Blessed Are the Cy Young Voters, 2.0

I do a lot of editing of other people's writing in my work, and one of the things I try to avoid is making edits that are distinctions without differences. There's no reason to alter a writer's copy if the change is no better or worse.


Distinctions without differences divide the AL Cy Young candidates so far this year, and by so far, we mean 90% of the way through the season.

Again, let's consider the contenders and shake our heads at the red pubic hair of difference among them. For a discussion of the statistics, see the previous post.

Masahiro Tanaka, 13-4, 2.97, 194 Inn, 160 K, ERA+ 148, FIP 3.27Chris Sale, 15-8, 3.03, 202 Inn, 205 K, ERA+ 133, FIP 3.43
Corey Kluber, 17-9, 3.12, 205 Inn, 215 K, ERA+ 153 FIP 3.26
Jose Quintana, 12-10, 3.05, 192 Inn, 171 K, ERA+ 133 FIP 3.43
Rick Porcello, 20-4, 3.12, 202 Inn, 167 K, ERA+ 146, FIP 3.45
Danny Duffy, 12-2, 3.18, 170 inn, 181 K, ERA+ 139 , FIP 3.53
Aaron Sanchez, 13-2, 3.17, 173 Inn, 140 K, ERA+ 136, FIP 3.60
Cole Hamels, 14-5, 3.24, 181 Inn, 181 K, ERA+ 141, FIP 3.98
J.A. Happ, 19-4, 3.27, 176 inn, 152 K, ERA+ 132, FIP 4.03
Justin Verlander, 14-8, 3.33, 200 Inn, 216 K, ERA+ 124, FIP 3.64
David Price, 16-8, 3.91, 212 Inn, 217 K, ERA+ 118, FIP 3.46

If you like advanced metrics, Kluber's your guy, but Porcello sports a sparkling W-L record and an ERA and FIP that are about the same as the other best contenders. Price leads this group in innings pitched and strikeouts, and though his ERA is high from early season struggles, FIP has him third best.

Good luck with that vote. I think Kluber has an edge on Porcello right now, but Tanaka could win the award with a couple of sterling starts that catapult the Yankees into the playoffs. And if you think Hamels or Sale is this year's Cy, I have no argument against it.

Good Luck With That Cy Young Vote

There are roughly 16 games left in the MLB season as this is being written, and if you know who should win the Cy Young Award in each league, you deserve a prize with the name of dynamite's inventor on it.

In the old days it was easy: find the guy with the best won-loss record and a reasonable ERA and cast your vote. But today we are cursed with knowledge, and the more we know about pitching performance, the less we're able to distinguish top pitchers.

Let's take a look at the top contenders, first in the NL:

(ERA+ adjusts for the ballpark; FIP adjusts for defense. Bold indicates league leaders.)

• Kyle Hendricks, 15-7, 2.03, 173 Inn, 157 K ERA+ 197, FIP 3.38
• Jon Lester, 17-4, 2.40, 184 Inn, 179 K, ERA+ 167, FIP 3.46
• Noah Syndergaard, 13-8, 2.43, 174 Inn, 205 K, ERA+ 165, FIP 2.26
• Madison Bumgarner, 14-9, 2.66, 206 Inn, 231 K, ERA+ 153, FIP 3.20
• Tanner Roark, 15-8, 2.75, 193 Inn, 157 K, ERA+ 152 FIP 3.67
• Max Scherzer, 17-7, 2.78, 211 Inn, 259 K, ERA+ 150, FIP 3.09
• Johnny Cueto, 16-5, 2.86, 207 Inn, 181 K, ERA+ 143, FIP 3.06
• Jake Arrieta, 17-6, 2.91, 179 Inn, 171 K ERA+ 137, FIP 3.49
• Jose Fernandez, 15-8, 2.99, 174 Inn, 241 K, ERA+ 131, FIP 2.40

...and the wild card, Clayton Kershaw, 11-3, 1.81, 129 Inn, 155 K, ERA+ 214 FIP 1.70

In other words, according to ERA+ and FIP, the Cubs pitchers pitch in a good hitting park before the best defense in the game. Noah Syndergaard plays his home games in Supression Stadium but Jose Reyes at third and Yoenis Cespedes in center are catnip for opposition hitters.)

How Do You Value Kershaw?
The first thing voters are going to have to do is determine whether Kershaw is a candidate. He's the king of the hill, but it's not possible for him to be as valuable to the Dodgers in 129 innings as other top candidates are in 200 frames for their teams.

Kyle Hendricks has a real edge in ERA over the field, but fielding independent statistics suggest he's had a lot of luck on his side. Eight unearned runs burnish his ERA. 

Thor is the best pitcher by the advanced stats, but accounting for the shaker of salt we take them with pushes him back to the pack. Lester has the gaudy record and second best ERA, but he has the best team behind him. Fernandez has dominates since returning from injury with 12.5 punchouts per 9 innings and the second best FIP. But the non-fancy stats have him ninth in ERA.

Max Scherzer is near the top in everything, which might tilt the scales in the voting. He's pitched almost as many innings as the league leader and he paces the league in whiffs, with the sixth best ERA and the third best FIP (not counting Kershaw, who isn't eligible for the league lead in those categories.)

The last three weeks will likely decide things, but woe are those who must decide. 

We'll take a look at the AL next, but the song remains the same.

The Too Close To Call

As a young adult, I felt it was my civic duty to investigate every policy issue facing our country and have an informed opinion on each. As I've aged, this need has ebbed, and I'm now perfectly comfortable not having an opinion on some complex issues. I can continue to cast informed votes on representatives and referenda without possessing exhaustive knowledge of every issue upon which they must rule.

When it comes to baseball awards, however, that's exactly the demand we make of voters. They must have a definitive opinion on who is the MVP or the Rookie of the Year, etc. But this year, there is one race in which it's just impossible to distinguish between a couple of candidates.

The AL Cy Young contest pits David Price's Blue Jay brilliance, following a trade from Detroit, against Astro ace Dallas Keuchel, whose season-long excellence stumbled a bit in September.

For the season, Keuchel's 20-8, 2.48 is Cy-worthy. Price is right too -- 18-5, 2.45.

Accounting for ballparks, Keuchel leads in ERA+, 162-161. In other words, the two pitchers allowed the same number of runs.

Price's 4.70 K/BB ratio is slightly superior to Keuchel's 4.24. Pitchers can't control anything as much as they can control walks and strikeouts. So that's a relative feather in Price's ball cap.

Keuchel owns a small edge in WHIP, 1.017-1.076. He's allowing fewer base runners. Because they keep the ball in the park at the same rate, that's one for Keuchel.

Keuchel has pitched 12 more innings, 232-220, which partially accounts for his superior WAR of 7.2 versus Price's 5.9.

The various defensive metrics generally like Houston's defense behind Keuchel better than Detroit and Toronto's defense behind Price. That might partially explain why teams scored 10 unearned runs against Price and only four against Keuchel. Those runs don't show up in ERA. That would seem to tilt towards Keuchel.

But fielding independent pitching measures -- about which you should be a little leery -- suggest Price has "earned" a 2.78 ERA; Keuchel has earned a 2.91.

Now, you make sense of all that. About the only thing we can say about the best pitcher in the American League this year is that it's Dallas Keuchel and David Price. (Oakland's Sonny Gray, 14-7, 2.73, is next best, but he tailed off by summer's end and pretty clearly fell out of the race.) Writers who split their votes are disdained for their indecision, or lack of guts, but in this case I think it's not just defensible, its indicated.

When Models Look Extra Ugly

Democrats are predictably excoriating Paul Ryan these days for his "attack" on Medicare. His voucher plan for the government-sponsored health care insurance for the elderly (and the not-nearly elderly; you can join at 65) diminishes benefits going forward.

Democrats are comparing Ryan's plan to perfection, or to the current system. Neither, of course, is an apt comparison. Medicare is rushing headlong off the financial cliff without reform, and threatening to take the entire American economy with it. Relative to insolvency, which is the ultimate fate of the program under everyone else's plan (i.e., no plan at all), Ryan's proposal is a revelation.

A similar debate is shaking the Sabermetric community these days in the wake of a pair of disturbing arithmetic developments. But the conclusion is the same: the measure of a new idea isn't in comparison to perfection, but to the old paradigm.

First, some context. Ever since Voros McCracken unveiled the idea in 1999 that pitchers have limited control over what happens once their pitch is put into the field of play -- a conclusion now much more nuanced and qualified -- seamheads have been whipping up concoctions to strip luck and defense out of pitching results to determine how well pitchers are actually pitching.

One of the many formulae brewed by the stat wizards is FIP -- fielding independent pitching. Without excavating spreadsheets filled with higher math, it can be described this way: given the number of batters a pitcher has fanned, walked, hit with pitches and allowed to homer, how many runs should we expect to score against him given average defense and ballpark?

In July, Reds closer Aroldis Chapman broke FIP (in the words of CBS Sports). He faced 52 batters in 14 1/3 innings and whiffed 31 of them. He allowed just six hits, two walks, a HBP and nary a run, nailing down 13 saves. Batters posted a desultory .122/.173/.143 line against him.  In other words, Chapman was Superman for a 30-day period. (He's been no slouch under other moons.)

Putting those numbers through the meat grinder yielded a FIP for Chapman of -0.99. That is, Chapman could be expected, given his performance, to yield minus-one run per nine innings. Certifiably nuts.

Others have noted odd sightings in Baseball-Reference.com's WAR (Wins Against Replacement) calculations. WAR attempts to review all of a player's performance and all of the context and measure him against a Triple-A replacement at his position. In mid-August, Cubs keystoner Darwin Barney had a higher WAR than Brewers slugger Ryan Braun. Just for context, Barney is hitting .268/.309/.386, or about 12% below the MLB average. Braun, at .301/.380/.526, is 53% above average. Braun is also superior in the baserunning department and has grounded into fewer double plays. Moreover, Wrigley Field and Miller Park are about equally kind to hitters, and both batters suffer equally in their inability to bat against their own team's woeful pitching staff.

What WAR sees that we don't is defense. It credits Barney for defense double in value of any other second-sacker's, while Braun's left-field stylings more resemble the staccato flight of a pigeon. Subjectively, there appears to be a grain of truth here, but clearly not enough that anyone in Wisconsin would trade Braun for every Barney ever known, including the purple dinosaur. WAR is suffering convulsions and has been put on bed rest, at the very least.

These two developments have led some to observe FIP and WAR's death throes. The projection models have failed and it's time to put them out of their misery. But in the words of that great philosopher Quick Draw McGraw, "Now hold on there just a doggone minute, Baba Looie."

No model is perfection, not even Adriana Lima. Clearly outlier performances like Chapman's make mincemeat of statistical models. As I've mentioned before, quantitative analysis of defense is just in the bloom of its youth, beholden to bursts of impaired judgment. I rarely rely on WAR or WARP and pay much more attention to offensive valuations, leavened by a general sense of a player's glovework.

Nonetheless, FIP is an extremely useful tool, and though the value it applies to Chapman's performance is nonsense, it's not really wrong. FIP says Chapman was virtually unhittable, and by golly, he was. Only 18 batters out of 52 could even put the ball in play.

The real question then is, are these models less imperfect than the old tools? WAR certainly measures something bigger and more relevant than Triple Crown stats do, but whether it measures relative positional value better than Triple Crown stats measure hitting performance would require some sort of study. There's no doubt that FIP tells us much more about a pitcher than W-L and ERA; it's been shown to be vastly better at projecting performance.

All of which presents the same moral that every other development in quantitative analysis has: the state of the art is improving, but will never be perfect. After all, they measure the performances of people.

How On Earth Did Buzz Capra Win the ERA Crown?

If the sabermetric movement could be condensed into one sentence it would be this: We have better ways to analyze the performance of players and teams, and better ways to predict their future value, than the traditional statistics.

New research demonstrates how nearly useless one year of batting average and ERA are in revealing a player's actual ability. Bill Petti of Beyond the Box Score looked at every player year in baseball history to determine how well one year's number correlate with the following year's. In other words, if Braves rookie first baseman Freddie Freeman hits .291/.352/.461 this year, what are the odds that he's roughly a .291/.352/.461 hitter, and not a .261/.312/.398 hitter getting good breaks or a .325/.398/.517 hitter getting bad ones?

The answer is that batting average correlates pretty poorly from year to year, largely because BABIP, which is a key component of batting average, correlates even worse from year to year. On base percentage, which combines batting average and walk rate, correlates about 50% better year-to-year than batting average because walk rate doesn't change much year-to-year. Slugging and OPS are about the same as OBP when it comes to year-to-year consistency.

In other words, Freddie may or may not be a .291 hitter, but whatever he hits, add about 60 points to get his on-base percentage and about 170 points to get his slugging percentage. (A .354 BABIP and a 3-1 K/BB rate suggest regression next year, though he's just a rookie, so natural improvement may  offset some of that decline.)


What correlates well year to year? Contact rate, patience metrics, strikeout rate and walks are the best. For what it's worth, line drive rate is the worst. Here's the whole chart:

.	Hitter Metric	Year to Year Correlation
.	Contact %	0.90
.	SwStr %	0.89
.	Swing %	0.84
.	K%	0.84
.	Z-Swing %	0.83
.	O-Contact %	0.81
.	Z-Contact %	0.80
.	BB%	0.78
.	BUH	0.77
.	GB/FB	0.77
.	GB%	0.76
.	O-Swing %	0.75
.	ISO	0.73
.	HR/FB	0.73
.	FB%	0.73
.	SLG	0.63
.	OPS	0.63
.	OBP	0.62
.	wOBA	0.61
.	IFH	0.59
.	IFFB%	0.56
.	F-Strike %	0.56
.	Zone %	0.52
.	IFH%	0.44
.	Batting Average	0.41
.	BABIP	0.35
.	BUH%	0.24
.	LD%	0.22

It's worth repeating what Petti says in the article, that ERA has about the same correlation as batting average, which is why seamheads are working to derive fielding-independent statistics for pitchers. As it turns out, even in their relative infancy, those measures have a much better year-to-year correlation than ERA.

It explains how Red Sock Bill Mueller could lead the league in hitting in 2003 (.326) after batting .260 the year before and before hitting .283 the year after. And how Buzz Capra could lead the league in ERA for the Braves in 1974 (2.28) the year after sporting a 3.86 ERA and before posting a 4.25. (Capra started just 61 games in his seven-year career and, other than that one season, was a below-replacement level pitcher.)

All this can get ridiculously complicated, but even if you don't understand the underlying methodology you can appreciate the information. If you read that Jair Jurrjens has a 2.96 ERA so far this year, but a 3.96 FIP, that means he's been a 3.96 ERA pitcher with great fielding, relief support and/or luck and can be expected to tail off the rest of the way. (Of course, in Jurrjens' particular case, he's laid up, so no regression for him right now.)

This is useful data to general managers, fantasy owners, baseball obsessives and fans, in that order, and that is the order in which it has been embraced.
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