Purple Row Awards: AL Cy Young

So as you've seen, the Purple Row staff has all voted on the major BBWAA awards for the 2010 season. Because of all the in-site discussion we've had regarding the NL postseason (considering Ubaldo Jimenez' season and Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez' strong finishes), it was actually a pleasure to review the American League to see the cream rise to the crop.

Pitching, every year, is such a debacle. There's a million things to judge pitchers by, and a million things to gauge a pitcher's season by. I'd like to take way too many words and discuss some of these criteria.

There's the old favorite metric to judge pitchers by, Pitching Wins. It's a metric that holds its roots in history, starting back when pitchers were expected to pitch an entire game, and outdueling your opponent had far more meaning than it does anymore. Nowadays, more starters are on 100ish pitch counts, given ceilings on innings in a season, and when you factor in the impact of having a strong bullpen in the modern game of baseball, you basically don't have the same one-on-one impact that pitching wins imply. There's a lot of correlation between good pitchers and high win totals, but all too often we'll find that win totals can be inflated by a strong team. Regardless, a lot of people with voting influence still put a lot of weight into the pitching win.

The next obvious metric to choose for voting is ERA. Typically, ERA is a pretty decent metric by which to judge a season. Runs allowed tend to tell a story of a season. As with anything, there are caveats that can sway an ERA (park effects, strong defense, magic juju), but as a general rule, low ERAs tend to follow good pitching.

If you're not a fan of run metrics, there's always accumulated stats and peripherals too look at. Innings pitched can be a decent point to look at, because no terrible pitcher is going to really make it through the 6th or 7th inning 30 times a season. But Livan Hernandez and Kevin Millwood do in fact exist, and Dusty Baker is lurking out there somewhere, so IP obviously isn't the end-all. What about pure strikeout totals? Typically they'll run alongside a high strikeout rate (duh) and inning totals. Combine a low walk rate (which will help that innings pitched total as well as provide context for strikeout totals) and a low homer rate (which will help keep that ERA low), and you not only have yourself an excellent pitcher, but a convenient bridge to yet another means of evaluating pitching.

SABR stats! You guessed it, SABR stats. Whether or not the metrics I'll suggest here are actually put forth by the Society for American Baseball Research, they do fall into that category purely based on the fact that they're American, Baseball-related, well-Researched, and I suppose there's a Society involved there somewhere. Anyhow, I'll make this brief. There are a lot of analysts who don't believe that Wins tell much of anything and that ERA is too defense-dependent to really indicate who the best pitcher was. There's a lot of round-and-round debate over how these metrics should be used, but essentially speaking, FIP and xFIP (and by extension, WAR) take a combination of pitcher peripherals (strikeouts, walks, home runs, and innings pitched) and package them into a neat number that looks an awful lot like ERA. Some analysts will swear by them, others will use them as a barometer of how trustworthy an ERA is, and others still will dismiss them as voodoo and witchcraft.

Join us past the jump and we'll take a look at the AL Cy Young candidates and how they stacked up in these various categories.

The first category we'll touch on is pitching wins. Here is the leaderboard:

Name	Team	W
CC Sabathia	Yankees	21
David Price	Rays	19
Jon Lester	Red Sox	19
Trevor Cahill	Athletics	18
Justin Verlander	Tigers	18
Phil Hughes	Yankees	18
Clay Buchholz	Red Sox	17
Carl Pavano	Twins	17
Ervin Santana	Angels	17
Gio Gonzalez	Athletics	15
C.J. Wilson	Rangers	15
John Danks	White Sox	15
Matt Garza	Rays	15
Brett Cecil	Blue Jays	15
Francisco Liriano	Twins	14
Ricky Romero	Blue Jays	14
John Lackey	Red Sox	14
Felix Hernandez	Mariners	13
Jered Weaver	Angels	13
Shaun Marcum	Blue Jays	13

So far, it looks like CC Sabathia is the obvious choice for the AL Cy Young. David Price and Jon Lester aren't bad choices, and Trevor Cahill could make himself a strong case, accumulating 18 wins while playing for an offensively starved team. Hitting and breaking that 20-win mark is going to make a strong case for Sabathia, considering the weight of the pitching win in the mind of many a voter. It might be an inflated win total, given the Yankees were the run-scoringest team in the majors. Same goes for Phil Hughes. Let's try and back these cases up with some stronger numbers.

Name	Team	ERA
Felix Hernandez	Mariners	2.27
Clay Buchholz	Red Sox	2.33
David Price	Rays	2.72
Trevor Cahill	Athletics	2.97
Jered Weaver	Angels	3.01
Cliff Lee	- - -	3.18
CC Sabathia	Yankees	3.18
Gio Gonzalez	Athletics	3.23
Jon Lester	Red Sox	3.25
C.J. Wilson	Rangers	3.35
Justin Verlander	Tigers	3.37
Max Scherzer	Tigers	3.5
Dallas Braden	Athletics	3.5
Francisco Liriano	Twins	3.62

Definitely a change in the playing field there. Suddenly the 13-game-winning "King" Felix Hernandez leaps into the lead, with David Price, Trevor Cahill, and CC Sabathia bolstering their win totals with solid run prevention efforts. But as we talked about earlier, there may be more to the picture than simply wins and ERA. Tropicana Field played as somewhat of a pitchers park, Yankee Stadium roughly even, and Oakland as a slightly more extreme pitchers' park than Tampa. Those things can help deflate a pitcher's ERA, given large outfields and difficulty in launching a ball over the fence. Maybe we should look at peripherals.

Name	Team	IP
Felix Hernandez	Mariners	249.2
CC Sabathia	Yankees	237.2
Jered Weaver	Angels	224.1
Justin Verlander	Tigers	224.1
Ervin Santana	Angels	222.2
Carl Pavano	Twins	221
Zack Greinke	Royals	220
John Lackey	Red Sox	215
John Danks	White Sox	213
Cliff Lee	- - -	212.1
Fausto Carmona	Indians	210.1
Mark Buehrle	White Sox	210.1
Ricky Romero	Blue Jays	210
Jeremy Guthrie	Orioles	209.1
David Price	Rays	208.2
Jon Lester	Red Sox	208
Matt Garza	Rays	204.2
C.J. Wilson	Rangers	204
James Shields	Rays	203.1
Colby Lewis	Rangers	201
Gio Gonzalez	Athletics	200.2
Trevor Cahill	Athletics	196.2

Again, the picture changes. Sort of. Felix Hernandez has posted the lowest ERA in the American League and done it over the most innings as well. Nearly a run lower than the next highest inning load, CC Sabathia, Felix Hernandez is starting to present a compelling case for himself. So what about strikeout rate, that's a big deal, right? Well, yes, but it's almost more important to put those strikeouts in the proper context, meaning a strikeout-to-walk ratio. Both are a big deal. Strikeouts are the most defense-independent means of producing outs, so pitchers who get those high strikeout numbers are typically more effective than their counterparts. However, some of those strikeout-getting pitchers also give up a lot of the free pass, nullifying some of their effectiveness. So strikeout-to-walk ratio is pretty important.

Name	Team	K/9	K/BB
Jon Lester	Red Sox	9.74	2.71
Francisco Liriano	Twins	9.44	3.47
Jered Weaver	Angels	9.35	4.31
Justin Verlander	Tigers	8.79	3.08
Colby Lewis	Rangers	8.78	3.02
Max Scherzer	Tigers	8.46	2.63
Felix Hernandez	Mariners	8.36	3.31
James Shields	Rays	8.28	3.67
David Price	Rays	8.11	2.38
Cliff Lee	- - -	7.84	10.28
Scott Baker	Twins	7.82	3.44
Gio Gonzalez	Athletics	7.67	1.86
Shaun Marcum	Blue Jays	7.6	3.84
C.J. Wilson	Rangers	7.5	1.83
CC Sabathia	Yankees	7.46	2.66

Well, just looking at K/BB, Cliff Lee is the absolute Mack Daddy of the American League. That 10.28 K/BB is the kind of number reserved for relief pitchers, for example, Rafael Betancourt or Edward Mujica, the only two PITCHERS in BASEBALL to have a higher K/BB than Cliff Lee - at least as far as qualified IP shows. That isn't to say that a K/BB of over 10 is necessary for a pitcher to be absolutely dominant, but it should be noted that in baseball HISTORY, no starter who started over 27 games has posted a K/BB higher than Cliff Lee. In fact, only 5 other pitchers, PERIOD, posted a higher single-season K/BB higher than Cliff Lee. Observe:

Rk	Player	SO/BB	G	Year	Tm
1	Dennis Eckersley	18.33	51	1989	OAK
2	Dennis Eckersley	18.25	63	1990	OAK
3	Mariano Rivera	12.83	64	2008	NYY
4	Edward Mujica	12	59	2010	SDP
5	Rafael Betancourt	11.13	72	2010	COL
6	Koji Uehara	11	43	2010	BAL
7	Cliff Lee	10.28	28	2010	SEA/TEX

Not only is Cliff Lee the only starting pitcher to post so high of a K/BB, it speaks to how strong of a "Year of the Pitcher" 2010 was, considering that 4 of the top 7 pitchers in K/BB who appeared in 27 or more games were this year. Words cannot describe. What's amusing is if we drop the search criteria to over 10 K/BB, only one additional pitcher adds his name to the list: Wilton Lopez of the Houston Astros posted a 10.00 K/BB over 67 innings in 68 appearances in the 2010 season. If we drop the criteria again to a K/BB over 9.00 and keep the minimum appearances requirement, the list expands to 15, and we add another starter to the list (Curt Schilling, 2002, 35GS, 23-7, 259.1IP, 3.23 ERA, 9.58 K/BB; how that man didn't win the Cy Young is beyo- oh right Randy Johnson).

Part of me wants to hand the award right over to Cliff Lee, just based on this unprecedented dominance, but Jered Weaver's 4.31 K/BB is still downright elite, and posting a 3.00+ K/BB is pretty great still. If we raised the bar of efficiency-based dominance to a K/BB over 9, there would be 2 pitchers in history who could REALLY win the Cy Young award, right? There has to be more to the voting.

Last metric, FIP. There's some debate on whether to use FIP or xFIP when evaluating pitcher performance over a season. For the sake of this evaluation, I'm going to use FIP. I feel it's a strong evaluator of "this is what the pitcher did" as opposed to "this is the level we can expect of them going forward". I know I'm oversimplifying the intricacies of xFIP, but this article has gone on long enough and we're hungry for results.

Your AL FIP leaderboard:

Name	Team	ERA	FIP
Cliff Lee	- - -	3.18	2.58
Francisco Liriano	Twins	3.62	2.66
Justin Verlander	Tigers	3.37	2.97
Felix Hernandez	Mariners	2.27	3.04
Jered Weaver	Angels	3.01	3.06
Jon Lester	Red Sox	3.25	3.13
Zack Greinke	Royals	4.17	3.34
David Price	Rays	2.72	3.42
Gavin Floyd	White Sox	4.08	3.46
CC Sabathia	Yankees	3.18	3.54

Given the emphasis on strikeouts, walks, and homers in FIP's formulation, it makes sense that Cliff Lee would be at the top of the board. What is also interesting is the ERA-FIP discrepancies. Most of the pitchers represented by this leaderboard have an ERA inflated from their FIP, which can be the product of once again, defense, poor batted-ball luck, park effects, and of course magic juju. The real standouts though are Felix Hernandez and David Price (and to a lesser extent, CC Sabathia), who have ERAs well deflated from what their FIP would suggest. Blame the ballpark, blame the defense, whatever, but these guys probably didn't pitch QUITE as well as their ERA suggest. Maybe somewhere halfway between FIP and their actual ERA, I don't know. It could be an interesting discussion point.

So finally, the actual winners of this award. Excellent work, reader, slogging through all of these 2000 words. The reason I attempted to break all of these metrics down was not to build to the "SABR perfection" as it could appear, given my known slants and such, but rather to illustrate some of the major elements that should be taken into account when attempting to pick one player above the rest. I'm sure that the 7 staff members voting on the AL postseason took any number of metrics and criteria to mind when making their decisions, and I'm sure we all voted in different directions. Sort of.

Your final tally for the AL Cy Young Award:

Name	Votes
Felix Hernandez	21
Cliff Lee	8
David Price	4
CC Sabathia	4
Francisco Liriano	3
Justin Verlander	1
Jered Weaver	1

So congratulations to Felix Hernandez, who, by Purple Row's voting standards, wins the 2010 American League Cy Young Award.

Ed: Full Voting

 

Russ	Jeff	Fish	Mart	Bryan	Silverblood	Greg
Hernandez	Hernandez	Hernandez	Hernandez	Hernandez	Hernandez	Hernandez
Lee	Lee	Sabathia	Lee	Price	Price	Lee
Liriano	Verlander	Liriano	Weaver	Sabathia	Sabathia	Liriano