Success Quote by Dontrelle Willis

There is a whole career’s worth of quiet bargaining packed into that line: the pitcher admitting he’s judged by a statistic everyone knows is flawed, while still taking pride in earning the right to be judged by it. “Win or lose” is a rhetorical shrug, but it’s also a preemptive defense. Willis is telling you he understands how arbitrary pitcher decisions can be - run support, bullpen leaks, an error that should’ve been an out - and he’s refusing to let that randomness define his self-image.

The real flex is “fortunate.” He frames durability not as entitlement but as a gift, which reads like an athlete’s way of nodding to all the forces that can steal innings: injuries, fatigue, managerial quick hooks, and the modern trend toward treating starters like five-inning contractors. When Willis came up in the early 2000s, the ace who “goes deep” was still the ideal, but the game was already shifting toward pitch counts and matchup-heavy bullpens. So the sentence doubles as a subtle nostalgia for an older pitching ethic: stay out there, keep taking the ball, keep your team’s fate attached to your arm.

“Deep enough into games to get decisions” is the tell. He’s not chasing a shiny win total; he’s chasing responsibility. The subtext is clubhouse credibility: I didn’t hide from the hardest outs, and I didn’t offload pressure onto relievers. In an era where workload is negotiated and blame is dispersed, Willis is staking a claim to something simple and increasingly rare - ownership.