The AL Cy Young race has gotten pretty interesting. A month ago, Max Scherzer looked like a near lock, with his glistening 19-1 record and strong peripherals that supported the idea that he’d pitched like an ace this year. However, he’s gone 1-2 with a 4.66 ERA in his last five starts, perhaps opening the door for voters to take a closer look at all the candidates. And when they’re investigating, they just may find that the difference in quality of competition is a pretty significant factor this year.

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FanGraphs has a lot of metrics, ranging from the standard counting numbers that have filled baseball cards for decades to more complicated calculations and formulas. Odds are pretty good that if there’s something you want to know about a particular Major League player, we probably have a metric for it. However, up until today, we’ve lacked one number that answered two of the most basic questions that people ask: Who has been the best offensive player in the game, and who has been the best defensive player in the game?

You could get at those questions with the numbers we had, using a combination of metrics found on the site, but there wasn’t just a single number that simply answered those two questions. And, unfortunately, the lack of an available sum of offense or defensive value led to people occasionally substituting in a number that didn’t actually answer the question they were trying to answer. This was our fault, not theirs, but as of an hour ago, this has been rectified with the introduction of two new numbers here on FanGraphs.

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I wrote up the Billy Hamilton factoid this morning because I wanted to write about him, but I didn’t have a fully formed post yet, so I used that as a tide-me-over until that post materialized. Well, now, I might just have to come up with a new idea, because J.J. Cooper wrote about Billy Hamilton at Baseball America today, and I don’t think I can do any better than this.

On the three of Hamilton’s four steal attempts last night where the broadcast showed his steal from first move to sliding into second, Hamilton was consistently taking roughly 3.1 seconds from first move to tagging the bag. If you want a fuller explanation of how each steal was timed, please see the note at the bottom of this story.

If a base stealer can get from first to second in right at or under 3.1 seconds, the math of throwing him out becomes very, very difficult. With a slide-step, a pitcher can often cut his time to home to 1.1-1.2 seconds. Without the slide step, a 1.3 second time home is pretty reasonable. For any pitcher taking more than 1.3 seconds to throw home, it’s probably not worth even considering a pitchout.

The post even includes GIFs of Hamilton’s steals last night, with the Astros being basically helpless to stop him from running even when everyone knew he was going. I heartily endorse this piece, and will now go try and find a new subject to write about, since J.J. Cooper aced this one.

Here’s a fun little game. Go to the top of the page and click on leaderboards, then use the league drop down box to isolate just NL players. Now, click on the advanced tab so that you can get to the two components of our baserunning metric, wSB (stolen base runs) and UBR (baserunning runs besides SB/CS). You’ll see them on the right hand side of the page, between BABIP and wRC.

Now, before you sort by wSB, go to the min PA drop down. Instead of picking a minimum, you need to set this to zero, because the hero of our story doesn’t yet meet the lowest playing time threshold on the drop down box. Now, once you’ve done that, you’ll have a leaderboard consisting of 543 names, because the lack of a minimum playing time requirement means that our net is huge and catches everyone who has appeared as a hitter or runner for an NL team this season.

Now that you’ve done that, click on wSB to make it sort in descending order. You are now looking at the NL leaders in runs added through base stealing. For those who didn’t play along with the instructions, I’ll create the table for you, just without all the other things on the advanced tab:

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Chris Davis hit his 51st home run of the season last night. 20 years ago, that would have been a pretty big deal, but the years around the turn of the century reset the bar for newsworthy home run totals. After having only two 60 homer seasons in the first 100+ years of baseball, we saw six such seasons in four years. 50 homer seasons used to be the stepping stone to greatness; now, Davis is still 22 home runs away from the single season record.

As we know, though, the game as its being played today doesn’t look like the game that was being played 15 years ago. The strike zone is bigger, the players are smaller, and both runs and home runs are much harder to come by these days. Chris Davis might not set any real records, but hitting 51 home runs (and counting) in this offensive context is still an accomplishment worth celebrating.

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Back at the turn of the century, the 2000/2001 Oakland A’s were remarkably successful, and that success led Michael Lewis to write a little book called Moneyball, which you’ve probably heard of. I think everything that could possibly be said about that book and those teams has probably been said, written, and re-hashed 100 times, so don’t worry, I’m not writing this post to kick that dead horse anymore. I just want to point out that, 12 years later, the A’s have basically done the exact same thing that got the book written in the first place.

Those A’s teams won 193 out of the 323 games they played, the second best winning percentage in the game, despite the fact that they were spending a fraction of what their high revenue competitors were throwing at players. The A’s teams of last year and this year have won 182 of the 312 games they’ve played, the second best winning percentage in the game, despite the fact that they were spending a fraction of what their high revenue competitors were throwing at players. For more context, a table.

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Last week, we spent some time talking about players that may or may not receive a qualifying offer when they hit free agency this winter. The qualifying offer is an important decision, because it grants the original organization a compensation pick at the end of the first round if that player changes teams through free agency. However, it requires teams to be willing to make an offer of at least $14 million in salary for 2014, so it can’t just be handed out to every free agent in hopes of stocking up on draft picks.

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The NL MVP race has a lot of good candidates. Clayton Kershaw is having an amazing year for the Dodgers. Yadier Molina and Matt Carpenter have been fantastic for the Cardinals. Joey Votto is his usual excellent self. Paul Goldschmidt is the run production candidate, and has had a great season on his own merits. This feels like the kind of year where a lot of different guys are going to get votes, and the winner probably won’t be unanimous.

But let’s not let the reality of a solid field of candidates obscure the fact that Andrew McCutchen is pulling away from the field. He might not look like a traditional MVP, but McCutchen is having a remarkable season.

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