If you haven’t heard yet, Stephen Strasburg needs Tommy John surgery, and is probably out until 2012. There’s really one general reaction to this that everyone seems to be having – this sucks.

Whether you root for the Nationals or not doesn’t really matter. This makes baseball less interesting as a whole, as Strasburg was legitimately one of the most entertaining guys in the sport. Rather than getting to watch him throw 100 MPH fastballs, we now have to spend the next year and a half talking about whether he’ll ever be the same pitcher again post-surgery. While the success rate of TJ surgery is very high, it’s certainly possible that his velocity never comes all the way back, and we never get to see what a pitcher who threw that hard could have turned into.

This is a loss for the game. Obviously, it’s a pretty significant blow to the Nationals as well, who now have to re-think their path to contention and potentially push back their time-frame a year or two. If they were thinking of re-signing Adam Dunn before, they almost certainly shouldn’t now. Losing Strasburg for 2011 and getting a questionable version of him for 2012 pushes the Nats back into long-term building mode, as they just lost a player they simply can’t replace. This injury has a significant effect on the decisions Washington has to make this winter.

Someday, hopefully, science will catch up the with the sport, and we’ll figure out how to keep some of these great young arms healthy. Until then, we’ll just have to cross our fingers every time another phenomenal pitching prospect hits the show. We’re getting used to losing them early. Maybe pitching is just such an unnatural movement that it’s unavoidable, but I’m holding out hope that some smart guy will figure out how to keep these arms from blowing out. If MLB wants to find an area to invest in their long term future, this is where they should be throwing money.

Hurry back, Strasburg. The game won’t be as fun without you.

The third of the series. Parts one and two of the trilogy are available on vhs.

Hisashi Iwakuma (RHP, Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, 29) – I consider Iwakuma, by some measures, to be the second best MLB pitching prospect currently active in NPB. Tall and stringy at 6’3, 170 lbs, Iwakuma is a fairly standard fastball/slider/forkball righty. He can reach 95-95 mph with his fastball, but mostly works around 90-91. None of his three main pitches strike me as outstanding, but he commands them all well and can be dominant when he’s keeping the ball down in the zone. The fun fact about Iwakuma is that early in his career, he used a “two stage” delivery, in which he brought his front leg up, then back down without touching the dirt, the up again before finishing his delivery. You can check it out in this 2002 clip of Iwakuma facing Ichiro in an MLB-NPB All-Star game. Two stage deliveries were banned in NPB a couple years ago, so he and others, notably Ken Takahashi and Daisuke Miura, had to rework their mechanics. This and other factors caused Iwakuma to spend a few years in the wilderness, which I chronicled at my main haunt after last year’s WBC. Iwakuma is signed through next season, and assuming his remains in good health, will be eligible to move cross-Pacific after next season.

Tsuyoshi Wada (LHP, SoftBank Hawks, 29) – Wada is another guy who could come over after the 2011 season. Wada reminds me of Dallas Braden (or rather, Braden reminds me of Wada), with his arsenal of a 86-87 mph fastball, a good circle change, and a solid slider. To use a cliche, Wada knows how to pitch. He’s had a strikeout rate in the 7-8 for most of his career despite a fastball that’s average even in NPB. I found game footage of Wada’s August 25th start against Orix. He didn’t have his best stuff, but it’s enough to give you an idea of what he throws.

Chihiro Kaneko (RHP, Orix Buffaloes, 27) – Wada’s opponent on the 25th was Chihiro Kaneko, who I think is the most underrated pitcher in Japan. Kaneko thoroughly outclassed Wada on the 25th, striking out 12 and walking none while allowing two earned runs over an 8-inning, 97 pitch performance. He did surrender a triple to Munenori Kawasaki, whom we discussed earlier. Kaneko has excellent command of a good fastball that sits around 91-93 mph. He augments the fastball with a battery of breaking pitches, most notably a slider and a changeup, witch both sit in the low 80’s, and a sub-70 mph curveball which I would like to see him throw more often. Kaneko is in his fourth full season so he’s a ways away from free agency, but he’s definitely one to watch.

That’s it for me on prospect mini-profiles for a little while. If you have any more guys you want to see, let me know and I’ll pick ’em up in the next round.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable parts of the Padres run to the playoffs is the fact that they’ve done it just one season after trading their ace Jake Peavy to the White Sox for four young pitching prospects. Although there was certainly some promise in that package, it was hard to imagine a situation in which the Padres pitching staff – particularly, the starting rotation – didn’t take a hit without the presence of Peavy.

The main driving force behind the San Diego rotation has been young stud Mat Latos. The second was one of the pitchers brought back from Chicago in exchange for Peavy: Clayton Richard. Richard has fit right into PETCO Park, throwing 159 innings with an ERA of 3.55 and a FIP right behind at 3.60. Overall, Richard has already posted 2.3 WAR this season, which compares quite favorably to Peavy’s 2.7 mark in 2008 and his injury limited 1.8 mark in 2009.

Now, Richard is not yet as good a pitcher as Peavy was in his heyday as a Padre. Surely, Peavy was a benefactor of his home park, but still, his K-rates eclipsed one per inning every season from 2004-2007 and again in 2009. Peavy’s walk rates which hovered between 2.5 and 3.1 per nine innings prevented him from posting elite defensive-independent numbers. Particularly in 2008 and 2009, when Peavy’s walk rates settled around 3.0, Peavy fell from elite to merely above average.

Richard simply doesn’t have the strikeout ability that Peavy did, as his K/9 is a career high 7.1 this season. Richard’s walk rate also sits at 3.6, well above any mark that Peavy ever posted in San Diego. But Richard induces far more ground balls – 48% against Peavy’s 42% career mark – and that has helped Richard keep the ball in the yard this season. which is partially due to Petco Park and partially due to a bit of luck, but it’s a big reason why Richard has had so much success this year. As Richard’s luck regresses, he won’t be able to equate Peavy’s results from even his down 2008 and 2009 campaigns, but a 4.13 xFIP suggests that Richard should still be a productive member of the rotation, and at age 26, he has room to grow.

Jake Peavy is set to earn $59 million over the next three seasons. Over that same span, Clayton Richard will make $400 thousand in 2011 and then two arbitration rewards in 2012-13. The updated ZiPS system projects Richard to post a 3.77 FIP against 3.89 from Peavy. For the Padres to get out from under that massive contract while adding a pitcher who can replace the production is just an incredible, incredible find, as Clayton Richard looks to be a key for the Padres franchise both for now and the conceivable future.

What you’re getting here is two games for each of the next three days. It’s all part of FanGraphs’ “commitment to service.”

(Games listed by day and in order of likely awesomeness. NERD scores in parentheses.)

Friday, August 27th
Philadelphia (3) at San Diego (10), 10:05pm ET
• Your starting pitchers are Roy Oswalt (9) and Mat Latos (10). One of them’s likely to play left field at some point tonight. So, heads up on that, is what I’m saying.
• At the team level, the Phillies are currently undervalued by NERD, on account of the injury situation (and subsequent returns). Second baseman Chase Utley remains both handsome and talented, however.
• You should take note of Padre Chris Denorfia, who’s not only slashing 289/.354/.483, and not only an alumnus of Choate, but whose family settled in Bristol, Connecticut — i.e. the American city with the highest density of Cistullis per capita.*

*It occurs to me that this may interest you zero percentedly, but maybe you can at least benefit from some of that vicarious joy.

Boston (7) at Tampa Bay (10), 7:05pm ET
• Your starting pitchers are Jon Lester (7) and David Price (10), both of whom are so competent as to almost entirely lose my interest.
• At the team level, the Rays are currently the best baserunning team in the majors — at least by NERD’s rigorous standards.
• You should take note of the radio broadcast from the Boston side — especially if you want to hear exactly one thousand local auto glass commercials.

Saturday, August 28th
Arizona (9) at San Francisco (4), 9:05pm ET
• Your starting pitchers are Dan Hudson (9) and Matt Cain (6). Hudson, only 23, is sporting a 8.84 K/9 against only a 1.47 BB/9 through his first five Diamondback starts. For all their questionable maneuvers of late, this move appears not to be one of them.
• At the team level, the Giants have recently distinguished themselves: with the acquistion earlier this week of Cody Ross, they become one of the few teams in major league history to feature a roster composed entirely of outfielders.
• You should take note of Andres Torres, who is threatening Chase Utely in terms of the old handsome/talented combo deal. (Torres’ line this season: 480 PA, .287/.368/.501, .352 BABIP, .382 wOBA, 140 wRC+, 5.7 WAR.)

Pittsburgh (6) at Milwaukee (8), 7:10pm ET
• Your starting pitchers are Zach Duke (5) and Chris Capuano (???). I originally gave Capuano an estimated NERD of 1 (see the full daily schedules down below), but, at second glance, that’s probably way unfair. Not only is Capuano sporting a 3.52 xFIP, but he’s also clawed his way back into the rotation after undergoing two consecutive Tommy John procedures. Feel that, America? That’s your heart being warmed.
• At the team level, the Brewers are currently fourth in all of baseball at 69.0 park-adjusted runs above average on the season — trailing only the Yankees, Twins, and Red Sox. Of the 596 runs they’ve scored this year only like 517 of them were scored against the Pirates.
• You should take note of Lorenzo Cain if and when he appears in this game. I’m led to believe that he only started playing baseball in high school. Also — and perhaps related — he kinda runs like a giant, incredibly fast puppy.

Sunday, August 29th
New York Americans (6) at Chicago Americans (5), 2:05pm ET
• Your starting pitchers are Ivan Nova (7*) and Gavin Floyd (7). The former of those guys, Nova, made his first career start on Monday. He was was efficient — 5.1 IP, 22 TBF, 3 K, 1 BB, 9 GB on 18 BIP (50%) — if not overpowering, but he’s noteworthy for another reason, which is that he features a change-up with rather startling movement. While his fastball sits around 94-95 mph, he throws his changepiece pretty close to that in terms of velocity — around 87 mph. But while (per Texas Leaguers) the average major league change-up features about 6.5 inches of armside run (i.e. toward a righthanded batter), Nova’s change moves over 10 inches. And it’s pretty obvious even while watching the game on a netbook.
• How about instead of discussing either club on a team level, we just pop up some poppycorn and watch this video of Nova’s first start.
• You should take note of around the 0:27 mark in that same video, where Nova throws a 97 mph fastball by Adam Lind.

Houston (0) at New York Nationals (3), 1:10pm ET
• Your starting pitchers are Bud Norris (9) and R.A. Dickey (10). That’s not actually the NERD score that Dickey would receive by the current formula, but a number of readers lobbied on his behalf and I totally completely wanted them to stop doing that.
• At the team level, one nice thing you can say about the Mets is that they’re not the Astros. Seriously, the only thing the Astros do well is steal oftener than average — which, that’s not really a skill, per se.
• You should take note of how the Astros replaced their old-ish and mostly chunky first baseman with a much younger, but still equally chunky, first baseman.

Also Playing
These games are very likely playing at some kind of sporty channel near you.

(Note: I don’t know how Hammel got listed as a 1. Ignore that. But also, probably don’t watch that game, either.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball hasn’t seen a hitting Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967 and the National League has been dry since Joe Medwick in 1937. While never common, there were 13 seasons between 1901 and 1967 that saw a Triple Crown winner, a little under 10% of the time.

The traditional Triple Crown is no longer as impressive as it once was given what we know about measuring individual offensive performance and the contextual nature of RBIs. Still, it remains a milestone that is appreciated and known among nearly all fans and it is hard to win the Crown without putting together a legitimately fantastic season. While it remains unlikely that anyone accomplishes it this season, there are several interesting candidates.

The two most likely winners are both in the National League. Albert Pujols: the expected, and Joey Votto: the surprise. Votto came into play today currently atop the league in batting average with Pujols in third, seven points back. Seven points is a lot to make up in just over a month, but it is certainly doable if Votto’s runs into a string of bad luck. Meanwhile Pujols enjoys the league lead in both home runs and RBIs each by two over Votto. The edge has to go to Votto for the moment.

Finishing with the least likely of the three, Miguel Cabrera is having a fantastic season for the Tigers. Currently the AL leader in RBIs by seven over Alex Rodriguez, Cabrera should be able to relatively coast to the AL title there with A-Rod now on the disabled list. The other two legs look more difficult for Cabrera. He’s sitting 14 points behind Josh Hamilton for the batting title but even more daunting is the nine home runs by which he trails Jose Bautista. Cabrera is almost certainly not going to be able to catch Bautista, but his season at the plate remains worthy of highlighting.

Not nearly as impressive, but related to the topic at hand is the pitching version of the Triple Crown: ERA, strikeouts, and wins in which both Roy Halladay and Adam Wainwright have a shot at in the NL. Halladay has 15 more strikeouts than Wainwright but Wainwright leads in both wins and ERA. Halladay, however, is right behind him in both, trailing by a single win and just four ERA points.

In a season that’s already pushing the boundaries on the historic, the first Triple Crown winner in 40 years could cement 2010 as one to remember.

Jordan Walden has thrown 40 pitches in the major leagues, 30 being fastballs, but one thing is evident: he throws really, really hard. How hard? Baseball Info Solutions has the average velocity at 98.9 miles per hour. If Walden qualified that would rank second only to Joel Zumaya’s 99.3 MPH heater. Back to Walden, though, he throws hard and he’s been a top prospect with the Angels for a few years now. Here’s what Marc Hulet penned about him in February:

Walden’s 5.25 ERA in ’09 was pretty ugly but he was hurt by a .377 BABIP and his FIP was just 3.77. Overall, he allowed 72 hits in 60.0 innings and made just 13 starts due to a forearm strain. The injury is worrisome (because it can lead to Tommy John surgery), but he appears healthy and ready to compete in 2010. He showed a pretty good strikeout rate in ’09 at 8.55 K/9 but his control was modest at 4.35 BB/9. He had a lot of troubles against left-handed hitters and posted a walk rate of 7.83 BB/9 against them in a smaller sample size. The right-hander has top-of-the-order stuff if he can harness it.

Hard-thrower with an ugly technique is usually another definition for “reliever” and the Angels decided to shift Walden to the bullpen permanently this season. Walden responded by striking out 38 in 43 Double-A innings and, while the walks were still there, you would have to think he can lower his total or at the very least leverage them better in shorter stints.

This is too early of a stage for anyone to decree whether Walden’s career will go the route of dominant closer or unsuccessful hype. The early returns do have him striking out three of his first 10 batters faced while only walking one, but … I mean, that’s 10 batters faced. That tells us virtually nothing. Even the velocity readings are skewed by small sample size. If that velocity does maintain Jeff Mathis will have to dust the ball for ashes before returning it to Walden.

Four days ago, if I had said that the four game series between the Phillies and the Astros would end in a sweep, I don’t think that anybody would find that claim terribly outlandish. If I had said that it would be the Astros completing that sweep this afternoon, I would have been laughed out of the room. However, behind a 5-1 victory over the Phillies today at Citizen’s Bank Park, the lowly Astros extended their winning streak to five games, including a road sweep over the two time defending National League champions.

Entering the series, the Phillies had a .556 winning percentage and a .529 third order winning percentage – winning percentage based on expected runs scored and allowed and adjusted for strength of schedule – according to Baseball Prospectus’s adjusted standings. The Astros entered the series with a .439 winning percentage and a .405 third order winning percentage. Basically, by either measure, the Phillies have played about 120 points of winning percentage better than the Astros this season.

Let’s take a look at just how unlikely, then that makes this sweep. The method to use here is the log5 method, a method derived by Bill James to estimate the winning percentage when two teams meet. The following formula gives the expected winning percentage for team A facing team B:

According to this method, the Phillies would be expected to win one game 61.5% of the time using raw wins. Using third-order wins – the better method – the Phillies are expected to win one game 62.3% of the time. However, we have to account for the Phillies playing at home. Since the home team wins 54% of the time in MLB, we credit the home team with 20 points of winning percentage and subtract 20 points from the away team. With this adjustment, the Phillies win 65.3% of the time with raw wins and 65.1% of the time with third order wins. Using probability theory, we can then determine the amount of times we would expect the Phillies to win 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 games in a four game series, as seen in the following chart.

Expecting Philadelphia to sweep the series wasn’t realistic, as the odds of Philadelphia taking four out of four was only 18%. However, they should have won the series – 56% probability of three or four wins – and a series loss should only have happened 11% of the time. Now, we know that some crazy things happened, particularly in the 16 inning game which saw Roy Oswalt make an out in left field. Still, we would only expect a sweep to happen 1% of the time. This one out of one hundred could be disastrous for the Phillies. Over the past week, their playoff odds according to Baseball Prospectus have fallen by 23%, and before this game their odds were roughly 1 in 3. San Francisco is off tonight, but Los Angeles has already won and St. Louis plays the Nationals tonight. The Phillies lost out on a major chance to make a stand in the Wild Card race and capitalize on a three game losing streak in Atlanta. It’s not fair to say that this series will take all of the blame if the Phillies miss the postseason, but there’s no denying that this sweep was disastrous for Philadelphia baseball.

There are a lot of good comments in this afternoon’s post about how we should evaluate pitchers for the Cy Young Award. We’ll get into more detail about the FIP/WAR discussion tomorrow, when I have more time than I do right now to really talk about the issue in some depth.

One comment that keeps arising, however, is about the correlation between Trevor Cahill’s BABIP and his sinker, specifically his ground ball rate. Several people assert that Cahill is inducing weak, easy to field contact by pounding his sinker at the bottom of the strike zone, and that’s why his BABIP is just .217. There are a few problems with this assertion, though.

We know that BABIP on groundballs is higher than on flyballs, as a ball is more likely to sneak between two infielders than it is to fall in front of an outfielder. In general, groundball pitchers will post higher than average BABIPs, not the other way around, though the effect is generally pretty small.

The other problem… well, we’ll just demonstrate it this way.

Trevor Cahill: 56% GB%, 14.9% LD%, 29.1% FB%, .217 BABIP
Justin Masterson: 62.3% GB%, 14.9% LD%, 22.8% FB%, .344 BABIP

The argument that this particular skillset is the driver of a low batting average on balls in play falls apart when you consider that Masterson, who gets more groundballs and has an identical line drive rate, is posting one of the highest BABIPs in all of baseball. We cannot just see two variables and assume that one is the cause of the other. Cahill has a high groundball rate, and he has a low BABIP, but there’s just no evidence that the former is driving the latter.

The line drive rate is the real factor here. Among the nine starters who have a LD% under 15 percent, the average BABIP is .271, well below the league average. As you probably know, the lion’s share of hits in baseball come on line drives, and so a pitcher who doesn’t surrender that many hard hit balls will also not allow that many hits (though, this does not appear to be a skill, as the year to year correlation of LD% is very low).

Again, though, Cahill’s BABIP stands out as a crazy outlier, even in this no-line-drives group. If you take him out of the sample, the average BABIP for the remaining eight guys is .278, sixty points higher than Cahill’s, even though he’s at the high end of line drive rate for this subset of pitchers. Even if we also throw out Masterson to even things out, the other seven guys have a BABIP of .268, still way higher than Cahill’s mark. And, again, they have lower line drive rates than Cahill does.

Cahill is likely throwing pitches that are harder to hit than an average pitcher. He deserves some credit for that, even if he can’t keep it up. However, on top of that, he’s almost certainly just getting some good fortune, whether it be through assistance from his defense or just lousy hitting from his opponents. We cannot, and should not, give him credit for the .217 BABIP just because it happened. It isn’t all him.

If you’re anything like me, you despise the dearth of imagination in the nickname-industrial complex, which nowadays requires that every nicknameless athlete be referred to by their first initial and the first three letters of their last name. From time to time, a decent nickname will slip through the cracks — Carlos “El Caballo” Lee, David “Big Papi” Ortiz, Covelli “Coco” Crisp — but this relative paucity only highlights their general absence. Many of the nicknames that break the paradigm are derivative of previous ones: Francisco Rodriguez’s “K-Rod” is a takeoff on Alex Rodriguez’s A-Rod, just as Jason Heyward’s “J-Hey Kid” recalls Willie Mays’s “Say Hey Kid”, and Derek Jeter’s “Mr. November” recalls Reggie Jackson’s “Mr. October.”

I was reading Robert Creamer’s terrific biography of Casey Stengel (born Charles, nicknamed “Casey” and “The Old Perfessor”), and I was struck by just how weird yet pervasive and evocative the nicknames used to be. The following passage about the 1913 Brooklyn Dodgers really did it for me:

Best of all, Robby [manager Wilbert Robinson] found an impressive young pitcher named Ed Pfeffer to take Rucker’s place as ace of the staff. Pfeffer, a big strong right-hander, was nicknamed Jeff after his brother Frank, who had pitched in the National League some years earlier and had been called Big Jeff after Jim Jeffries, the heavyweight boxing champion. His kid brother inherited the name.

Just marvel at that flight of fancy: because of a prizewinning boxer who’d retired in 1905, two brothers named Edward and Francis wound up being named “Big Jeff” and “Jeff.” Nowadays, they might have been called Eddie and Frankie, or maybe Ed and Frank; anything but Big Jeff and Jeff. Robby Robinson himself had a nickname so well-known that during his entire managerial tenure with the club, the Dodgers were known as the Robins. (Other players on that squad included George “Nap” Rucker, Ross “Tex” Erwin, James “Red” Smith, and, best by far, Fred “Mysterious” Walker.)

Of course, plenty of old-time nicknames were hackneyed, too, as SABR member Rick Solensky discovered hundreds of baseball players named “Lefty,” “Dutch,” “Doc,” “Deacon,” “Bull,” “Moose,” “Rabbit,” “Red,” and “Kid.” But even those could have their moments. Two of Stengel’s early mentors were Charles “Kid” Nichols and one of my personal favorites, Norman Elberfeld, the Tabasco Kid. So maybe, once upon a time, those names got worn out from overuse. But I wouldn’t mind seeing a few of them return. I certainly doubt Johnny “Big Cat” Mize minded when Andres Galarraga dusted off his nickname and wore it well. It’s such a good name it would have been a shame to use it just once.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic. But I think it’s a shame that, with a few notable exceptions — Chipper, Boof, and Joba, bless your hearts — players are nightly announced to bat with the first names their mothers gave them. Look up and down any major league lineup, and you’ll see nary a Preacher nor a Schoolboy, neither a Dizzy nor a Dazzy, nor a Duke nor a Skoonj. Instead, you might find a V-Mart or an F-Mart, a K-Rod or an A-Rod or an I-Rod. Without question, the baseball that’s been played in this Year of the Pitcher has been truly transcendent. It’s just a shame we lack nicknames to match.

After Trevor Cahill lowered his ERA to 2.43 last night, Buster Olney tweeted that his numbers made Cahill a top contender for the AL Cy Young award. Keith Law quickly responded, noting that Cahill was 31st among AL starters in WAR and had a 4.07 FIP, suggesting that Cahill was in no way a Cy Young candidate despite the shiny low ERA.

Olney and Law clearly approach the award from different angles. Buster is more traditional, and prefers to use the numbers that have always been the standard for evaluating pitchers. Keith just wants to reward the guy that he thinks pitched the best, and doesn’t care about the way things have always been done. But their discussion raises an interesting question: what role should our stats have in the Cy Young discussion?

The award is ostensibly about rewarding the best pitcher in a league in a given year. For most of history, we’ve judged pitchers by how many runs they’ve allowed, but over the last 10 years, there has been a shift to try to isolate the actual abilities of the pitcher from that of the teammates that surround him, which is a worthy pursuit, as I don’t think anyone believes that a player should receive an individual award based on the work of others. Metrics like FIP have gained popularity, and it’s the primary reason for Law is using it in his Cy Young argument.

But FIP was not designed to give us a better insight into what actually happened, but, instead, what is likely to happen in the future. FIP is part of the collection of metrics that do a good job of predicting what will happen in the future by focusing on things that are under a player’s control. FIP was never designed to be a backward-looking metric designed to tell us what actually did happen. And there’s a decent argument to be made that the Cy Young award should be awarded based on what did happen, not on what should have happened or what will happen in the future.

In Cahill’s case, the real sticking point is his BABIP, which currently stands at an absurdly low .217. The next lowest batting average on balls in play for an AL starter is C.J. Wilson, at .263. The gap between Cahill and the rest of the league is enormous, and it is the driving force behind his low ERA. That .217 BABIP is not sustainable in any way, shape, or form. Unlike things like strikeout rate, BABIP is simply not a skill that a pitcher has much control over, which is why it’s not included in the FIP calculation.

But it is highly unlikely that Cahill has had absolutely nothing to do with his low BABIP to date. Yes, that number is driven down by a combination of outside factors, including his home park, his defense, and some bad hitting by his opponents, but it would be folly to assume that Cahill hasn’t had anything to do with hitters having a tough time getting hits off of him so far. We certainly should not give him credit for all of the hit prevention, and we should not expect it to continue, but logically, I think we have to assume that he has contributed, at least in some way, to the amount of balls that have found their way into the gloves of his defenders. Perhaps he has just hit his spots really well for several months – history says he can’t keep doing it, but do we want to assume that he’s had nothing to do with the results? I don’t.

So, just like I would not rely solely on ERA to make a judgment about who deserves the Cy Young award, neither would I rely solely on FIP. When trying to evaluate how a pitcher did in the past, ERA includes too many things that aren’t under his control, while FIP strips out too much. If I had to choose one or the other, I’d go with FIP over ERA, because I think it gets you closer to reality, but we don’t have to choose. We can look at the whole picture, and that’s what I suggest people do with their Cy Young picks.

Look at a pitcher’s walk rate, strikeout rate, home run rate, batting average on balls in play, and his left-on-base rate. The summation of how well he has pitched will be found in these five metrics. ERA includes all five and is affected greatly by the last two, while FIP only deals with the first three. I think we should look at all five, but not weight them evenly.

Walk rate and strikeout rate have little outside influence – they should be weighted the most heavily. Those are the two areas where a pitcher has the most control over the outcome. Home Run rate is certainly something a pitcher has some control over, but park and luck can interfere here, so I would give it a little less weight than the first two. Batting average on balls in play gets even less credit than home run rate, since there are so many contributing outside factors, but pitchers should get a little bit of credit or blame for the results on balls in play. Left-on-base rate is generally going to follow closely with HR/9 and BABIP, as posting low numbers in those areas will allow a pitcher to strand a lot of runners on base, so it gets the least credit, to avoid double counting something a pitcher has already gotten credit for. But some pitchers have historically been better at leaving runners on than others, and they should get credit for that in retrospective awards.

If I had to quantify these weights, I’d suggest it should be something like this:

Strikeout Rate: 40 percent
Walk Rate: 30 percent
Home Run Rate: 15 percent
Batting Average On Balls In Play: 10 Percent
Left-On-Base Rate: 5 percent

Reward a pitcher the most for what we know he can control, but reward him at least a little for things he may have had some influence on, even if he can’t keep it up. Don’t just go blindly into the discussion quoting ERA or FIP. Neither tells the whole story. .