The AL Cy Young Conundrum

Remember what an easy call the two MVP races are? Kris Bryant and Mike Trout are far and away the most valuable players in their leagues this year.

But good golly Miss Molly are the Cy Young competitions a quagmire. Depending on how you slice it, one person's ripe fruit is another person's rind. 

Taking a gander at the junior circuit first, there are a bevy of candidates.  

Rick Porcello went 22-4, 3.15 for the Red Sox, with a league-leading 6-1 strikeout-walk rate.  

J.A. Happ, in his season of redemption, earned a 20-4, 3.18 line, though the advanced stats give his Toronto defense a lot of the credit.  

Justin Verlander bounced back to 16-9, 3.04,  and the AL's lowest WHIP and highest pitching WAR. 

The Yankees' Masahiro Tanaka owned a 14-4, 3.07 resume despite a relatively low strikeout rate. 

And Chris Sale, for all the drama of his season in Chicago, pitched to a line of 17-10, 3.34 and completed a league-leading six games.

Verlander's year was stealthy-great. He paced the league in strikeouts and and hurled a healthy 227 frames. The advanced stats say his ERA was partially a figment of defense and ballparks. I award him the bronze medal.

Porcello really shined and would get my second place vote. The advanced stats like him but he's a little light on whiffs, which is the one thing a pitcher can claim nearly total credit for. 

For my money, the best pitcher in the AL was Cleveland's Corey Kluber. At 18-9, 3.14, he didn't lead the league in anything  but was among the best at everything. He anchored the Tribe's killer rotation, pitching a lot innings with an excellent K-BB ratio, a low WHIP and more strikeouts than frames. The advanced stats love him, giving him their highest grades. The playoffs aren't considered for this, but they certainly vindicate this choice.

What's that you say? One of the others is your guy? Go for it. There's no credible argument against any of the pitchers named here.

Just please, don't talk to me about Zach Britton. The guy was a horse out of the Oriole pen, with an 0.54 ERA and 47 saves. He deserves the Rolaids Relief Award, unless Andrew Miller steals it. But the dude pitched a grand total of 67 innings -- one at a time, and that's just a quantum leap easier than throwing six frames each time out. Meausring him against starters is an apples and zebras comparison.

That's not a knock on Britton. Over the last three years, he's thrown 209 innings -- about a full year for a starter. Batters have touched him up for a 1.38 ERA and 0.9 WHIP. In that one year's worth of pitching he earned nine wins against replacement -- roughly MVP level. He's a stud, but so is Mike Trout. And neither one deserves the Cy Young.

The Cubs' Chances of Winning the World Series

If you saw the post-game interview with Corey Kluber after last night's Game 4 win for Cleveland, you got a taste of why he's in the running for his second AL Cy Young. Not that a wicked arsenal of pitches isn't useful, but Kluber demonstrated poise, equanimity and perspective that have to help on the mound during a tense three-hour battle.

Behold his response to a question about winning the series following Game 4:

“I think we like the position we’re in, but the task isn’t done yet. We still have one more game to win, and we’re going to show up tomorrow and play with the same sense of urgency we’ve played with until this point. We don’t want to let them build up any momentum and let them get back in the series.”

It's an uphill fight for the Cubs, certainly. If each game is a tossup, the Cubs' 12.5% chance of winning the next three games for the championship is less than the odds that an ignorant troglodyte sociopath will be our nation's next commander-in-chief. So that's pretty sobering.

But the point is, they don't have to win three games; they only have to win the next one. Then their chances double, and the series offers them a day off and a new opportunity.

The World Series isn't anything like over, as Kluber notes. You'd rather be in his position than Chicago's, but a couple of timely hits in the next two games could change all that.

Two Morals In a Very Small Story

Here's a baseball story with two morals.

Corey Kluber notched his ninth win last night in Cleveland's 7-4 victory over Chicago. Kluber has been an All-Star contender based on a 9-6, 3.01 half-season that features good peripherals including a complete game and 4.5-1 K-BB ratio.

Last night was vindication for Boston manager John Farrell's decision to bypass Kluber for the honor. The righty from Stetson managed six innings while surrendering four runs on eight hits, two walks and a home run.

The Tribe tallied three times in the fifth to bail Kluber out of a deficit. Then the real bailing began. Relievers John Axford, Bryan Shaw and Cody Allen shut the door over the final three frames, fanning six of the nine batters they faced -- all outs. That is, Cleveland's defense was asked to make all of three plays behind the trio of firemen.

Allen gets credit for a save, and why not: he struck out the side. Shaw and Axford receive bupkus, except the warm feeling that their work, combined with a potent Indian offense, secured Corey Kluber a "win." 

(In the interest of redundantly flagellating an equine corpse that long ago achieved rigor mortis, the Associated Press dedicated their first two game summary paragraphs to Kluber's sub-stellar performance and none to his successors.)

The morals of the story are familiar: 1. Pitching wins are the ultimate evidence that correlation is not causation. 2. If it's not measured it's not valued by the old fogies who still think RBIs are about "clutchness," but that doesn't mean we shouldn't value it.