* Felix has a comfortable lead over CC in innings, strikeouts, ERA and peripheral indicators of all stripes. As a consequence, many of CC’s advocates have built their case on his edge in wins. Run support, of course, is the explanation. Among AL pitchers with at least 140 innings on the season, CC ranks 11th with 7.34 runs of support per start. Felix? He ranks dead last (51st) with 3.76 runs of support. For liberal-arts majors like me, that means CC on average has roughly 3.5 more runs of support per start than Felix does. I invite anyone to argue that the difference in wins is a function of CC’s guts/clutchiness/sense of the moment/heart of a warrior rather than run support.
* Throughout the history of the award, the league leader in wins has won the Cy Young 58.8% of the time. By “league leader,” I mean respective league in the post-1966 era, when a Cy Young winner was named for both the NL and AL. Before 1967, “league leader” means “led all of baseball in wins.” For these purposes, a tie for the league lead in wins counts as leading the league. It’s interesting that in the early 80s, voters stopped giving wins so much weight in the balloting process, and since then the wins leader has claimed the Cy “merely” half the time. So the trend away from the “wins=Cy” line of thinking predates the onset of the “Sabermetric Revolution” or whatever you want to call it. The point is that pitchers who don’t top the loop wins can and very often do win the award.
Keep in mind that we’ve still got 10 days to go in the regular season, and the numbers could still change, however incrementally. Also keep in mind that pitchers like Jered Weaver, Cliff Lee, Jon Lester, and Clay Buchholz also have their own compelling arguments. However, since the fray is seemingly reduced to the two pitchers examined above, I’m talking only about them. And Felix, right now, is clearly more deserving of the award.
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1. Cooper Nielson Posted: September 26, 2010 at 07:43 PM (#3648810)I suppose if Sabathia finishes with 22 wins (does he have two starts left?) and no one else gets more than 19, he might "win" over the wins crowd, but other than that, what makes his season any better than Jon Lester's, or Jered Weaver's, or even Justin Verlander's? The only real advantage he has over any of them is his IP.
Innings are very valuable, don't get me wrong, but right now he is +25.1 on Lester, +18.2 on Weaver and +12 on Verlander. Not an embarrassingly wide margin. Despite pitching more innings, he has fewer strikeouts than all three of those guys. Of that group, he has the second highest ERA (Verlander's is slightly worse) and highest WHIP, as well as the highest opponents' AVG, OBP and SLG.
If you ran single-season similarity scores, I'm pretty sure Verlander would be CC's #1 match. Yet I don't think anyone is considering Justin Verlander a serious candidate for Cy Young this year (he might get some 3rd place votes). So why is CC?
To me, it looks like Felix, Lester and Weaver are the top three candidates, with a week left in the season to change things.
Fangraphs WAR paints an interesting picture. It has Lee first and Liriano #2 with Felix third. Lee's pitched pretty amazingly to be up there after missing so much time. I wonder if he'd have done even better if they laid off him a bit midseason.
I'd prefer to look at value based on what actually happened rather than what a simplistic model says "should have happened".
You don't have to like or use FIP, but you don't need to repeat this dumb line, either. The walks, strikeouts and home runs allowed actually did happen.
If you don't like converting those events into runs and then wins, then I don't see how using actual runs allowed is preferable, when we can cut right to the chase with wins.
There's pretty much no "should have happened" that goes into an analysis based in runs allowed. You just see how many runs allowed the pitcher gave up, how many innings, and adjust that for its value in context. We don't need to say, "an ERA of X theoretically produces Y wins" to prefer the season of the pitcher with the lower ERA.
I don't see why you think there's a slippery slope from an analysis based in RA to one based in Wins. It's true the stats are not entirely dissimilar, but no two things are entirely dissimilar, and people have historically had very little trouble maintaining an analysis based in RA without suddenly sliding into old-school sportswriterdom, lauding wins, and voting for Jack Morris or whatever.
Is it a slippery slope argument? I guess. I see a spectrum of measures from most granular to least (and somebody could call that a slope). At the left side, we're talking more about inputs than outcomes (say, raw Pitch FX data is the furthest left that we have currently), while the furthest right is the ultimate outcome: W or L. And on the way, there are various measures: things like FIP, component ERA, ERA, RA, etc.
I don't see anything special about ERA or RA on that spectrum. Like I said in my first post in this thread, it's fine to prefer RA, and to dislike FIP or other component stats, but I don't think it makes sense to simply dismiss one band of that spectrum as "made up".
The reason we look at runs allowed, rather than wins, is because we believe that the pitcher has little control over runs scored, and that it's due to teammates and timing; so if we try to focus on the pitcher's contribution, we should only look at runs allowed. There's nothing wrong with taking that further to hits/outs allowed, or to batted balls/walks/Ks/HR. Once you step away from wins, they're all points on the same spectrum. (And I'm not even advocating the use of FIP or anything like it here; I'm just saying that dismissing it while looking at ERA/RA/etc is inconsistent).
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