When you come up through the ranks as a young lefty starter, you learn about the importance of the changeup. By breaking away from the right-handed batter, that pitch offers the best way to neutralize the natural platoon advantage those hitters have against you. By the time you get to the big leagues, it’s part of your approach, like it or not. That’s why lefty starters throw changeups 65% more often than righty starters in major league baseball.

If you look at Jon Lester’s career, though, his best years have come when he’s thrown his changeup the least. The flippant reason for that truth might be because his changeup isn’t that great, and his other pitches are better. The long version is much more interesting, though, as it gets to the theory of changeups, and a new concept called tunneling.

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There’s a difference between saying a pitcher has a changeup, and saying a pitcher throws a changeup. Pretty much every pitcher has a changeup — all it takes is once or twice having messed around with the grip and the delivery. If a guy has thrown a changeup, and remembers what he did, it could be said the same guy has a changeup. But to say a guy throws a changeup — that’s something active. That says, not only does the pitcher possess a changeup in his arsenal, but he could throw it at any point. It’s a part of his approach. The pitcher has a fastball, a changeup, and a curve, say.

I don’t know where the point is where one becomes the other. I don’t know how many times a pitcher has to use a pitch before it can be said the pitch is a part of the pitcher’s attack. Here’s what I can tell you about Craig Kimbrel: for years, he’s had a changeup. Now he’s closer than ever to regularly throwing one.

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Congratulations to Jake Arrieta, who was just named the National League Cy Young Award winner, edging out Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke in one of the best Cy Young races in baseball history. Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer rounded out the top five in the voting, just released over at BBWAA.com.

Back in mid-August, I was informed that I had been chosen to vote on the Cy Young Award in the National League this year; it would be my first time getting to vote on the pitcher awards after being an MVP and Manager of the Year voter last year. As a voter, I feel an obligation to the players to try and acquire as much information as I can in order to make the most educated decision possible, and so I spent the next six weeks working my way through various ideas and philosophies about how to evaluate a pitcher’s performance.

About a week after receiving the ballot, I wrote a piece exploring the idea of using a pitcher’s hitting performance as a variable in deciding the Cy Young Award, and I asked a lot of people in the game whom I respect about their views on that issue. A month later, I worked through some of my thoughts on how to best separate out a catcher’s value from his pitchers’ results, and then the next day, I looked at some other factors mentioned by the commenters, including the potential value of consistency.

In writing those pieces, I wanted to lay some groundwork for how I was attempting to put this puzzle together, because I knew that when the time came to actually show my ballot, no one was going to read a 5,000 word treatise on the complexity of evaluating pitchers with the tools we currently have available. But given the abundance of worthy candidates this year, even that kind of article probably wouldn’t provide enough room to lay out the case for each of the pitchers who had deserving years. In my view, there were three guys who all had seasons that would be easy choices for a Cy Young Award in a normal year, and picking between them was basically an impossible task.

While I eventually had to settle on a 1-5 order, a more realistic assessment of my view is that I turned in ballot with #1A, #1B, #1C, #4, and #5. As I write this, I don’t actually know who is going to win, and I’m not going to feel the wrong guy won no matter how the top three end up being ordered. You can make a strong case for any of them, and the gaps between them are so slight that I don’t think we should be arguing with significant conviction that there is a right answer. There are three deserving Cy Young winners in the National League this year, and I only wish there was some mechanism in place where I could have voted for a tie.

But, at the end of the day, we were asked to split hairs and determine an order. So, now that the voting has been revealed, here is a look at how I filled out my ballot, with some brief overviews of the reasoning behind those decisions. And by brief overview, I mean there are another 2,500 words to this post, but I left out some discussion of things I looked at that ended up not having a huge impact on my decision, such as quality of opposition, park factor adjustments beyond what is already calculated, and which umpires they pitched to, among other things. I’ve tried to lay out my thoughts as coherently as possible while also keeping this post on the shorter side of War and Peace. With that said, on to the ballot itself.

One of the best young pitchers in baseball, Cole turned into a dominating #1 starter this year, and when I began the process, I assumed I’d have him somewhere on my ballot. In the end, though, he fell just short, coming in at the sixth spot on a ballot with only five openings. While his numbers were excellent, a few small flaws in his resume conspired to push him just outside the top five.

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Darren O’Day is a free agent. Ken Rosenthal reports on what’s going on with free agents. Mild controversy:

Sources: O’Day asking for four-year deal in $28M to $36M range. Most accomplished reliever on open market.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 18, 2015

The argument against: as players go, Darren O’Day is relatively old, and old people wither and die. Also, O’Day is a reliever, and the perception is that relievers are made out of dry spaghetti noodles, subject to break with the lightest pressure. A four-year commitment to an aging reliever? No, sir. Better to find a starting pitcher, or maybe a young outfielder or something. Something you can set your watch to.

The argument for: Darren O’Day is really super good. The best predictor of someone being really super good next year is whether a player was really super good last year. Good players get big free-agent contracts. Really, that’s all you need to know. The rest of the post will only belabor this.

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Episode 610
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 3 min play time.)

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The other day, August wrote about how the Tigers’ bullpen was in desperate need of improvement. That is, if the Tigers intend to compete in 2016, and they do intend to compete in 2016, while simultaneously trying to keep the longer-term picture in mind. So it made sense when, earlier Wednesday, reports came out the Tigers didn’t love the asking prices for the higher-tier relievers available. It’s not like the Tigers have all that much youth to move around, anyway. This all led to an unsurprising end: the Tigers have picked up the more affordable Francisco Rodriguez, from the Brewers. The Brewers are getting a low-level prospect. There are some players to be named later. This will probably just be remembered as the Rodriguez trade, if it’s remembered at all.

Of course a team in the Brewers’ position had little reason to hang on to a veteran closer. And of course a team in the Tigers’ position was looking to add a veteran closer. Doesn’t get more veteran closer-y than picking up the active leader in career saves. You could say Rodriguez is only 34 in January, and that’s true. He’s also looking ahead to his 15th season in the major leagues. He’s survived for a long time, and he’s even thrived for a long time. You can only do that by adapting. Francisco Rodriguez is a tremendous example of how a pitcher should want to age.

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Ben and Sam discuss the Rich Hill signing and more Mike Trout punctuation, then answer listener emails about Jerry Dipoto and David Ortiz and do a double Play Index.

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When Dave Cameron wrote up the Athletics’ signing of Rich Hill yesterday, he titled it “A’s Sign Rich Hill, Because Of Course They Do.” He focused more on the fact that Hill was a resurgent pitcher that represented a low-risk, high-reward, low-money signing — a bit like Scott Kazmir before the 2014 season. That makes a lot of sense, given Oakland’s budget constraints and past practices.

There’s another way Hill is the perfect major league acquisition for the Athletics, though. He’s a fastball/curve guy with an iffy changeup. He’ll fit right in.

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So you want your team to spend in free agency. You think to yourself, “This is the year. We’re just a couple pieces away. Go out and get ’em, [insert name of General Manager who, in all likelihood, will not ‘go out and get ’em’ the way you envision].”

Maybe you look to a pair of recent World Series winners as the way to do the offseason without committing a massive chunk of payroll on a big-ticket acquisition. Look at how much value the Royals extracted out of mid-tier signings like Kendrys Morales, Edinson Volquez and, on a smaller scale, guys like Kris Medlen and Ryan Madson. Or the Red Sox, and their insanely cost-effective 2013 offseason that netted them Mike Napoli, Shane Victorino and Koji Uehara — crucial pieces to their championship run.

That’s how you do it! You don’t even need to catch the big fish. Just plug your holes with a few of the middle-class free agents to put around your stars and you win the world championship. All there is to it!

Except, remember that time the White Sox:

• signed Adam LaRoche to extend their lineup, and
• signed Melky Cabrera to shore up their outfield, and
• signed Zach Duke to pitch the late innings?

And then:

• Adam LaRoche posted a negative WAR, and
• Melky Cabrera posted a negative WAR, and
• Zach Duke posted a negative WAR?

At the times of their signings, there wasn’t a real discernible difference between the Victorino/Napoli/Uehara trio and the Cabrera/LaRoche/Duke trio, except the Red Sox trio turned out to be awesome and help win a World Series, and the White Sox trio became a complete trainwreck and now the White Sox are stuck with those guys. They’re deals that were totally defensible at the time, but deals that wouldn’t be made were Rick Hahn given a do-over.

The White Sox were the epitome of a stars-and-scrubs team in 2015, led on offense by Jose Abreu and Adam Eaton, with a rotation fronted by typically excellent seasons out of Chris Sale and Jose Quintana. In Abreu and Sale, specifically, the White Sox can already cross off one of the hard parts in building a winner: get some of the best players in the world. Abreu is one of the very best hitters in the sport. Sale is one of the very best pitchers in the sport. These guys are real and play for the White Sox. They’re not the problem. The rest is the problem.

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