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.

Attaining Happ-Iness

The blind squirrel syndrome may have afflicted Astros GM Ed Wade this week when Roy Oswalt's trade request prompted him to fold the tent on this season. Of no value to the dying embers of the franchise in 2010, Oswalt brought back second-year hurler JA Happ, a pair of prospects and $12 million in contract relief from the Phillies.

One of the prospects from that deal (indirectly, by way of a second swap with Toronto) is a first base OBP machine destined to spell Lance Berkman when he is inevitably recycled to a contender for more prospects and off-loaded salary.

In sum, Wade is finally  recognizing that his franchise needs a complete overhaul, not a few patches. Anyone else on the roster, possibly excepting Michael Bourn and Wandy Rodriguez, whom they can ship out for cash or youngsters, moves this woeful outfit in the proper direction.

There are those cruising Blogomundo who can evaluate the prospects Oswalt returns, but that's almost always a flimsy proposition. The word "if" is always highly operative. We do know a few things about Happ, though.

JA Happ has tossed 217 innings in his young major league career, the vast majority of them in 2009, and his results have been outstanding. He is 14-5 3.11 in Philly's rich offensive environment, a value to his team of 5.5 wins compared to a fifth starter type. If that's the real JA Happ, at 27 years of age, yowzah!

However, the prediction gods are not sold. Happ enjoyed a .270 batting average on balls in play against him last year (compared to about .300 on average), watched only half the expected number of fly balls against him leave the park and stranded 85% of his runners. None of these seems particularly sustainable. In addition, Happ is only nominally acquainted with the strikeout, meaning he is especially susceptible to a regression to the norm. Baseball Prospectus crunched the numbers and found that his performance rates more like a 4.97 ERA pitcher than a 3.11.

These considerations are generally valuable and shed new light on results that looked starkly different in the darkness of ignorance. However, they are not destiny, so we'll see what happens in Houston. In the meantime, if nothing else, the Astros have come to understand their problem, act on it, and save themselves beaucoup Benjamins. A few more acorns and they'll cease to be a blind squirrel.

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