R.A. Dickey is having a Cy Young sort of season. So is Johnny Cueto. Maybe a few other starting pitchers in the National League, too, but especially Dickey and Cueto. They’re on pace to win 20 games, lose fewer than half of those and finish among league leaders in ERA and strikeouts—which is to say, they’re having seasons typical of a Cy Young winner.
But Aroldis Chapman and Craig Kimbrel are having seasons that have never been done before.
So let’s give the Cy Young to one of them.
Problem is, Chapman and Kimbrel are relievers, and relievers aren’t supposed to win this thing. A closer will win it from time to time, but usually he has to have some #######’ facial hair or 50-plus saves or just do like Sparky Lyle did in 1977 and pitch for the Yankees.
...And if the season ended today, voters wouldn’t. Without telling them why, I asked four baseball writers at CBSSports.com and one at Yahoo Sports for their top-three Cy Young ballot if the season ended today. None of them named Chapman or Kimbrel. So I’m here to get the word out, start a conversation about the NL Cy Young, because the right thing must be done. And the right thing is for Chapman and Kimbrel to be sitting in the lead at this moment
Repoz
Posted: August 08, 2012 at 01:14 PM |
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1. Esoteric throws a 'hard slider' Posted: August 08, 2012 at 01:28 PM (#4203330)Every year we have to do this stupid dance.
I don't think a modern closer's getting there if there are reasonable SP choices, barring some sort of 90+ IP, 50+ save season.
Still, if I had to bet right now I'd say it's most likely to be Cueto when all is said and done.
cueto is 3rd in innings pitched
just doesn't have a lot of flashy numbers. he strikes out 7 guys a game but that's not impressive in this day and age.
i like cueto a lot and certainly way more than almost any relief pitcher as a cy young candidate
but i can understand a voter not being enthralled.
and please don't anyone on this board trot out wins.
I normally would discount relievers in the best pitcher discussion, but when a starter is asked to relieve, and puts up monumental numbers hitherto unseen in baseball history, he should be in the center of the discussion.
And by WAR, Chapman is 20th in all of baseball among pitchers, in barely 50 innings, and first in K rate. Using 50 innings he's 14th in HR rate, and his walk rate is also better than average. Who has been a better pitcher than Chapman in the innings thheyve been alotted?
And if it has to be a starter, clearly Strasburg has been the most effective starter in baseball.
You mean the story about how he clearly has no balls because he can't take the pressure in NY? Seriously, I think Burnett's story would be a negative in the eyes of some voters.
(Of course, it wouldn't exactly be the first time cool factor beat out value in award voting. But the results of the author's small-sample voter poll, at least, are gratifying.)
EDIT: Started composing this before #7/#9 were posted. I disagree with your criteria and wouldn't vote that way, but it sounds like you're within the rules of the award and are being consistent, so, cool!
i still give a lot of weight to the innings difference and cueto has been consistently very, very good
but i understand why folks are looking at chapman. he's awesome and he's made the reds pitching staff what it is. that and some very solid defense.
s
I'm open to consideration of Chapman and/or Kimbrel, but this argument doesn't do it. Chapman has started zero major league games. When he was used as a starter in the minors, he wasn't all that good. It's the move to the bullpen that let him take a step forward. It's just as easy to imagine him not being able to maintain that velocity in a starting role and ending up more like Dan Bard than Chris Sale.
heads up that the reds believe chapman is the team's best starter based off his work in spring training
as of 26 July
30 IP 35 KO 0.60 ERA
as of today
35 IP 42 KO 2.06 ERA
bullpen stats change quickly!!
1. Kimbrel
2. Jansen
3. Chapman
4. Robertson
5. Frieri
All debuted in the last 5 years, the top 3 all in 2010. Rob Dibble is #6, the tops among retired pitchers. 45 pitchers meet 100 IP and have 10 or more SO/9. 29 of them are active (though 1, Ankiel, hasn't pitched since 2004). All but 2 of them pitched within the last 10 years, the 2 exceptions being Dibble and Bryan Harvey.
Their numbers look a lot like the high school stats of pitchers who are drafted in the first round.
If there were some reason that the Reds were playing more interleague games than other teams, then maybe. As is, every team in the NL plays interleague games. That's part of being in the NL.
He hasn't even been close. Verlander, Sale, Felix, etc, etc. He hasn't even been close to the "most effective" in his own league. Yea he's good, but he's also not thrown very many innings. Hell, Jose Quintana, he of the minor league signing by the White Sox, is only .1 bWAR away from Strasburg.
I think it's an interesing question. Is the award designed to honor the Cy honor the guy who pitches best for an NL team? In that case, interleague is irrelevant. Or is it to honor the guy who pitches the best in National League games? Since interleague games only have one-half the significance of intraleague games in that regard, a case can be made for discounting numbers in those games.
Obviously, when these awards were created, the distinction was irrelevant. Now, it's at least worth kicking it around.
He's clearly the most effective per inning pitched, in the innings he's been allowed to pitch, which was my point.
I think writers have clearly gone with the former. If a writer is advocating the latter in this one case, it should be because he believes it always and not just because it makes his candidate (Chapman) look better. You can't change criteria based on whom it most benefits.
In 2008 (I think), when Sabathia was traded to Milwaukee, I did advocate looking at adding his interleague stats (against the NL) to his NL stats for Cy Young candidacy. I think now that was a bad call, though.
I think it's never really been given much consideration, in part because there was no interleague play for the vast majority of the time the award was being presented.
And I wondered whether all of CC's stats should be considered when evaluating whether he was worthy of the NL's Cy Young.
I'm not saying I'm sold on either idea. Just that interleague is a major change in the way the game is played and how these once-separate leagues operate. We should at least consider what these league-specific awards should be honoring as a result of this change.
Remember when Shannon Stewart was a very silly MVP candidate? I remember Rob Neyer (or someone) pointed out that before he was traded to the Twins, he killed them when facing them as an opponent. How do you handle that?
If that's the criteria used, shouldn't the relievers be back in the argument?
ValueArb's post 9 indicates they should be.
"Kimbrel and Chapman shouldn't get votes". There, RU happy?
If the criteria is value to his team, then obviously pitching worse in the interleague games lessens Chapman's value, because those games counted as much for the Reds as other games.
If the criteria is "outstandingness" and the idea is that you can reward someone who had less value to his team but was more "outstanding" when he did pitch, then the fact that Chapman wasn't as outstanding in certain games seems as relevant as the fact that he was more outstanding in other games. I don't know what the principled reason would be for awarding "National League vs. National League outstandingness" as opposed to "outstandingness while playing for a National League team."
I think the argument for treating inter-league differently is stronger in an MVP context than a Cy Young one. In an MVP contest, one could make an argument that intra-league games are more important because they are against the teams against whom the team is directly competing for a playoff berth. If one views the Cy Young award as more of a pure "best pitcher" competition (and I get the sense that most people see it this way), then the only argument I could see for treating inter-league and intra-league differently might be a quality-of-competition argument, which, if anything, would probably work against Chapman here (he fattened up his statistics by beating up on weaker teams in the weaker league).
Wait, if they're going to get a Cy Young, shouldn't they not lose any of the games they win?
If the criteria is not "who pitched best for an NL team, but who pitched best in NL games." Then, you're not just weighing what the pitcher did positively for his own team, but the damage he did to the other NL team. The performances in games between two NL teams count fully this way - Chapman is helping the Reds as much as he's hurting the NL rival he's pitching against. But an interleague game only has half the NL value as an intraleague game.
But a flip side to the argument is 2008. If all games are equal, then why not go even further. Maybe we should ignore not just who they pitched against, but who for. During the 2008 season, CC Sabathia had the best overall year of anyone who could be defined as an NL pitcher (whether by quality of performance, IP or who he finished with - he did have a GP edge with Cleveland, however). In a sport where teams now compete against foes from the other league, should we automatically exclude those IP thrown for another team?
Keep in mind, I'm not pushing one of these ideas or the other. I'm merely noting that how we approach these league-based awards probably warrants more discussion than it's been given since the sport has abandoned the leagues as separate entities.
If nothing else, I find it more interesting than rehashing whether Ichiro's a Hall of Famer.
This seems like it could slipperyslopify down into something like "innings thrown in a pennant race should count more."
Indeed. Atlanta is 51-1 when leading after 6. That's a really great feeling for a fan.
Chapman instead has to use the "outstanding" argument, and I don't see a way to reconcile this line with the "outstanding" argument.
Yeah, I brought it up because I did think it was worth considering...
¹ At least in a single-season context, anyway. If we're talking about e.g. the Hall of Fame, then it might well make sense to magnify the difference between super-great and great, and to consider Mariano Rivera a better candidate than an above-average SP with three times as many IP. But when we're dealing with a single season, presumably we're talking "replacement value" as we generally know it.
i am likely influenced by brewerdom but after watching 2007 and 2012 fall apart completely due to awful bullpens i am not a advocate for a closer but i am a strong proponent that whatever you do to make for a good bullpen you do it
I didn't intend to limit it to just Chapman. Just the idea that games played outside the league could be looked at differently, depending how one views the award (and what it's honoring).
Hey, let's not forget the 2010 bullpen, made awful by giving big innings to a parade of veterans who were uniformly terrible (Trevor Hoffman, LaTroy Hawkins, Jeff Suppan, David Riske, Claudio Vargas). Aside from Carlos Villanueva there was a near-perfect correlation between age and ERA.
Whatever happened to Zach Braddock?
Don't they still do the Rolaid's Relief Fireman of the Year? Or was that just from when I was younger?
EDIT: ....and then I read the rest of the page....D'OH!
I guess.
But I guess it's just hard to really be enthused by a remarkable performance in 48 innings. A lot of pitchers are great in 48 innings.
Craig Kimbrel has a 1.29 ERA in 42 innings. Nice. RA Dickey had a 0.18 ERA in 48.2 Innings, but we're going to punish him for also tacking on an extra 94 Innings with an ERA of 4.47? I'm not sure that makes much sense, form a "most extraordinary" point of view.
I love high K relievers. I love watching Chapman. But maintaining a great performance while seeing batters more than once per game, over 200 innings throughout the season, is far more impressive and extraordinary in my opinion.
Johnny Cueto, 4/5 to 5/9: 48.1 IP, 1.12 ERA
Johnny Cueto, 6/12 to 7/22: 54.2 IP, 1.65 ERA
Jared Weaver, 5/18 to 7/7: 42.2 IP, .84 ERA*
J Zimmermann, 6/27 to 7/28: 44 IP, 1.02 ERA
David Price, 6/24 to 7/25: 42.1 IP, 1.49 ERA
Chris Sale, 5/1 to 6/9: 48.2 IP, 1.48 ERA
King Felix, 7/8 to 8/4: 48 IP, 1.13 ERA
(Verlander has not had a sufficiently dominant consecutive stretch)
and the real stud starters:
Ryan Dempster, 6/5 to 7/20: 39 IP, .92 ERA
Ryan Vogelsong, 5/3 to 6/9: 56 IP, 1.60 ERA
Hmmm ... Dempster, Vogelsong, Zimmerman, Braun, Howard ... verily we live in the Golden Age of Ryans.
(There are plenty more perfectly decent Ryans out there at the moment. I'm guessing that was the most popular name 25-30 years ago.)
*Does include 3 UER which would bring his RA up to about 1.50
Word. The Rolaids was reasonably popular when it first started out (seems to me) but faded. The writers had no reason to write about it and the formula did produce a few odd winners (largely based on saves). Alfonseca won it in 2000 with his league-leading 45 saves ... and 4.24 ERA and just 47 K in 70 IP ... but I'm pretty sure it had faded by then. Anyway, it pretty much just went to the league leader in saves I think so there wasn't much point to it.
In 1976, the Rolaids reward was first given. That year Eastwick led the NL with 26 saves (winning the award and having led the league the year before with 22). Bill Campbell won the AL award with just 20 saves but mainly thanks to his 17 wins ... 168 IP in 78 appearances. After the introduction of the award, you rarely saw league leaders under 30 except in strike years.
Wow, Campbell's 77 was incredible. 140 IP in 69 appearances with 13 wins (9 losses) and a league-leading 31 saves. Now that's leveraging a reliever! 69 appearances and he played a role in the "decision" in 53 of them while averaging 2 IP per.
Nah, Michael. The top male name (in the US, anyway) in each and every individual year from 1977 to 1992...maybe other years, too, but figured that was the sweet spot for MLB performance. http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/popularnames.cgi
2007 had a lot of starters who struggled in the sixth inning too, making Yost look dumber than he was. 2012 was two seasons. Most of April/May they had all of the injuries and a lot of players off to slow starts. Bullpen was not great at that time either, but not noticably worse than anything else. Then others started getting healthy and playing better and the bullpen cratered, losing way too many games to overcome.
The problem with the closer can be seen in the recent Reds Brewers series. Brewers swept the Reds at home, Chapman never takes the field. Two of the games the Brewers have the lead, the other they score 2 in the 8th to overcome a one run deficit. In the olden days Chapman would have been in the game at some point in the eighth inning, if not starting the inning on the mound. Here he isn't. "You can't beat our best!" Maybe not, but I guess we can prevent him from ever playing, given how you use him! (Brewers actually got good relief pitching in the series as well.)
(There are plenty more perfectly decent Ryans out there at the moment. I'm guessing that was the most popular name 25-30 years ago.)
There's also a wealth of Brandons in MLB right now, especially in the Bay Area (McCarthy, Moss, Hicks, Inge, Belt, Crawford). They're not nearly as good as the Ryans, though.
Michael is surely #1 in baseball. I did some research on Yahoo Fantasy Sports for players who have played at least one game in 2012 and came up with:
21 Mikes
14 Michaels
Also from the "Michael" family:
7 Miguels
2 Mitches
1 Mitchell
1 Maikel
1 Micah
1 Mickey
I'm not sure where "Melky" and "Yamaico" come from.
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