So far this season, the Mets' Jacob deGrom has pitched like a Cy Young candidate. The right-hander sports a National League-best 1.57 ERA and is second in WAR at 3.1, third in strikeouts with 106 and fifth in WHIP at 1.01.

But despite that flashy stat line, deGrom has a paltry 4-1 record to show for it, and New York is 5-8 in games he has started. He doesn't even have the most wins on his team and, by comparison, four of the Rockies' five starters have as many or more wins than him.

The case of deGrom isn't so curious to those behind the "Kill The Win" movement, which argues the statistic is outdated, insignificant and downright misleading.

"I've never been a fan of the win since I was a starter in college," Colorado reliever Adam Ottavino said. "It's just stupid. It doesn't mean anything, because it's not a true representation of how you pitched."

In a major-league landscape where the definition of a starter is becoming watered down — with extending bullpenning becoming the norm and "the opener" seeping into the baseball lexicon — there's a case to be made, as Ottavino pointed out, that the stat doesn't carry near the weight it appears to.

Wins are typically the individual pitching stat that is listed first in print and online. Winning 20 games in a season and 300 games in a career are standard benchmarks for elite major-league hurlers. And without getting too deep into the complicated history of the win — first invented by Henry Chadwick in the 1880s — it's a stat that now has baseball traditionalists at odds with those possessing more modern, edgier views of the game's evolution.

Starters can shred opposing lineups, yielding a couple of runs through seven strong innings, as the Rockies' Tyler Anderson did on Thursday at Cincinnati, and come away with the no-decision, as deGrom has done so often this season. Alternatively, as Jon Gray noted about his three-run, five-frame performance Wednesday against the Reds, "I just got a win the other day by getting my (butt) kicked."

But the team's heavy influence on the individual stat — or the fact relievers can earn easy wins by throwing as few as one pitch — doesn't have Colorado manager Bud Black wanting to bury it just yet.

"I would not want to kill the win," Black said. "I would maybe adjust the qualifications for it, because I think if you're a starting pitcher and you're (Justin) Verlander going against (Clayton) Kershaw, and it's a great duel and you outpitch him, it should be recognized statistically."

As an example, Black offered increasing the five-inning minimum set in 1950 to a six- or seven-inning minimum plus a three- or four-earned run maximum in order for a starting pitcher to earn the win.

Perhaps that would erase some of the gray area that comes with the current stat. Fewer wins for a pitcher, as in the case of deGrom this season, don't necessarily correlate to bad pitching. And more wins don't always necessarily correlate to dominant pitching, but in the case of Washington's Max Scherzer — the league leader in wins at 10-1 — it most certainly does.

Even Ottavino, staunchly anti-win, acknowledges that dilemma in an age where the 20-win season is becoming harder to achieve — 2017 was the first year without one in the majors since 2009 — and the career 300-game winner is probably extinct, considering the increasing hesitancy by managers to leave starters in the game through the third and fourth times in the lineup.

Of active pitchers, 45-year-old Bartolo Colon (243), 37-year-old C.C. Sabathia (240) and 35-year-old Justin Verlander (196) are the closest to the 300-win mark.

"It seems like 200 career wins would be a crazy amount, and 300 seems almost impossible with the way the game is now," Ottavino said. "Again, it's a weird indicator, because if you had that many wins, that means you did something right — but it doesn't really tell you anything else about how you got there."

And that's just fine with some traditionalists, like Rockies catcher Chris Iannetta, who believe the stat should just be left alone.

"I don't understand what the need is to even go down that road, other than as a thought experiment," Iannetta said. "Pitchers are evaluated in many different ways. There's no need to make a widespread decree that (the win) doesn't make sense."