AL Cy Young

Well said, BB. That's what made a lot of what was written about this so infuriating, is because you didn't need any new-fangled stats from those kids these days with their hip-hop music, and their baggy pants, always running t-squared tests on my lawn!!!
Ooops, got a little carried away there for a second.
Anyway, you didn't need anything more complicated than good ol' ERA to make this decision, which, for my money, is one of the best stats that exist if your goal is determining how well a player has preformed in a given year.

 

Well, this year's award will be considered the one in which a spike was driven through the fallacy that wins is a meaningful tool for measuring pitchers. That's a good thing.

 

Can't pass this up (so it's a fastball I can swing at; sue me!). When you square the t-distribution, you get the F-distribution with 1 d.f. in the numerator and n-1 d.f. in the denominator. ;D

I agree with you on the ERA. If you judged it by wins, Tommy Hunter was better than Cliff Lee for the Rangers this season.

 

Agree with BB. You can always keep further parsing down what "should" have happened based on a variety of factors, and I wholeheartedly endorse that for predictive tools. But when you are measuring what a player did that season, sometimes you just have to stop extrapolating and give him credit for what happened.

But wins are still a stupid stat.

 

He would have been easy to vote for at 12-12, too, at least for any voter with a clue.

 

Nolan Ryan & Randy Johnson are not sure. 10 years ago, Hernandez would not have won. 25 years ago, he might not have been top 3.

 

Based on WAR for pitchers at baseball-reference.com, yeah, the writers got this one right.

However, they did supremely fuck up the NL voting, because Ubaldo Jimenez was clearly the best pitcher in the league, it says so right there on the spreadsheet.

 

So you're telling me David Price is right and Joe Morgan is wrong? But Joe Morgan "played the game" didn't he?