Corey Kluber won the American League Cy Young Award on Wednesday, beating Seattle’s Felix Hernandez by 10 points, with 17 first place votes to Felix’s 13. In doing so, Kluber became the first Indians pitcher to win the award since Cliff Lee in 2008, the first Indians right-hander to win the award since Gaylord Perry in 1972, and the first player in the entire MLB with the initials C.K. to win a Cy Young since Clayton Kershaw, like, 20 minutes earlier.

This came as a bit of a surprise! Most people expected Hernandez to win. Four of five CBSSports MLB writers polled here selected Hernandez. This Washington Post article from September had Kluber third. 62% of the 18,000 individuals polled by SportsNation picked Felix. This ESPN forecast gave Hernandez a 70% chance to win. Nobody actually thought Kluber was going to win this.

And that makes sense. Kluber had an awesome year, but Felix had an awesome year, too, and he was more awesome in some of the ways that have historically been rewarded. Jeff put it pretty well in his post from yesterday in saying that there really was no right choice for this award. Kluber and Felix were damn near equal. But you know that already. You’ve read countless posts about it, and your mind is already made up for who you would have voted. I agree with the selection of Kluber, personally, but this isn’t about who should have won, or my thoughts on that matter. It’s about who did win, and what that can tell us about the voting process in 2014.
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The Washington Nationals are in an enviable position. The team won 96 games for the second time in three years before bowing out in the division series. They are a talented group, well-built with one of the best rotations in baseball plus a high-octane offense to match.

They are certainly a World Series favorite for 2015 with the talent on-hand. They’re also a team coming to a crossroads. They are in the enviable position of choosing between living for today or planning for the future. Or, most likely of all, they’ll take care of one without tossing the other aside.

As the hot stove season heats up, a number of high-profile Nats names will pop up with regularity. Among their core talent, they have four very good players heading towards free agency at the end of the 2015 season. Jordan Zimmermann, Ian Desmond, Doug Fister, and Denard Span all figure to attract their share of attention as the Nats cannot retain all four players at market prices – to say nothing of workhorse reliever Tyler Clippard.

So what options might general manager Mike Rizzo explore? A rumor connecting Zimmermann and the Chicago Cubs was quickly shot down, but the logical match of the two clubs demonstrates the world at the feet of the Nats front office. They have multiple options in front of them, the best of which requires trading the man who threw a no-hitter in his final regular season start of 2014.

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The free agent market is beginning to percolate, and though all has been somewhat quiet on his front to date, it stands to reason that Max Scherzer will be one of its chief beneficiaries. It’s a strong starting pitching group at the top, with Scherzer, Jon Lester and James Shields the lead dogs. Most would agree that none of these guys are Clayton Kershaw or Felix Hernandez, but it wouldn’t be shocking if one of the current free agents approached the tax bracket of The Two Best Pitchers In Baseball. Scherzer presents a particularly intriguing case – he is a true outlier, a dominant strikeout artist who has allowed a fairly extreme amount of damage on the balls he has allowed to be put in play. Is this on Scherzer, or are there other factors in play? The question, at the very least, must be asked before any club invests anywhere a quarter billion dollars in him. Read the rest of this entry »

If you like big trades with flashy names, this isn’t the post for you, because this one is dedicated to the Tigers swapping second base prospect Devon Travis to the Blue Jays for center field kinda prospect Anthony Gose. Neither Travis nor Gose looks likely to turn into any kind of star, but this trade is still interesting — to me at least — because both look like potentially useful pieces that help fill a need for their new teams.

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Every organization wants to be perceived as honest, but not each one can be taken at its word. It was refreshing to hear the Phillies acknowledge not too long ago that they won’t be contending over the next few years. As obvious a point as it was to make, it was important to hear the Phillies be truthful about their situation. As for the Tigers, it’s no secret what they’ve been doing. They’ll come right out and say it: they’ve been trying to win right away, in large part for the sake of Mike Ilitch. The Tigers haven’t acted like they’ve had the luxury of time, and Wednesday they made another big win-now move, keeping Victor Martinez at a four-year guarantee worth $68 million. Per usual, there are questions about the back. Per usual, that’s not the priority.

It’s a fairly simple move to explain, if you buy into the greater organizational pattern. The Tigers are set up to be competitive, and they could’ve used a bat, so they kept one of their best, at a substantial price. One of the things that was so perplexing about the Doug Fister trade was that it made the Tigers immediately worse. That broke from the trend, and caused some to wonder if the team might be slowly trying to plan more for the future. Martinez is about 2015. Martinez is about winning before the future even has a chance to happen. What does Mike Ilitch care about the years down the road?

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I understand why the BBWAA announces finalists for awards before it announces the winners — they’re trying to build some suspense, some anticipation, and, okay, that’s fine, even if the finalists don’t tell us much we couldn’t predict. For example, we’ve long known the AL Cy Young was going to come down to Felix Hernandez vs. Corey Kluber. All the non-contenders have been officially eliminated, which does nothing. It’s even funnier when you get a race that isn’t a race at all, like Jose Abreu and the AL Rookie of the Year. Or, say, Clayton Kershaw and the NL Cy Young. According to the BBWAA, Kershaw is a finalist, along with Johnny Cueto and Adam Wainwright. The ESPN forecast is somewhat torn between Felix and Kluber, in one league. In the other league, it’s less torn:

Unanimous, in other words. And this is the way things are likely to play out. Clayton Kershaw ought to get every single first-place vote, because of the gap between himself and the others. You can eyeball the gap if you want, but we can also put some numbers to the idea. What would it have taken for Kershaw to come away resembling Cueto or Wainwright?

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Though we won’t know the winner of the 2014 American League Cy Young Award until later Wednesday, we’ve already been given some clues. The BBWAA has told us the three finalists are Felix Hernandez, Corey Kluber, and Chris Sale. Based on the association’s own precedent, Sale isn’t going to win because he didn’t throw enough innings, so this is coming down to Felix vs. Kluber, as we’ve been assuming for months. The feeling is that Felix is going to win, and ESPN agrees with that pretty strongly, but Kluber’s case only got stronger as the season wore on, so it’s hard to imagine a bad choice. Which, from another perspective, means it’s hard to imagine a good choice.

There were two Cy Young winners in 2013. There were two Cy Young winners in 2012! There were two Cy Young winners in 2011, and in 2010, and in 2009, and in 2008, and in…you get it. There have been two Cy Young winners every year since 1970. In 1969, there were three, as AL voting was split between Mike Cuellar and Denny McLain. That’s our one existing case of there being co-Cy Youngs, meaning I think it’s safe to presume Wednesday will reveal a single winner. That’s too bad when you’ve got a pair of guys who are equally worthy.

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David Price is known for some things. Most notably, he’s known for being a pitcher. A pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. Beyond that, he’s known for some more specific things within pitching. He’s known for being one of the best. He’s known for having a really great changeup. He’s known for being one of the best because of his elite ability to command his pitches and not walk anybody. He’s known for throwing a ton of innings and consistently working deep into games. And, as of lately, he’s known for becoming an elite strikeout pitcher.

Sometimes, those last two things can work against each other. When you think about throwing a lot of innings and working deep into games, you think about pitch count. Pitch counts have to remain relatively low for one to consistently work deep. Only Clayton Kershaw and Adam Wainwright have more complete games since the start of 2012 than Price, so clearly, he does a good job of this. The biggest reason is the walk rate. Price never gives hitters the free pass, which is one of the most important things about keeping a pitch count low. But Price also strikes a ton of guys out, which is something that can drive a pitch count up. You can’t get a strikeout on the first pitch, and at-bats that end in a strikeout often require five or more pitches.

Unless you do it like David Price.
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Yesterday, FanGraphs facilitated a crowdsourcing effort not unlike that other recent crowdsourcing effort which produced year and dollar estimates for the contracts likely to be received by this offseason’s top-55 free agents.

In the case of yesterday’s exercise, however, readers were asked not to estimate the values of the league’s free agents, but rather of those players who are both (a) candidates to be traded this offseason, and also (b) signed to contracts of disproportionate cost relative to the player’s likely benefit to a team in wins.

The purpose of the exercise: to estimate the actual market values (in dollars) of those same contracts for the actual years which remain on them. And the secondary purpose: to estimate, as well, the amount of “dead money” — that is, the amount a player’s club would have to cover to successfully trade away a player — present on each of those contracts.

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It’s easy to see that baseball has changed over the last couple of decades. Walks, strikeouts, homers, and stolen bases have all seen their ups and downs, and we’re currently experiencing a valley in terms of offense. Games are longer. There’s instant replay.

But there’s evidence that players are getting similarly better and worse at these things — the distribution hasn’t changed, the graph has just been shifted. It’s possible that the relative value of certain events in baseball as a whole could still be about the same. A stolen base’s relationship to a win could be unchanged if the distribution of stolen bases is similar, and there are just fewer of them.

Is that what you find when you look back empirically? If you relate strikeouts, walks, stolen bases, and home runs to winning, is that relationship steady over these turbulent times?

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