How Pitchers Can Be as Valuable as Hitters

By Bill


As you may remember, I don't think pitchers should be eligible for the MVP award. And were I voting today, when the rules explicitly state that they are eligible, I wouldn't vote for one. It's funny to me that there are people who think voters are bound to consider pitchers because the instructions say they're technically eligible, but think voters are free to consider utterly irrelevant things the instructions more or less unambiguously don't leave room for, like whether or not the candidate's team made or contended the playoffs...but that's a discussion for another day.

Jim Ingraham was the lone voter to leave Verlander off his ballot yesterday, and I think he did it for totally the wrong reason (which will be the point of the rest of this post), but he certainly had the right to do so, and I'm kind of glad someone did.

But I've spent some time (more than I should have, certainly) hanging around on MVP-related discussion and comment boards today, and I was shocked by how many casual or non-sabermetrically minded fans were dead-set against Verlander winning, and for what seems to me like a crazily stupid reason, the same reason Ingraham used in the link above. I'll quote from Ingraham, since he's considerably more literate than the dozens of other examples I've seen:

I know Verlander is a great pitcher. I also know, by the nature of his job, he did not appear at all in 128 of the Tigers' games this year. That's 79 percent of the Tigers' season. I can't think of any other sport in which a player who didn't play in 79 percent of his team's games could be voted the Most Valuable Player in his league.

And it just blows me away how relentlessly, determinedly ignorant this position is. And I think most people who get to this blog probably have the same reaction, or at least understand mine. But I was so overwhelmed by the lack of understanding of what I thought was a really straightforward, facially obvious fact -- pitchers can be just as valuable as hitters -- that I thought a more thorough breakdown than what we did in our blogfight was warranted.

WANTED: New end-of-season award

By Jason Wojciechowski

A few days ago, I wrote a piece at my original home pointing out a bunch of silly things Bill Simmons said in his article about the MVP at Grantland. One portion of his argument that I left alone had to do with whether pitchers should be eligible for the MVP. Can the best pitcher in the league, who starts just 32 games, really be better than the center-fielder who starts 160? Surprisingly (this is Bill Simmons we're talking about), he comes out with the right answer: starting pitchers absolutely can be MVPs. Unsurprisingly (see last parenthetical), there's no actual argument to back this up beyond "Lefty Grove won the first AL MVP and Pedro shoulda won in 1999," but whatever: by any means necessary, right?

Here's the problem, though: once we've come to accept that a pitcher can be the Most Valuable Player in baseball, baseball's award system starts to look really unfair. Why does the Cy Young Award exist? We could declare, even if just de facto, that the MVP is for position players and the Cy Young is for hitters pitchers, but all that does is reinforce the idea that pitchers and hitters aren't comparable. Wouldn't it be more just, not to mention more fun, if there were a hitter equivalent of the Cy Young, and then the winners of the Cy Young and the hitter award did battle for the ultimate MVP award?

The Hank Aaron Award almost covers this gap, but the main stumbling block is that defense apparently does not matter for that prize. This page at MLB.com describes the award as being for "the best overall offensive performer." That doesn't help explain why Derek Jeter has won the trophy twice, but I want my Cy Young equivalent to be a Best Position Player award, not a Best Hitter award, to ensure that defense and position are officially considered relevant by whoever we decide to have vote for the trophy. They matter in real life, after all, so they should definitely matter in award-voting.

Obligatory Mid-Season Awards Post

By Bill


Because not everything has to be groundbreaking or something, dammit. These are just kind of fun.

Here's who I'd vote for for the big awards if the season ended today. I'm flying solo again; TCM and/or Mark can jump in with their own picks if they want to, but I'm just not feeling like a team player.

I'll also throw in who I expect to deserve it by year's end. Not who I think will win, of course -- I've long given up trying to figure that sort of thing out -- but who I think I'd vote for a few months from now.

AL MVP
Today: Jose Bautista (.334/.468/.702, 6.6 fWAR, 6.6 bWAR)
Easiest one first. Bautista leads the majors by a healthy margin in homers, OBP, SLG, and WAR. To get to Bautista's 6.6 fWAR from the AL runners-up's WAR (4.8 by Boston's Adrian Gonzalez and Jacoby Ellsbury), you would have to add in one whole Mark Trumbo or Jeff Francoeur. It's not close.
End of the Season: Bautista. He's too far ahead, and with 7 homers and a .395 batting average in his first ten games of July, he's showing no sign of slowing down.

Steve Carlton's '72, King Felix's '10 and the Myth of Knowing How to Win

By Bill

I suspect that what we're seeing right now in the American League is something we'll see in one or the other of the leagues almost every September for the next mess o' years: one pitcher has the most wins, one has been the best at preventing runs, and there's a heated debate (among, increasingly, fans of the team the wins guy pitches for on the one hand and almost everybody else in the world on the other) over which one deserves the Cy Young Award.

You can guess which side I come down on in the Felix-vs.-C.C. debate, and it's been covered more than adequately elsewhere (including last week's podcast), so I won't discuss it here; I'll just heartily endorse this, and this, and this.

What I do want to address is one line of argument the pro-Sabathia crowd keeps bringing up in this debate. You see it mostly in angry comments to articles like the ones I just linked to, but it's probably phrased most ably by courant.com's Dom Amore (who doesn't ultimately pick C.C., but uses this argument to take Felix out of the equation right away; the bolded emphasis is mine):

Pitching isn't like a golf tournament where the lowest aggregate score wins, it's Match Play - the job of a starting pitcher is to match the other guy on each given time out. This is why a great pitcher can win a ton of games for a bad team, like Steve Carlton in 1972, while others, no matter how talented, seem to find their way to .500 no matter what kind of team they're on, such as A.J. Burnett.

Sounds good, right? Well, not to me, and probably not to you either since you've found your way to this blog, but you can see why it would sound good to a lot of pretty smart people. Most serious baseball fans get the allusion right away: in 1972, the Philadelphia Phillies won just 59 games, and Carlton was credited with the "win" in nearly half of those victories, going 27-10 in his 41 starts. If he can win with a terrible team like that, why is it unfair to expect Felix Hernandez to win with the similarly terrible Mariners?

Seeking Second Cys

Lar, at Wezen-ball, had an interesting exercise going today, looking to find seasons where hall of famers swept the major post-season awards. Lar identified three seasons, all pre-1967 (which is when the writers began awarding the Cy Young in each league), where three Hall of Famers dominated the categories. But that didn't seem fair. After all, the writers only had hit on three awards those years, rather than the four from '67 on. The Common Man was responding on this topic in the comments section of Lar's piece, extrapolating on his idea, and wouldn't you know, it turned into a post in its own right:

I like this exercise a lot, Lar. Going back to your data, I looked at those '57, '59, and '66 seasons where HOFers swept the awards, and thought about awarding a second Cy Young and seeing what would happen.

1957: I gotta think the AL award goes to Jim Bunning, who led the league in IP, tied for the lead in Wins, 2nd in strikeouts, and 3rd in ERA in his first big season. That would give you a clean sweep.

1959: This year probably comes down to one of three guys in the NL. Warren Spahn led the league in IP (292), tied for the lead in wins, and finished 3rd in ERA. But Sad Sam Jones also pitched 270 innings that year, winning the same number, and won the ERA crown outright while finishing 2nd in strikeouts. Finally, Elroy Face won 18 games out of the bullpen, against just 1 loss, and finished 7th in the MVP race. So it's not clear that you'd get a sweep there.

1966: This is, by far, the most interesting (to me anyway), as the AL winner almost certainly would have been Jimmie Kaat of the Twins. Kittie threw 304 innings in 41 starts that year (both led the league), and won 25 games (five more than runner-up Denny McLain). He also was 6th in the AL in ERA. Gary Peters, of the White Sox, finished with an ERA under 2.00, but only won 12 games and pitched a third fewer innings. On its surface, this doesn't seem to get you your sweep; but I've got to wonder if having a Cy Young award in his cabinet would have put Kaat over the top with the voters.

Thoughts? Feel free to vote in the poll at the right.