We’re not out of the woods yet, fellow awards-voting onlookers. Last week, the Baseball Writers Association of America made several errors in handing out year-end hardware—some arguable, some egregious. While many thought 2010 to be a turning point when voters gave Felix Hernandez—he of 13 wins—the American League Cy Young award over CC Sabathia (21 wins) and David Price (19 wins), 2011 shows that we’re only looking at a tiny step forward, if that.
The target of my ire this season falls upon the National League Cy Young voting and the American League Rookie of the Year voting. While I don’t have a big problem with Clayton Kershaw winning the NL Cy Young award, my beef is with the fact that he ran away with 27 of 32 first-place votes, while Roy Halladay received just four and Cliff Lee failed to secure a single one. Check out their ERA estimators for this season without names attached and tell me who was better.
|
xFIP |
|||
|
Candidate A |
2.47 |
2.84 |
2.81 |
|
Candidate B |
2.20 |
2.71 |
2.79 |
|
Candidate C |
2.60 |
2.68 |
2.72 |
It’s not an easy call, is it? Not nearly the kind of parity that should lead to one candidate receiving 85 percent of the first-place votes. Now we’ll attach the names and throw on some more traditional metrics:
|
K/9 |
xFIP |
oppTAv |
||||||
|
Clayton Kershaw |
233.1 |
21 |
2.28 |
9.6 |
2.47 |
2.84 |
2.81 |
0.265 |
|
Roy Halladay |
233.2 |
19 |
2.35 |
8.5 |
2.20 |
2.71 |
2.79 |
0.267 |
|
Cliff Lee |
232.2 |
17 |
2.40 |
9.2 |
2.60 |
2.68 |
2.72 |
0.269 |
Kershaw runs away with the traditional categories, and it seems to me like all the voters needed was to see that Kershaw won the “Pitching Triple Crown” before they called it a day. If that wasn’t the case, we would have seen a much more even split among the three candidates. Given that Cliff Lee was best in xFIP and SIERA while facing a slightly tougher schedule than the other two, I think he makes for a very strong candidate, and I’d venture to say that he’d get my vote if I had one (he did get it in the Internet Baseball Awards voting).
My qualm isn’t that Lee didn’t win—it’s obviously very close, and I wouldn’t begrudge a vote for any of the three—my qualm is with people claiming that Kershaw was the obvious choice, and his win coming in such a landslide. In fact, he’s quite obviously not the obvious choice and is made out to be solely as a result of his surface stats—namely his wins, where he holds the greatest edge over his competitors, and his ERA. Maybe voters have moved beyond using wins as their sole measure of pitcher effectiveness, but they obviously still place a great deal of weight on it, and when they see a pitcher with the most wins and lowest ERA, that combination gets them salivating like a fat kid around cake.
Moving on to the AL Rookie of the Year award race, amid two worthy corner-infield candidates (Eric Hosmer and Mark Trumbo), three pitchers finished in the top five of the voting—and they may well have finished in reverse order of what they deserved.
|
K/9 |
xFIP |
oppTAv |
||||||
|
189 |
13 |
2.95 |
5.6 |
4.44 |
4.72 |
4.78 |
0.277 |
|
|
165.1 |
16 |
3.70 |
5.3 |
4.01 |
4.16 |
4.29 |
0.276 |
|
|
171 |
9 |
3.74 |
9.1 |
3.42 |
3.53 |
3.36 |
0.277 |
As we all know, Jeremy Hellickson won the award (netting 61 percent of the first-place votes), but not as widely known is the fact that Ivan Nova finished fourth—one spot ahead of Michael Pineda. If there were ever a piece of evidence proving that the writers still rely heavily upon wins, this is it. Despite nearly identical ERAs and vastly more Ks for Pineda, Nova’s Yankee-induced win total netted him a first-place vote and a greater share of the total votes than Pineda earned. You could argue that the AL East provided a tougher environment, but you’d be wrong, since the two faced a virtually equal quality of opposition. And, of course, the peripheral stats are ever in Pineda’s favor.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for this disgraceful result. I challenge anyone to give me a single reason why Nova is a better choice for Rookie of the Year than Pineda. Just one.
I’m even willing to give more leeway with defining Rookie of the Year than I am for MVP or Cy Young. While the latter two should pretty clearly go to the player/pitcher who was the most valuable, I’m okay with giving RotY to a player who might not have been the most valuable, given certain conditions. If the guy played in the minors for a couple months (lowering his overall value) but was better than a player who was in the majors the whole season, I’m okay with that. If a guy’s numbers weren’t phenomenal but he showed great stuff or still has a lot of upside, I’m okay with giving him a vote. The award is for the best rookie, and that shouldn’t be restricted to the player who was the best this season. It’s just as much about deciding who will continue to be great players and who will be tomorrow’s MVP and Cy Young candidates.
This is why I’m not outraged at Hellickson winning. Yes, his peripherals aren’t great and his BABIP was incredibly lucky, but I think he’s a better pitcher than those numbers reflect. Yes, Pineda was even better and has a greater ceiling, but Hellickson will still wind up as a very good pitcher. And to some extent, one comes to expect that the voters will be drawn to Hellickson’s sparkly 2.95 ERA, the same as a fish is drawn to anything shiny. It’s par for the course. I just can’t see an argument for Nova. His numbers, aside from wins, were significantly worse than Pineda’s. He doesn’t have top-notch stuff (nowhere close to Pineda’s), and he’s already reached his ceiling. But he won 16 games and plays in the national spotlight in New York. I’d hope that the voters didn’t merely vote for him because he’s more familiar than Pineda, being a Yankee, and I don’t think they did. I do give them more credit than that… but not much more. It seems again that the wins combined with the practically equivalent ERA and perceived tougher competition won the day.
To those who say the voters have moved beyond wins, citing King Felix: you’re going to need to reassess. Indeed, there still appears to be a heavy weight placed upon wins, and for those voters who are looking at something else, it doesn’t appear to run much deeper than ERA, which is almost as bad.
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Ivan Nova had a slightly lower ERA than Pineda despite pitching in front of a worse defense in a home ballpark that doesn't help him as much as Pineda's ballpark does.
It is reasonable for writers to believe that the awards should be about past results, not demonstrated skills such as SIERA is designed to indicate.
Plus, over enough time (way more than one year), ERA is a better indicator of skill than the estimators. (See: Rivera, M.) It's also an actual result.
Nova's B-R WAR is 3.6, while Pineda's was 2.8. That's a huge difference. That's "one reason." If you look at the actual run prevention results - the thing that helped their team win games - Nova was just better.
Is Pineda the better bet going forward? Absolutely. But Michael's argument is completely sound, and while you can disagree with it reasonably, it's unjustifiable to paint the other side as dumb and crazy.
If you go entirely to the other extreme, the "what did happen, not what should have happened" result, you're basically taking the age old argument for wins and applying it to ERA instead. Wins are what happened, but we've all agreed that we shouldn't use those, because there is too much noise in that stat that is outside of the players control. ERA incorporates more of whats under a pitcher's control, and less outside of it, but it still includes a healthy serving of the latter. The "it's what happened" argument does not automatically make it correct, just like it doesn't make the argument for using wins correct.
Basically the argument is about what portion of the reward should be for what the player controls and what portion for what he doesn't control. We've definitely been trending more towards the control and lots of SABR people seem to prefer that, but taken to its logical extreme it leads to awkward results. If we were able to determine that some injury was completely random (outside the players control) should we ignore time missed for the purpose of awards voting?
Following from this, the fact that Nova didn't allow any HR with runners on base and thus saw his FIP dip dramatically in these situations, while Pineda saw a rise in HR rate and FIP with men on becomes relevant. Nova created more bad situations for himself by pitching worse with the bases empty, but he reduced the impact of this by performing dramatically better once men reached, in components that FIP credits to the pitcher. It may not be repeatable, but is does reflect his 2011 performance beyond the raw results.
What's the best way to adjust for this, starting from a DIPS approach? I'm not sure - but it's the type of thing that should be addressed before coming to the conclusion that the voting results are disgraceful.
And why assume the wins carried the day? It could as easily have been the K's, or the dominance on an otherwise putrid team (Kemp, notwithstanding).
Two, Nova had a considerably better ERA+, not just ERA. Yes, I am aware that the second reason arguably isn't as strong as it looks, when you look at actual opponents faced. It seems to me as though your real argument here is that the voters didn't look at "the right" advanced statistics, rather than that they just fixated on wins.
ERA+ is pretty much just ERA with a few small adjustments, so it doesn’t surprise me that Nova bests Pineda here. He has a tougher park, so that would push his ERA+ above Pineda’s. I suppose there are “advanced†stats like ERA+ that paint Nova as better than Pineda, but I don’t really consider ERA+ a viable advanced metric for short-term analysis (long-term is a different story). Not that I believe they really looked at ERA+, but maybe I am arguing that they didn’t look at the right advanced stats. But I don’t know that that’s necessarily wrong. If these are the people tasked to select the best pitcher, shouldn’t they be expected to look at the right data?
K/9 is a pretty good metric for a pitcher's raw stuff, and has some degree of predictive power going forward. To claim it as the thing that makes this comparison "ever in Pineda's favor" so that preferring Nova is "disgraceful" is just silly. You can do better than this, Derek.
[Begin quote]
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for this disgraceful result. I challenge anyone to give me a single reason why Nova is a better choice for Rookie of the Year than Pineda. Just one.
[End quote]
Further commentary seems to indicate (via your reliance on FIP) that you don't believe pitchers have any control over BABIP, which is a provably false statement. If you're going to FIP, you are ignoring a real skill variance. Granted, that variance is often obliterated by luck in a single season, but there's still a skill component.
The reason this sort of argument irritates me so is that it can only set back stathead arguments. We, in fact, have come an enormous way. Park effects matter. Defense matters. Wins matter very little. These principles are making progress.
But when you argue that just because Nova had better results than Pineda is not a reason to vote Nova ahead of Pineda.... that's alarming. FIP has known flaws; shouldn't we agree that those are flaws? Fangraphs' WAR for pitchers really crushes the value of guys like Mariano who routinely outperform their peripherals, because it bases WAR on an ERA simulator.
Let's not take a bite out of a writers' group that I have to believe would not have made some of the Burroughsian mistakes of the past, unless we have a real argument to make. I don't think the heat shed by this article brings much light to the proceedings. We don't want to be an insular little club scoffing at the stupid; that's one of the fastest ways to get stupid.
I think Nova was better than Pineda. I think Kershaw and Halladay were better than Lee, even if not by much.
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Kershaw - 7.3 WARP
Lee - 6.2 WARP
Halladay - 4.8 WARP
Of course, it's unlikely than more than a small fraction of the 32 NL Cy Young voters looked at WARP, but it doesn't make sense to me that you omitted it from this article.
Which brings us to Pineda. Post all-star break he was 1-4 with an ERA over 5 and only 58 IP. I am guessing if he didn't completely crap himself in the 2nd half, he would have gotten more consideration.
As for Nova, you could make a good argument for him, but frankly if Hellickson had that lineup behind him, he probably wins 20 games. Granted the XERAs are similar, but at the end of the day, "lucky" or not, Hellickson's season was consistent throughout, and he was better in all meaningful stats outside of Wins, which is by large part determined by run support. Nova even had the media advantage by pitching for the Yankees - the fact that the New York hype machine didn't turn out strong for Nova should tell you everything you need to know from the guys who watched him fling it every 5th day.
Sorry but this article is much to do about nothing. You are pretty much trying to create issues where there aren't any. I am the first guy to say the BBWA gets it wrong a lot, but not this time. Certainly there are better arguments to be made elsewhere.
Start-to-start consistency is largely a myth, though I can see Pineda’s second-half costing him votes. I don’t necessarily believe it should (why shouldn’t his stellar first half have netted him just as many positive reviews?), but I think that played a part.
If everyone were fully rational, *every* vote would be unanimous, as they would all reach the same conclusion about candidates who might be only thinly separated.
To be clear, rational actors with the same knowledge should always agree. Differing knowledge may lead to non-unanimity. But the general point stands well.
I agree with BillJohnson that rational thinking wouldn't necessarily lead to a unanimous vote.
You leaned very hard into the voters because no one voted for the guy with the lowest ZpHX or xFIP or something, but if you do that, you'd best be taking everything into account yourself.
Did you account for this handedness issue? It doesn't appear that you did. And if the platoonmates vs. lefties were stronger, it's very hard to give Lee a bonus for that.
I think that the general argument that A and B are close so A should get about as many votes as B is flawed at the outset. If we're voting for Most Giraffes and Steve has 198 and Joe has 199, we're all going to vote for Joe. (Christina Kahrl made the a similar baffling argument re: Votto's MVP, which I understood to say that Votto probably deserved it but so many people voting for him was a crime against math.)
I'm far from a supporter of the voters; I'm still mad Alan Trammell didn't win the MVP when he obviously deserved it. But the tenor of the article is unjustified by the actions of the voters.
My argument isn’t that Lee is absolutely the best choice; you’re right that I haven’t looked at everything to say that for sure. My argument is merely that it’s close. If I were one of the ones casting a real vote, naturally I would look into the quality of opposition thing more and run a much more rigorous analysis. The point wasn't to say that this is the guy who should win. Just that there were a few who deserved more recognition.
Last year, Felix Hernandez had every 'advanced' metric lopsidedly favoring him, including several conventional stats like Ks. The Ws didn't follow, but the voters responded to his case. Halladay and Lee didn't have the same slam-dunk case, and Kershaw is certainly deserving, too.
VORP agrees - and so too did the Internet Baseball Award voters, apparently. There's no controversy here.
While it's entirely possible, if not probable that many voters still rely too heavily on wins, this year's voting doesn't lead to that conclusion. You could also make the blanket statement that the results show a prevailing preference for value estimators that use runs allowed as a starting point over those that are based on defense-independent estimators. Or, you could suggest that the voters look at a variety of advanced metrics, but fall back on their intuition when the advanced metrics disagree or are inconclusive.
If anything can be gleamed on how much the voters still value wins from parsing this year's voting results, I'd point to the fact that Ian Kennedy, who had the NL's best W-L record, only finished fourth, behind all three sabermetrically viable candidates. If wins still carried the degree of weight implied in this article, that would be an unlikely result.
The defense-independent estimators are a good method of getting a better understanding of a pitcher's performance, but they also fail to preserve things like sequencing. That's a problem even for a lot of people who understand the metrics. There's nothing wrong with taking a component-driven approach to looking at value to eliminate unknowns, but the implication in the article seems to be that this is the only valid approach.
The alternative philosophy: Virtually all award-winning seasons have some combination of luck and sustainable performance. What's the best method to preserve that element of luck for pitchers' performances (to be consistent with other awards) while stripping out the performance of his teammates (defense, bullpen, etc.)? Until we have a better answer to this question, is it really fair to be overly critical of voters for using a tool like ERA rather than a more advanced tool that answers a completely different question than they're asking?
I don't know about the writers, but if I had to vote and my primary voting criteria didn't answer the question, I would look to secondary criteria. And, in this case, W, K, ERA and WARP all favor Kershaw - and IP is effectively even (1 IP separating the 3).
Is it then that surprising that 27 of 32 voters saw one pitcher who led in many categories while a wash in others and voted that way? I mean, who votes their 2nd choice 1st because they know their 1st choice will win and they want the vote to be closer?
As such, it isn't surprising that 27 of 32 voters were able to find a single stat that swung them to put Kershaw 1st on their ballot - because they had so many from which to choose. And even if they felt it was 1a and 1b, only one person can get that 1st place vote.
It would eliminate the "Pitchers already have their own MVP award!" meme. It would allow for a rational discussion of - and dismissal of - the "Verlander only played in 21% of his team's games" meme. After all, Verlander was involved in more plate appearances than any position player, though when defensive plays from a good center fielder or shortstop are factored in, the needle can swing the other way. And most of all, it really would make it more fair, given that pitchers are in fact eligible for two prestigious and *financially lucrative* awards, where position players are only eligible for the one. (Both are eligible for Gold Gloves; Silver Sluggers are pretty meaningless.)
As to the NL CY, one must also consider how people vote. While it is true that the difference between Kershaw and the Phillies duo was small, it does not follow that the voting results would be close. There seemed to be wide agreement (including by you) that Kershaw was marginally better. Thus, a small difference in value turned into a voting landslide.
I also can't get as excited about who finished fourth and fifth in the AL ROY. While Pineda's performance statistics show him ahead of Nova, they weren't as dominating as King Felix's, and you have to give Nova a fair amount of credit because, even with all those runs the Yankees scored, New York is a much harder place to pitch (heck the Yankees even sent the guy to the minors in mid season so that Bartolo Colon could stay on regular rest). I can't even get too excited that one voter actually placed Nova first on his ROY ballot. While his peripherals were clearly below Pineda's, his FIP, xFIP and SIERA were all materially better than Hellickson's, and K/9 was close, so it's not clear that his advantage in wins was the sole factor in that vote.
But then, Kershaw wins the pitching triple crown pitching for a substantially inferior team (albeit in a substantially better pitcher's park), and for me, that's enough. Kershaw is the Cy Young winner, and a deserving one, even if by an overwhelming margin.