Tough Choice

[elfsutton]

MR should get it. Never will that happen in real life, 17-0, under 2.00 era, 2 saves to boot. That is as impressive as it can get I think. Incredible but can he do it twice?

[sc_superstar]

As for the closer idea, Alvarez was probably equal to my closer ability wise, the closer has a slightly lower GB% but a higher K/9 Rate. Alvarez's wins total do seem skewed by my starters poor performance, since (and the 10 holds in 87 games helps show this) that many games he was in, there wasnt really a chance for losses.

Lopez seems like the better choice, getting the Grienke/Hernandez votes for being efficient even if they dont have the wins to show for it.

[Charlie Hough]

Kudos to sc_superstar for being willing to set aside any personal bias and choose another team's player for the award. Hell, being willing to subject the decision to a poll on these forums shows some reasonableness in its own right.

[Questdog]

Originally Posted by JMDurron

This is what turns it from being just slightly in Lopez's favor to making it an easy choice of Lopez to me.

I wouldn't say that your hesitation is "only" team bias, as it's clearly a close race. I go with the reasoning for Lopez from an earlier post -

"I would give it to Santiago Lopez. He averaged nearly 7 IP per start, had 1.02 WHIP over 222.1 IP, 42 BB, and 247 K. That's incredibly impressive control and outstanding performance from a starter."

If you were choosing between a great reliever and a pretty good starter, I can see the argument for the reliever winning out. This is a choice between a great reliever and a great starter, so the guy who was nearly as dominant for more innings should win out.

Context matters, this isn't the dark ages where we evaluate pitchers purely on W-L anymore. I suspect that Questdog is just trolling, hoping to get someone to pull a Wolf and severely oversell the irrelevance of pitcher wins by using excessively strident language, whereas I will just say that the context matters more than a particular number when it comes to evaluating pitchers. A 2-win difference between the pitchers, when the starter had most of his team blundering about behind him and at the plate during his games, is relatively meaningless. A reliever entering potential blowout games where his team is already down by many runs would be effectively insured against accumulating losses, and this is a luxury that a starter does not have. Therefore, the winning percentage is a nice-looking statistic that should not be overly weighted in this decision.

Questdog never trolls.....and the W-L record of a pitcher is about as context sensitive a stat as there is......and for a relief pitcher, the 17 wins is impressive, however, what is truly amazing is the 0 losses.....I think you'd be hard pressed to find a relief pitcher who pitched so many innings without once ever costing his team a game......in 1959, Roy Face of the Pirates went 17-1 in relief with much less impressive stats than this OOTP player....now in those days the Cy Young Award was new and it was considered only for starting pitchers, so he didn't get any votes.....but he finished 7th in the MVP balloting.......the Cy Young award winner didn't get a single mention on any ballot, even though he got 13 of 16 1st place votes for the Cy Young.....in 1952, a pair of relievers won 15 games (Wilhelm and Black)...that was before the Cy Young Award was created....they finished 3rd and 4th in the MVP race....Robin Roberts finished second with 28 wins...Mike Marshall won the Cy Young in 1974 with stats less impressive than the above player......

See, the thing is, an award should be given for an outstanding accomplishment.....if you were to vote on who is the best pitcher in the league, that is a different question than who had the most outstanding season.......if you asked me last fall who was the best player in the AL, the obvious answer was Mike Trout.....if you asked me who was the MVP for 2012, the obvious answer was Miguel Cabrera.....

And a starting pitcher can be awesome, but lose a lot of low scoring games and it's a shame and doesn't make him less of a pitcher.....but it means that the team could have enjoyed the same results with a much lesser player....so the player's value for that particular season was not what it could have been.....and that should matter......if the logic of handing out awards for sabermetric value were carried to its extreme, we'd quit logging hits and outs and just award a point total on how hard the ball was struck.....baseball is a game, first and foremost, and the most important stat is who won and who lost.....not who was more likely to win....

[Questdog]

Originally Posted by elfsutton

MR should get it. Never will that happen in real life, 17-0, under 2.00 era, 2 saves to boot. That is as impressive as it can get I think. Incredible but can he do it twice?

That is the crux of the issue....the sabermetric award backers claim that if an accomplishment is an outlier and deemed unrepeatable, that it should be discounted......but in reality, the unrepeatable accomplishments are the ones we should be taught to cherish, since we will likely never see them again.....

Of course, he'll never go 17-0 again...but isn't it great that he did?....

[Charlie Hough]

17-0 needs to be qualified. It's only a historical mark for the ages if the team never bailed out the pitcher after blowing the lead while he was still the pitcher of record. Otherwise, the zero losses could be a by-product of good fortune. And many of the wins could be too.

As a perfect example, let's look at Roy Face's first two wins of his famous 1959 season. In his first decision, on April 22, 1959, he came into a tie game to start the 8th inning and gave up the go-ahead run in the form of a solo home run by the first batter he faced. He was on track to get the loss. But after pitching a scoreless 9th inning, the Pirates scored two runs in the bottom of the 9th, giving Face the win.

In the next game of the season, on April 24, Face gave up 4 hits and 2 runs in 2.1 innings and blew a save, but he got credited with the win when the Pirates scored 3 runs in the top of the 9th inning and Face managed to avoid blowing the lead for a second time in the bottom of the 9th.

This is just looking at his first two decisions of the season. So let's be serious. 17-0 doesn't necessarily mean that a pitcher was perfect in relief, just as Face certainly was not perfect in his 18-1 season. He blew saves and still got wins on 3 other occasions in 1959. So I've already got a total of 5 of his wins that came from blown saves or blowing a tie game, and I haven't even looked for any other cases of blowing tie games.

So let's see the game logs before we start concluding that 17-0 was somehow a phenomenal feat that may never be repeated. Roy Face certainly had a great season in 1959, and he was really at his best during the middle of that year. But his wins were checkered with blown saves and games that he was on track to lose before getting bailed out.

To Questdog's point, though, this is further argument that sabermetrics should be marginalized. All you really need are IP, H, R, ER, BB, K, ERA and WHIP. I don't think it needs to get more complicated than that to get a sense of general accomplishment, but then we need subjective valuation based on the circumstances of the season, individual game performances, etc. And game logs and box scores can give us what we need for that.

[Questdog]

I agree, Charlie, if you are working for the club at the arbitration hearings.......but otherwise, it doesn't matter how those wins or the avoidance of losses came about as much as the fact that they happened (or didn't)......does the fact that Joe DiMaggio had a few cheap hits during his 56 game hit streak mean that we should not acknowledge it?.....or how about the game that ended the streak, when by all accounts he was robbed of a few hits by excellent fielding?.....should we say he deserved a hit and continue the streak?.....

Bottom line is that every event in a baseball game is predicated by its context and enviroment.....to try to eliminate their influence from the record is an exercise in futility....

In Face's case, I don't know, but hypothetically, the hits he gave up to relinquish the lead may have not been due to poor pitching, but just bad luck....why should he have to be saddled with the responsibility for their happenstance, yet not get relieved of it by another lucky happenstance?......and where sabermetrics gets in murky waters (to me) is when it makes proclamations about what is happenstance and what is not.....

[ihatenames]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

To Questdog's point, though, this is further argument that sabermetrics should be marginalized. All you really need are IP, H, R, ER, BB, K, ERA and WHIP. I don't think it needs to get more complicated than that to get a sense of general accomplishment, but then we need subjective valuation based on the circumstances of the season, individual game performances, etc. And game logs and box scores can give us what we need for that.

Let me also add that is BABIP was .286. So there is nothing in his slash lines that would leave me to believe he was just lucky either. He pitched a season and is deserving of consideration with 156 innings pitched in relief.

17-0 out of relief is extremely impressive no matter if you're fan of classic or sabermetric stats.

[BMD]

If a middle reliever were to have a season like this in real life. One where he was dominant for an average of nearly 2 innings a game in more than half of his teams games allowing his team to apparently convert 17 late inning wins, I have no doubt the following season at least a third of the teams in the league would start grooming a pitcher to attempt to replicate this role. A season like this in modern day baseball might revolutionize the way pitching depth charts are used, creating this new role that could be just as important as a starter or closer. Decades later once this this new role becomes common place and recognized as a key (if not the key) pitcher in every bullpen, perhaps fans would be shocked that this pitcher never won the Cy Young Award because it was given to some lame ol' starter. In fact, maybe by that point it wouldn't even be called the Cy Young Award anymore. Maybe by the 2050's, the best pitcher wins the Domingo Alvarez Award! Don't wait! The future is now! Go to game set up and change the name of the award and give the first annual Domingo Alvarez Award to Domingo Alvarez!!! DO IT NOW!!!!

Viva la revolucion!

[Questdog]

Originally Posted by ihatenames

Let me also add that is BABIP was .286. So there is nothing in his slash lines that would leave me to believe he was just lucky either. He pitched a season and is deserving of consideration with 156 innings pitched in relief.

17-0 out of relief is extremely impressive no matter if you're fan of classic or sabermetric stats.

But, of course, you cannot go 17-0 no matter how good you are without some luck.....but the fact that Lady Luck decided to shine on this individual for an entire season without once ever wavering her attention is something worth memorializing.....

And the flip-side is that no matter how lucky you are, you cannot go 17-0 without some skill.......

[hopeful1212]

Another thing, this isn't just about wins and losses. At the heart of this is also FIP vs WAR.

Here their FIPs as I calculated them 3.20 + (13*HR+3*BB-2*K)/IP

Alverez 2.06
Lopez 2.48


Alverez was the better pitcher, he just didn't pitch as many innings. I think way too many people are just looking at WAR, which is in part a compiling stat. If we were looking at batters, would you go with the guy with more HR and RBI, or with the better RATE stat (OPS etc.)?

[hopeful1212]

And then the question is how much do you penalize the guy for not being a starter (and not being able to pitch as much). Really, if you can't give it to Alverez, then the Cy Young award is pretty much only for starters for you.

[ihatenames]

Originally Posted by Questdog

But, of course, you cannot go 17-0 no matter how good you are without some luck.....but the fact that Lady Luck decided to shine on this individual for an entire season without once ever wavering her attention is something worth memorializing.....

And the flip-side is that no matter how lucky you are, you cannot go 17-0 without some skill.......

I agree 17-0 means he was lucky in terms of decisions. That's not what I ment to say. Let me clarify. I ment to say his other stats such as ERA do not appear to be induced by luck when looking at his BABIP which at .286 is not crazy low. So he wasn't overly lucky in terms of balls just hit right at fielders. So it is my opinion that his excellent old school stats such as ERA are backed up by his performance is more sabermetic stats.

[Canuck]

Would you be able to post a screenshot of his TWTW rating?

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by hopeful1212

Another thing, this isn't just about wins and losses. At the heart of this is also FIP vs WAR.

Here their FIPs as I calculated them 3.20 + (13*HR+3*BB-2*K)/IP

Alverez 2.06
Lopez 2.48


Alverez was the better pitcher, he just didn't pitch as many innings. I think way too many people are just looking at WAR, which is in part a compiling stat. If we were looking at batters, would you go with the guy with more HR and RBI, or with the better RATE stat (OPS etc.)?

Pitching many more innings at a slightly lower overall level means that the overall performance was better. Which is what the Cy is supposed to measure. It's not a reward for the most efficient pitcher, otherwise a RP would win every year.

[sc_superstar]

So I feel like the right choice was made in this situation, since despite being an effective member of the bullpen in 2014, was not as unhittable as before. This shows that 2013 was more of an oulier where the offense carried the bullpen to alot of wins because the starter was usually out in the 5th or 6th. I upgraded my starters in 2013, and while they were still bad, they werent worst staff of the league bad, and the bullpen was still tops in the league and D was not as good but still top 5.

[Questdog]

What does how he performed the following year have to do with anything?....

[hopeful1212]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

Pitching many more innings at a slightly lower overall level means that the overall performance was better. Which is what the Cy is supposed to measure. It's not a reward for the most efficient pitcher, otherwise a RP would win every year.

No, it's the better performance in a large number of innings for a reliever (150+!). He nearly had enough innings to qualify for the ERA title. If you don't get it for pitching nearly as many innings as a starter and better than all of them, then it's an award that's only for SP.

[rudel.dietrich]

Lopez is the easy choice. And I am a bullpen man


I do have to ask, how did you get 150 IP out of him? Did you manage all the games yourself?

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by hopeful1212

No, it's the better performance in a large number of innings for a reliever (150+!). He nearly had enough innings to qualify for the ERA title. If you don't get it for pitching nearly as many innings as a starter and better than all of them, then it's an award that's only for SP.

It's maybe nearly as many innings as a generic starter, but not nearly as many innings as the starter he's being compared to. 60 innings less, is a big, big deal. It's around a 40% difference.

It's important to factor in the fact that someone was pitching an extra 60 innings that the RP didn't pitch compared to the starter, and likely at a much lower level than either. The amount of innings pitched matters.

The fact that the RP pitched so many innings so well mitigates this point to a small extent. I'll admit that if ever a RP deserved a CY it would be this guy. But the extra innings make a big difference. You can't just ignore them.