J.C. Bradbury: Determining Awards: Results Versus Performance

Or as Juan Samuel Goldwyn-Shares once said…“The harder I practice, the luckier I get!”

When it come to pitchers, that analysis gets a little more complicated. Batters do most everything they do by themselves. Pitchers need the help of fielders to get outs. Batting average on balls in play is something that pitchers have little control over, and BABIP is heavily influenced by randomness. I’m a strong-DIPS proponent. I think the evidence is clear that pitchers have very little control over hits on balls in play, and even on extra-base hits on balls in play. When I see a pitcher like Tim Hudson near the top of the league in ERA with a strikeout-to-walk ratio of less than two, I have a hard time treating Hudson as pitching as one of the league’s elite pitchers. Tim Hudson is a good pitcher, and at times this season he has been one of the best, but the award should go to the best pitcher for the entire season. Even if Hudson led the league in ERA, I couldn’t support him for the Cy Young.

It may seem that I am judging Bautista and Hudson by different standards by ignoring luck for the former but not for the latter, but I’m really focusing on different types of randomness. The role that randomness plays for pitchers is different than it is for hitters, because the main metrics that we use to judge pitchers are heavily polluted by factors beyond their control. If a pitcher gets lucky in striking out batters or preventing walks and homers, I’d have no problem supporting a Cy Young campaign, even if I thought there was little chance that he could continue to perform with the same level of outcome success.

So, when its outcomes versus performance, I prefer to focus on outcomes, but I there has to be some accounting for luck. And due to the nature of the luck they experience, I think we have to treat pitchers differently than we treat hitters when accounting for luck.