Awards Season: Cy Young

It's that time. The time when old versus new, tried versus true, and bullshit versus horseshit comes about. I of course am talking about the baseball awards season. Let's start with the discussion of the four major awards (well two really). First there is the Cy Young award given to the best pitcher in each league and is pretty self explanatory, but then there is the MVP award given to the "most valuable player" in each league. How the hell can you determine value? Statheads are trying to do this with WAR (wins above replacement), but what the hell is a replacement level player? Old time writers and inside-the-box thinkers want to say that the most valuable player is the player whose value to his team is the highest in the MLB, while new sabermetricians want to say that the MVP is the guy with the best WAR and therefore is of the highest value. I have to say that I think both are wrong. I do not think WAR accurately reflects how good a player really is and we know that once Theo sells off everyone on the team, Darwin Barney will be the most valuable player on the Cubs simply because he will be the only one left. What you really have to look at is what kind of offensive production does your player give you and then find the most productive player in baseball and then that is the guy. Now a further problem with the MVP is that it is not inclusive to any position and it can include pitchers. This is dumb because pitchers have their own award. I only look at offensive players for the MVP. Pitchers are defensive players only. This brings me to something I want to talk about with regards to this year's results, but let's just get right into it. I will show you the baseball writers of America votes followed by the results from the THFL scoring system.

Cy Young:

NL Cy Young Votes 2012

AL Cy Young Votes 2012

THFL top 10 pitchers 2012

Can you see a problem here? Gio Gonzales isn't even in the top 10 pitchers in the THFL system, but he is number 3 in the BBWA votes? Come on man. Also, note that Justin Verlander scored about 68 more points than David Price this year, but lost the Cy Young. Verlander had a 2.64 ERA while Price had a 2.56 ERA so what is the big deal? The big deal is that Verlander pitched 27.333 more innings than Price did this year which amounts to 3 entire 9 inning games. This is a lot more baseball and his ERA is only slightly higher at 2.64. Verlander had 34 more Ks than Price as well and had 6 fewer wild pitches. I just don't see how Price could win given the numbers here except for the fact that Price had 20 Wins! Wins! That's what the writer's know and love. Poor Verlander only had 17. Now the Dickey versus Kershaw story is much closer as both had nearly identical strikeout numbers and Dickey only pitched 6 more innings than Kershaw. Dickey posted a 2.73 ERA while Kershaw had a 2.53 ERA. But again Dickey won this award because he had 20 wins to Kershaw's 14. Did you know that pitchers cannot win you games? They can only prevent losses because a pitcher is a defensive player only!!! Dumb. They (the BBWA) got it wrong.

Coming soon: the MVP award...