skyking162

It’s time to start discussing who should win the major awards — MVP, Cy Young, Hank Aaron, and Rookie of the Year. (Yes, I included Hank Aaron, because if people are going to use MVP to appease their personal fetishes, I think we need a major award to recognize the best offensive player. And I’ve purposely excluded Manager of the Year. I’m not sure we’ve ever gotten that one right or even figured out how to award it.)

I want to discuss what the Cy Young award actual means. How do we define the “best pitcher”? In general, you want a pitcher who prevents runs in a way that wins the most games. Quality and quantity of performance are important. But going from a vague definition of “best” to looking at data (numerical or not) in order to make a decision forces you to answer some tough questions. Here are some of those:

Actual runs allowed versus composite runs allowed
Two pitchers that give up the exact same number of hits, walks, doubles, homeruns, etc. would very likely give up a different number of runs, depending on when each event occurred. Do pitchers get credit/blame for how their events combine? How much? Certainly some of it is luck, but some of it is skill. Tom Glavine is a famous example of a pitcher whose approach drastically changes with runners on base, such that his actual ERA is consistently lower than his composite ERA — by design.

Actual homeruns allowed versus expected homeruns
Groundball/flyball percentage is a better indicator of future homerun rate than actual homerun rate. Weird, huh? Do you hold pitchers accountable for the homeruns they actually allowed, or make room for some adjustment based on other skills? Do you use a park adjustment for homerun rate? A blanket adjustment or do you take a look at every homerun allowed and see if it would be a homerun in an average park? What about Coors — it yields more homeruns, but not because of the distance of the fences.

Do K’s matter?
If two pitchers throw a perfect game, but one strikes out ten more batters, does that matter? All outs are pretty much equally valuable, but pitchers who strike out more batters tend to be better going forward.

How do you adjust for fielding?
Many factors here. To not adjust at all seems unfair.

Based on those issues, there are many ways to define the Cy Young award. Here are a few.

• Most Valuable Pitcher (in the Jayson Stark - Shannon Stewart sense). Pitchers are judged exactly by the runs they allowed and in the situations they allowed them. Win Probability Added is likely your stat of choice. Ignoring specific game-state, you might like Support-Neutral Wins/Losses
• Most Valuable Run Preventer. Pitchers are judged exactly by the number of runs they allowed over the course of the season compared to a baseline. A lower ERA is good and more innings are good.
• Best Master of Their Own Domain (in the who would you rather have if 2007 was played again sense). Pitchers are judged on their core skills and quantity of innings. Runs prevented would use a DIPS ERA instead of actual ERA.
• Best Established Level of Performance (in the Sandy Koufax career sense). If you were to predict the pitcher to have the best season next year based on this year’s numbers, who would it be? Pitchers get credit for things they can control. Playing time is only meaningful as a gauge for how confident you are that you saw true skill. For example, a pitcher with only 120 IP would be regressed towards the mean more than a 200 IP pitcher.

Personally, I don’t think any of those are the perfect definition of the Cy Young award, although I lean more towards number three. Which do you prefer? How would you make the definition of the award as specific and meaningful as possible?

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.