which we can all agree correlates positively with how good a pitcher he was but not so strongly that it can't be easily improved upon as an analytic tool), but how many games (A) did his team win compared to (B) how many they would have won without him.
I haven't actually done this, but couldn't we just look at each of their teams' winning percentages in the games he didn't appear in and compare that to their winning percentage in the games he started to get a pretty good measure of his particular contribution to his career win total? That is, a better measure than just his career W.
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