AL Cy Young

Steve Carlton got at least one run of support in all 27 wins (obviously), and I think he got at least 2 runs of support in 26 of those wins (I looked it up a while back so I could be off).

EDIT: Looked it up. Carlton had two 1-0 wins, three 2-0 wins and three 2-1 wins. He had one 1-0 loss and two 2-1 losses. So in games where Philadelphia scored one or two runs, Carlton went 7-3. His ERA for the year was 1.97.

Felix rarely got even 1 run of support, it seems.

 

Yeah, I honestly think it's less about sabermetricians winning the fight and more about a bogus stat (pitching wins) being universally considered the fraud it is.

All the other stats that Felix dominated have been around for centuries.

 

gimme a break. won-loss record, even with 'overrated' wins, will continue to be the first factor voters look at. this was NOT an acknowledgment thar wins are 'overrated;' it was an acknowledgment that felix was BY FAR the best pitcher in the league despite his lower-than-usual no. of wins.

barring another exceptional statistical season lacking wins, most future cy winners will still be among the win leaders. this season was an anomaly in which the clearcut best pitcher did not win the more accustomed number of games.

 

Good article by Passan

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=AjrZT5wOERZSN6Prdi8N.RM5nYcB?slug=jp-felixcyyoung111810

 

Wins are what economists call a "coincident" indicator. If a pitcher has excellent stats in other main categories like ERA and strikeouts, he'll almost always have a lot of wins, too, because he pitched well, and pitchers who pitch well get Ws more often than not. Hernandez's win total was a fluke, a statistical anomaly even for a pitcher on a lousy team, and the voters saw it as such.
I'll bet if you ran the 2010 Mariners season through thousands of computer simulations, 13 wins would be at or near the lowest total Hernandez would get in any one simulation.

 

Shockey are really this thick? Wins are not the first stat people will look at, they aren't now and they won't be in the future.

 

Yes. I don't remember if I've written this on this thread or elsewhere, but I actually think it's a disservice to Felix to portray his Cy Young as a victory for stuff like WAR and FIP. I think there is still a lot of skepticism among about those stats, especially when it comes to award voting (more on this in a moment). I think Felix won mostly because his ERA was a lot better than CC's or Price's. All of his traditional stats, except Ws, were better.

As for the advanced stuff, I think a lot of is is misapplied in award selection, which is all about evaluating the past, not projecting the future. FIP, for example, boils pitchers down to Ks, BBs and HRs on the theory that pitchers have no way to control anything else. I accept that K, BB and HRs are a decent way of predicting the future because those skills are more repeatable. Just because a skill isn't easy to repeat doesn't mean it's not a skill, though.

If a pitcher, over an entire season, prevents hitters from getting hits on balls in play, he is doing something right. Will he be able to do it again? Don't know. But he did it, and he deserves credit for doing it.

That's why I think stuff like ERA, which measures what actually happened, is a better stat for, uh, evaluating what actually happened than stuff like FIP and WAR (which is derived from FIP).

 

Agree with this too. A lot of slippery-slopers want to say "What if the best pitcher had a 12-13 record? Or a 9-14 record?"

It's like saying: "If the roads were icy, but it was July, would you put chains on your tires?"

It's almost impossible, just like it's almost impossible to be the best pitcher in the league, over a significant amount of innings, while having a losing record or winning less than 12 or 13 games. Felix had the worst offense in decades behind him, and he won 13. It won't get worse than this.

This is as close as we're likely to get to ice in July.

 

well, so much for civil discourse. good night, people. not so much you, jc.

 

The reason the sabermetrics crowd considers this a victory isn't because voters used WAR and xWins to vote this year, although that's the way it's being presented by analysts and such.

The reason the sabermetrics crowd considers this a victory is because just as much as the sabermetrics crowd likes to play with WAR and VORP and FIP, it also likes to identify stats it considers as noise and not very helpful as a performance indicator. Wins is one. RBIs is another.

 

This is pretty cool:

@DAVIDprice14
Again thank you all!! Felix is VERY deserving of the award...I don't think people understand the numbers he put up outside wins/losses!

http://twitter.com/DAVIDprice14

 

I don't think they looked so much at that. Felix dominated in ERA, IP, and Ks. Made it pretty easy to vote for him once he got over .500.