The winner of the 2014 American League Cy Young Award is going to be either Felix Hernandez or Corey Kluber. Yes, indeed, there are other worthwhile candidates, and yes, you can argue whether Chris Sale should be penalized that heavily for his injury early on, but it’s a virtual lock that this is coming down to one of the two guys. So let’s just accept that assumption, and move forward. Which of the pitchers is going to win? And just how big will the winning margin be?

When we talk about awards, I don’t think we really care about the awards. I think it’s about the fun of trying to solve a problem, and about seeing how other people try to solve the same problem. It’s basically mental exercise, and in many cases there’s no obviously clear deserving winner and you can get as detailed as you like. For example, let’s take Felix vs. Kluber. You know one way to get really detailed? What’s Felix’s benefit of having pitched to Mike Zunino, against Kluber’s benefit of having pitched to Yan Gomes? That’s a question worth asking. This is really the fun of it every year, but for purposes of this post, let’s not try to figure out our own preferred winner. Rather, let’s consider the actual voters’ processes. What will the results tell us about how the BBWAA feels about splits?

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I have a little theory I choose to believe because it keeps me warm when times are cold. That theory is that, in every offseason, there’s a championship team to be built, and to be built reasonably, without costing an unrealistic amount. It’s not something that can ever be proven, and it’s not even necessarily interesting if you consider an offseason has virtually infinite possibilities, but I like to think the pieces are always out there, no matter how bad a team might’ve been the year before. It allows for hope, independent of circumstances. If it wasn’t your year, it could be your year.

We can at least try to support the theory with numbers from 2014. On the one hand, we can’t say anything about winning a championship, because you can never predict how that’ll play out. But to compensate for that, why don’t we take the idea to the extreme? Let’s say the idea is to build a good team. Nevermind building a good team through a reasonable sequence of moves. How about building a good team through an impossibly cheap sequence of moves? How about doing that without any kind of foundation already in place?

The idea, in short: construct a good 2014 baseball team out of players that would’ve cost nothing or almost nothing to acquire before the season. I’m not going to worry about getting 25 guys; I’ll just fill the important spots. The theory holds up to some extent, as the team you see below would, statistically, be about as strong as the best in the league. The obvious caveat is that, under different circumstances, maybe these players don’t put up the same performances. Maybe they received particular instruction from their 2014 employers, that maybe they wouldn’t get in the hypothetical organization we’re running. Totally valid! And maybe Troy Tulowitzki would’ve busted had he been drafted by the Mariners. We can never really know anything, so let’s just keep things simple and have some fun before we’re all dead.

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We’ve provided a lot of odds this season. There are current playoff odds, based on projections. There are current playoff odds, based on season-to-date numbers. There are current playoff odds, based on coin flips! There are past playoff odds, from any date in 2014. There are division series odds, and league championship series odds, and World Series odds. We’ve also, more quietly, provided single-game odds during the year. At the start of each day, these are based on the starting pitchers and the team projections. Later on, the odds are updated to take into consideration the respective starting lineups. We haven’t put these numbers to much editorial use, but they’ve been there, and over the course of the year most of the kinks have been worked out.

So, okay, keep that in mind. Those numbers have existed. Something else to keep in mind: the Rangers just swept the A’s in three games in Oakland. The Rangers are terrible. The A’s are just playing terrible. Have you connected the points? Allow me to connect the points. Turns out that was a particularly remarkable sweep.

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There was a time last season that Zack Greinke was batting over .400. At that time, no other pitcher in baseball was batting over .300. So people had some fun with that, because it’s fun when a pitcher is helping himself. It pretty much never lasts. Greinke didn’t keep batting over .400. This year he’s down near .200. He’s a pitcher, and pitchers are bad hitters, and single-season pitcher hitting statistics are limited by miniature sample sizes. No longer do we think of Greinke as a guy who’s going to break records. But all the while, as Greinke’s numbers have bounced around, he’s genuinely improved. And he’s improved to the point where, now, Greinke might be a half-decent hitter, and I don’t mean relative to pitchers this time.

Since the start of the 2012 season, Greinke’s come up 173 times. There are 107 pitchers who have come up at least 50 times during that window. Greinke leads the sample in wRC+, by 27 points. He’s the only pitcher in there with an OBP over .300. He’s one of four pitchers with an ISO over .100, and the next-best OBP in that group is .243. Some people thought of Carlos Zambrano as a good-hitting pitcher, and he had a 57 wRC+, with 24 times as many strikeouts as walks. Yovani Gallardo gets similar treatment, and he has a 41 wRC+, with 12 times as many strikeouts as walks. Travis Wood? 47 wRC+, 22 times as many strikeouts as walks. Mike Leake? 57 wRC+, 12 times as many strikeouts as walks. Those considered “good-hitting pitchers” tend to be pitchers capable of hitting home runs. Greinke adds unlikely elements of discipline and bat control.

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Let’s go back to 1920. Let’s look at starting pitchers who threw at least 75 innings in consecutive big-league seasons. Relative to last year, Jake Arrieta’s K-BB% has improved by 14 percentage points. That’s the fourth-greatest improvement within the sample. Relative to last year, Arrieta’s FIP- has improved by 64 points. That’s the single greatest improvement within the sample, edging out 2007-2008 Cliff Lee. This is what a breakout looks like. This is what maybe the biggest breakout looks like.

It’s up to you to determine whether or not Jake Arrieta is an ace, but he’s certainly generated ace-like results for the past several months, so if he’s not an ace yet, he’s on the right track. Six times already, he’s held an opponent hitless into the fifth. Three times, he’s held an opponent hitless into the seventh. Twice, he’s held an opponent hitless into the eighth. Arrieta’s flirted with history a few times, and while he hasn’t sealed the deal on an actual no-hitter, he’s at least earned greater familiarity and exposure. The Arrieta breakout, by now, is obvious. And more and more people are becoming aware of it.

So, we think we know what we have. How did this happen? How was Jake Arrieta built? Let’s condense his whole story into a blog post. Seems editorially responsible.

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Jose Altuve accomplished something Tuesday night. He played in a major-league baseball game! Wow! And even more incredible than that, he broke the Astros’ single-season record for hits, previously held by Craig Biggio. There are still another two weeks left to play. Of course, not all hits are the same, and we don’t usually spend much time talking about single-season hit totals, but you might prefer this: Altuve’s been great. The hits are one indication. He’s been something in the vicinity of a five-win player, as a 24-year-old in the middle infield. That’s a long-term building block.

So when some people think Altuve, they think hits. When other people think Altuve, they think short jokes. It’s clear that, in order to become the player he is today, Altuve’s had to overcome considerable adversity. A lot of that is simply that players his size tend to get selected against. They receive fewer opportunities. But then there can also be issues on the field, even during opportunities. Maybe it’s more difficult to turn a double play. It’s certainly more difficult to snare a line drive. And there’s the matter of the strike zone. Umpires aren’t great with unusual strike zones, and Altuve’s, obviously, is lower than most.

According to the PITCHf/x settings, the lower part of Altuve’s zone is lower than the average zone by almost three inches. The higher part of Altuve’s zone is lower than the average zone by almost five inches. So you know where this is going, based on that sentence, and based on the headline. I think I put together this same exact post every season. It’s time now to reflect on the season’s highest called strikes to Jose Altuve.

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This is about Clayton Kershaw, but this isn’t about Clayton Kershaw. This is about all great pitchers and the Most Valuable Player award. We know that, in the voting, pitchers face a severe penalty. That’s the long-established track record of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and it’s not about to dramatically change. There are writers who think pitchers need to be insanely good to be worth a high vote. There are voters who refuse to vote for pitchers entirely. We know the habits. Why are these the habits?

It’s not just a writer thing, either. Consider this recent Internet poll: Should pitchers should be eligible for the MVP? Here are the responses of a learned audience:

• 59%: Yes
• 30%: Yes, if the pitcher’s way better than the position players
• 11%: No

Even among FanGraphs readers, one-in-nine voters doesn’t think pitchers should be eligible — and another big fraction puts an asterisk on the eligibility. This is a question people argue almost every year, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t get it.

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You ever notice how “improved” doesn’t have a good selection of antonyms? That’s what I’m going for. “The pitch-framer who’s gotten a heck of a lot worse somehow” gets the idea across, but it makes for a pretty lousy headline. Anyway, now you know the question being answered.

Dave has noted a few times in the past that at this point, the market doesn’t seem to pay very much for quality pitch-framing. There could be any number of reasons for this, but one could be that teams simply think they can teach their catchers to receive the ball better. Why pay for what you can instruct? Jason Castro would be an example of a guy who’s gotten way better at receiving with proper, targeted instruction. I think it makes sense to us how a guy could learn to receive pitches better. It makes less sense how a guy could just flat-out do worse. It seems like a fundamental skill once it’s learned, but every stat has its players who get better and its players who get worse, and the catcher who’s had the biggest performance decline between 2013 and 2014 is a catcher who last winter inked a three-year contract after winning a World Series.

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Clayton Kershaw’s good! Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about him. In the first half of this season, he struck out more than a third of all the hitters he faced. In the second half, his strikeout rate is actually down 17%. Now, that’s percent, not percentage points, but it means one of six strikeout victims hasn’t been a strikeout victim. That seems like the kind of thing that should raise eyebrows. But you haven’t noticed because in the first half Kershaw allowed 19 runs, and in the second half he’s allowed 19 runs. One is less inclined to notice when great players are slightly differently great.

Also, his second-half strikeout rate is still extraordinary. Also, he’s still not really walking anybody, even though just yesterday he did put Yusmeiro Petit on base. The regular numbers love second-half Kershaw, but if you dig just a little bit deeper, you can gain a better understanding of how Kershaw has remained so dominant despite giving away a handful of whiffs.

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