November 18, 2010

At the bottom of the article, they list the writer by which pitcher was listed first on their ballot.
(Ah, there's Bob Elliott. I can always count on him to do the wrong thing.)

This might signal the death knell of "traditional" statistics. It's hard to imagine a starting pitcher with such a huge win differential compared to the leader (13 wins vs 21 for Sabathia) winning this award even 5 years ago.

But with this award, and Greinke and Lincecum winning last year, it seems that "wins" are not that important to the writers any more.

posted by grum@work at 04:19 PM on November 18, 2010

At the bottom of the article, they list the writer by which pitcher was listed first on their ballot. (Ah, there's Bob Elliott. I can always count on him to do the wrong thing.)

Plus one for George King. Lest we forget, George King left Pedro Martinez off his MVP ballot in 1999 (a year in which Pedro got the most first-place votes and narrowly lost to Pudge Rodriguez), justifying this on the basis that pitchers should not eligible for the MVP by virtue of only going every 5 days. Of course, this logic apparently did not apply to George King himself in the prior year's MVP voting, in which he gave down-ballot votes to David Wells and Rick Helling.

posted by holden at 04:57 PM on November 18, 2010

I get the feeling many people, be it fans or media, expected a huge argument about a pitcher with 13 wins winning the Cy Young Award. I also feel they are disappointed much of that argument is just not there. Most people who follow baseball can understand the rationale. The only thing all involved must realize, though, is that the "20 win" (or thereabouts) excuse is now extinct. From this point forward, it's ALL pitching stats combined, regardless of number of wins. If a pitcher, regardless of team, has a stellar ERA, pitches a lot of innings, and has a ton of K's, they need to be considered for the award, regardless of who they play for. I can't help but wonder if Hernandez had Sabathia's stats, and vice versa (and Sabathia had no run support and only 14 or so wins) if Sabathia would have won the award, playing for the Yankees. I'm not disagreeing with the choice, but it brings up other questions regarding other possible scenarios.

posted by dyams at 11:44 AM on November 19, 2010

Not sure that's a viable scenario

Seconded. How would that have happened? These "better" stats for tracking pitching performance exist because of cases like Hernandez's 2010. You can't torture them into a scenario where a pitcher with Hernandez's stats pitching in front of the Yankee offense winds up with 13 wins. Looks at the JoePos article linked above; it gives a good feeling for how someone can pitch well and lose a lot.

posted by yerfatma at 02:02 PM on November 19, 2010

I know it's doubtful, but the situation with Hernandez makes me wonder about different scenarios.

So the scenario would be that a high-offense team wins 90 games, but for every game that the pitcher started, they proceeded to score a significantly lower amount of runs than they do in every other game they play?

At that point, you're getting past the very obvious "team offense" and into the granular "team run support for a specific pitcher". That may be TOO granular for most people to accept, unless it was just ridiculous (like, 1.00 R/G vs 5.50 R/G for the other starters).

Even if it was just a big (but not insane) difference (2.50 R/G vs 4.3 R/G), I'm sure baseball writers would rather create a story about how that unlucky pitcher must be hated by his teammates since they obviously aren't trying that hard when he starts.

In King Felix's case, you just have to look at the Seattle offense for the entire season, for every pitcher in every split. They were historically terrible.

For the record:
Run Support For Each Seattle Mariner starting pitcher, 2010.
Hernandez received just a hair under the team average, but 1.4 runs less than the league average.

posted by grum@work at 05:10 PM on November 19, 2010

At that point, you're getting past the very obvious "team offense" and into the granular "team run support for a specific pitcher".

It's irrelevant though: the pitcher's real stats (i.e., not wins) would still reflect his dominant performance. That's the beauty of using them. Any tortured scenario you conceive of requires people to still care about pitching wins. Take that out of the equation and there's nothing to worry about.

posted by yerfatma at 09:41 AM on November 20, 2010