The Players Who Defined 2017
(Photo: Keith Allison)
The 2017 regular season is officially in the books. We didn’t get any kind of dramatic finishes, with the No. 1 pick the only thing decided on the final day of the season; Pablo Sandoval remained a net negative for his employers by costing the Giants the top pick with his season-ending walk-off.
Despite the lack of pennant-race drama, however, this was still a pretty fun season, with a lot of spectacular individual performances and the emergence of a few true powerhouse teams. So, let’s take a look at a few players who helped define the 2017 season.
While Giancarlo Stanton captured the home-run title, Aaron Judge is the new face of what power looks like in baseball. He not only became the first rookie ever to hit 50 home runs, he was also arguably baseball’s best overall player this season; he was the only guy in the game to crack +8 WAR this season. Unlike the last time power spiked in MLB, this one is defined less by hulking one-dimensional designated hitters and more by the most freakish athletic specimens ever to play the game.
Judge also represents the changing nature of contact in baseball; his 208 strikeouts are tied for the sixth-most in baseball history. What’s notable about Judge, though, isn’t that he strikes out a lot, but that he was among the best hitters in baseball while threatening the all-time strikeout record. The previous nine hitters to record at least 200 strikeouts in a season produced an average wRC+ was just 118; three of those nine seasons resulted in below-average offensive production that year.
Judge didn’t just set the mark for the highest wRC+ by a guy who struck out 200-plus times; no one had put up a wRC+ of 172 or better while striking out more than 150 times since Mark McGwire in 1998, when McGwire had 155 strikeouts but managed a 205 wRC+. We have never seen a great hitter strike out this often, and nothing sums up 2017 like the walking embodiment of a game where home runs more than offset all of the strikeouts.
Though Stanton and Judge did both crack 50 home runs, the home-run story this time isn’t about the guys at the top. Instead, most of the added power in baseball came from guys who weren’t supposed to hit for power, and no one embodies this unexpected power spike more than Jose Ramirez.
In his first two years in the majors, Ramirez totaled just 38 extra-base hits in 635 plate appearances, putting up a paltry .106 isolated-power figure from 2013 to 2015. This year, he racked up 90 extra-base hits in 641 plate appearances, his .264 ISO landing him right between Nelson Cruz and Paul Goldschmidt. The changes in the way the ball flies disproportionately benefited hitters at the lower-end of the power spectrum, and no one gained more than Ramirez, who has now emerged as an elite star in this game.
Ramirez might have benefited the most from being able to hit the ball just hard enough to send it into the gaps or over a short fence, but he’s only the most prominent member of the diminutive slugger. Of the league’s qualified middle infielders, 14 ran an ISO over .200 this year; in 1999, at the height of the “Steroid Era”, that total was just nine. A combination of defensive shifts and fewer balls in play (because of the rise in strikeouts) has reduced the range required of players to competently man an infield position. With the ball now also providing more rewards for guys who elevate, the game is now flush with slap hitters who have become legitimately dangerous.
The only starting pitchers in baseball history to strike out 35% of the batters they faced in a season: Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, and now Chris Sale. The era of the strikeout obviously means it was easier for Sale than either of the other two, but even adjusting for the league-average strikeout rate, Sale still had one of the most dominant seasons in baseball history.
But strikeouts aren’t the only reason why Sale embodies baseball in 2017. He also highlights the dramatic change in starting-pitcher usage, as his 214.1 innings pitched led the league this season. According to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, this is one of just three seasons in baseball history where nobody cracked the 215 IP mark, and the other two were shortened by work stoppages. Even in the abbreviated 1995 season, three pitchers topped 215 innings.
Prior to this year, no full season of baseball had ever seen fewer than eight pitchers pass the 215-inning threshold. Not surprisingly, those happened recently, with last year’s mark tying 2013 for the fewest 215-plus-inning pitchers. But the change is still dramatic, the game going from eight to zero in a single year. Starting-pitcher usage has been trending down for a while now, but this is the year that everyone was aggressive about managing even their best pitcher’s workloads. Barring a structural change in the way the game is played, we probably won’t ever see anyone throw 250 innings in a regular season again; after this year, even 225 innings looks like something of an upper limit.
What could have been? We can ask that question of too many elite players this year, and perhaps of no one more than Freddie Freeman. On May 17th, he was hitting .341/.461/.748, good for a 203 wRC+. Then Aaron Loup hit him with an up-and-in fastball that broke his wrist. He would return six weeks later, but wrist injuries are notorious for lingering, and Freeman hit “just” .290/.375/.507 after returning from the disabled list. A season that looked like it might establish Freeman as a contender for best hitter in baseball was cut short by an errant pitch, and we’ll never know what Freeman could have done if he’d have stayed healthy.
Freeman is hardly the only star to get sidelined this year. Mike Trout broke his thumb diving into second base. Bryce Harper‘s knee problems limited him to just 111 games played this year. J.D. Martinez played in only 118 games after beginning the year on the DL with a foot problem. Carlos Correa played just 109 games after suffering a thumb injury similar to Trout’s. Josh Donaldson‘s leg issues limited him to just 113 games. Michael Conforto’s breakout ended after just 109 games when his shoulder broke.
And those are just the hitters. Pitchers get hurt every year, but it feels like we lost more than our fair share of elite arms this year. Noah Syndergaard barely pitched at all this season. Madison Bumgarner missed two months after getting hurt riding his bike on an off day. Aaron Sanchez couldn’t figure out how to grip the ball without tearing his fingers apart, and missed most of the season because of it. Zach Britton’s arm hurt, then his knee hurt, and he was never really the Zach Britton of the last few years.
The Tommy John epidemic seemed to slow down a bit this year, but still managed to claim Shelby Miller, Michael Pineda, Trevor Rosenthal, Joe Ross, Drew Smyly, and Edinson Volquez, among many others. Julio Urias wished he would have just needed TJ; the recovery rates for his anterior capsule shoulder surgery are not nearly as promising.
We got some new stars this year, which is always nice, but hopefully next year, we get more full healthy seasons from the best players in the game. Aaron Judge and Jose Ramirez are fun, but I want six months of Mike Trout next year, please.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
TJ also claimed Alex Reyes preseason – arguably the pitcher I was most excited to watch this year.
I’d put Giancarlo Stanton on the list as well. Him hitting 47 homers out of the #2 hole is a change in lineups that we’ve not seen before. And one that could have a real lasting impact going forward in a copycat league.
We saw it in 2015 when Josh Donaldson won MVP while hitting 38 of 41 homers batting second. Sure it’s not 47, but I think the trend towards batting power second in the order has been happening for a few years now.
fair point. But what Stanton did took it to whole another level..
Donaldson 38 hr out of 2 hole in 620 pa
Stanton 47 hr out of 2 hole in 493 pa
Donaldson was in the same lineup as Bautista (40 HRs) and Encarnacion (39 HRs). Someone with a big bat was batting 2nd or 5th. I think most old-school managers would have drawn the lineup placing this guy fifth and Tulowitzki or Pillar batting second, so it was intentionally different but also less obvious than Stanton batting second.
The 2017 Marlins had Ozuna (37 HRs) batting fourth but typically had Yelich batting third, a player with modest power. Definitely unusual. I think another example of a manager batting their most powerful bat second was the 2016 Cubs with Kris Bryant.
2016 Bryant “only” had 19 homers out of the 2 hole in 379 pa’s. He split in 2016 between 2 and 3 hole.
Bryant played around half his season in the 2-hole, but the trend is more what I was getting at. Once Maddon got the idea that Bryant should be batting second around July, he was there for the rest of the year and throughout this year.
he still had 38 starts this year in the 3 hole(or a little more than 1/4 of the starts). Bryant averages 33 homers per 162 games. Stanton averages 44 homers per 162 games. Stanton a lot different animal than Bryant I think.
Good point. I believe by the end of the season we saw Judge hitting most of his homers out of the two hole, too.
2 hole is where you put the best hitters, and managers are finally coming around to that.
Unless you are Dusty Baker. Then you put Stephen Drew there.
looks like Bryce Harper is batting 2nd for the playoffs.
Don’t forget Wilmer Difo
Meanwhile, the best hitter in the NL over the past 3 years has barely sniffed the 2 hole. Votto batted 3rd every time this year, while a mix of Hamilton and Peraza batted ahead of him, along with Cozart. At least Cozart was really good this year.
Not enough lineup protection, is probably why. Bryant/Judge/Stanton/Donaldson all play(ed) in loaded lineups.
Trout has been batting second for several years. He led the league in both runs and RBI that way a couple of years ago. This year he hit 33 HR with all the DL time, was on a pace to hit more than 45 for a full season.
Trout split between 2 and 3 holes. He had 71 games batting 2nd and 41 batting 3rd.
Based on FG articles I would have guessed:
Byron Buxton, Francisco Lindor, Trevor Bauer and Eric Thames.
Buxton figuring it out has to be very exciting for the FG community. We’ve waited so long for this.
Really? How many Eric Thames articles has FG featured lately? Since the All Star break? Heck, since the first month of the season? Don’t remember that many Bauer articles either, TBH.
It would be interesting to see a complete breakdown of all FG mentions by team and player, and I suspect that the results would differ from the critics (who tend to have their own player- and team-specific blinders, both pro and con) expect.
Judge’s batting stats looks like Jim Thome’s mid-career numbers. Thome was probably a little better hitter, but Judge is a better athlete, in the field, and on the base paths. It’s way too early to assume Judge can sustain this level, but it was a blast watching him. i’m a little surprised Altuve isn’t on this list.
I would also really put Corey Kluber in the list as well.. I mean the guy misses a month of the season, but still finished #6 in MLB in innings pitched. The likely Cy Young winner. Think you’re going to find teams using starters a lot differently going forward- using them less in April/May- and Kluber(and really Sale)- is a prime reason why.
Yep, Kluber’s injury basically made up for the month’s rest that he lost pitching last October.
Another reason for Kluber. He had 5 complete games, leading the league in CG’s(tied with Ervin Santana). He had a whopping 8.4% of all complete games in MLB this season. This year had a total of 59 complete games. That number is a record low(down from 112 which was the record set in 2007 that lasted until 2014). Only 2015 had a year where MLB leader in CG had fewer than 5 CG(that year had 6 guys with 4 each). NL had no guys get more than 2 CG this year.
In an article titled “Players Who Defined 2017,” Kluber’s CGs automatically disqualify him from consideration. Unless you want to use him to contrast the steeply declining IP per start and CGs in baseball — but if you’re doing that then you’d also have to highlight Dee Gordon or Xander Bogaerts as middle-infielders who didn’t benefit from the “flyball revolution” or Nick Markakis and Alex Gordon as guys who struck out a lot but didn’t hit HRs or do much of anything else to make up for it.
fair point on the CG. And the declining IP per start thing is real…
2017 5.51 innings per start for starters
2016 5.65
2015 5.81
2014 5.97
2013 5.69
2012 5.89
2011 6.03
2010 5.98
2009 5.81
2008 5.80
Makes Klubers 7.02 innings per start that much more remarkable.
Gordon was never going to hit HR’s but Bogaerts collapse at the plate was totally unexpected. It is hard to hit HR’s when all you do is slap singles to right.
For the record, Bogaerts was batting .308/.361/.455 entering the day that he took a pitch on the hand. He didn’t say anything about it until late in the season, but apparently the injury really bothered him (not uncommon for a hand injury), and he says it was a mistake to try and play through it rather than give it some rest.
He hit just .176/.243/.206 over his next 27 games as he dealt with this issue (and his power truly vanished).
Then he finished .268/.372/.427 over his last 42 with his usual solid power.
So it wasn’t so much a collapse at the plate, so much as it was a quality season sandwiched around a month lost to a hidden hand injury.
And then, on the opposite end of the injury spectrum from Freddie Freeman, Joey Votto. 162 games played, and one of the best seasons of his career. And he turned 34 a few weeks ago.
Yeah 1 of only 5 guys to play in 162 and 1 of 7 to play in at least 160. Kind of surprised with things the numbers are so high….
While discussing 2017 Joey Votto, I think it is necessary to point out his remarkable turn-around on defense. 2016 was one of his worst defensive seasons of his career posting a -14 DRS and a -7 UZR. He bounced back in a big way in 2017 posting an 11 DRS and 6.6 UZR. I know these particular stats can be noisy from year to year. But it just seems like something else was going on there.
Also, worst baserunning value in baseball. That was kind of weird. You don’t think of Votto as being a terrible runner.
If we know anything about Votto that means that next year he will put up elite baserunning marks.
As a guy who watched a lot of Reds baseball, third base coach Billy Hatcher sent Votto to his demise at home plate like 6 times I think. Each of those times, it wasn’t close. His numbers probably would have merely been “bad” instead of “horrendous” with a competent 3rd base coach.
In Toronto, we understand this completely. 3b coach Juan Rivera is basically a windmill. He sends people incorrectly so often that he probably has -5 WAR all to himself, including such sprinters as Kendrys Morales who has trundled into an out at home plate on several occasions.
I’m mystified as to why Rivera is still there. It isn’t that difficult to see if someone’s going to make it or not, so how can you be so wrong so often?
I would love to see an analysis by team of baserunning, split by base for 1st and 3rd base coaches. This seems doable, although perhaps time intensive.
So if Votto or Morales isn’t thrown out at the plate he is more often than not going to die there anyway. The 3rd base coach should be a “windmill”, at least in most two out situations. While many things enter into the coaches decision, a 50% success rate, while looking bad by itself, is usually better than the runners chance of scoring during the ensuing play, even with average hitters coming up.
Problem is, a lot of these are more like a 10% success rate. By “not close” I mean, thrown out by 15 or so feet. As long as the ball doesn’t get by the catcher, the runner is out.
Agreed, in a lot of 2-out situations, you gamble. But Billy Hatcher doesn’t ever seem to know how many outs there are; his bad sends are seemingly random.
Per b-ref, Votto was thrown out at home 3 times. Basically right in line with his career numbers. His real problem is he only took the extra base 11% of the time. That’s really, truly horrible. He either had a really bad year reading teammates’ hits when on base or his teammates hitting behind him only hit line-drive rockets when he was on.
Compare that to Mookie Betts who took the extra base 68% of the time.
My penchant for hyperbole must have taken over. Thanks for looking it up.
I think a honorable mention goes to Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel, who each put up all-time great RP seasons (in a year of plenty of eye-popping bullpen performances), and yet managed to have their seasons be so great that it’s virtually impossible to choose one over the other.
1 thing that’s interesting- the number of saves down this year league wide. Dwon from 1276 last year(2nd most to 2015 with 1292) to 1179 this year(2nd fewest ever in 30 team era- record is 1178 set in 2000).
Meanwhile, I wonder if something has changed in closer usage pattern. Only 3 players had 40+ saves, the lowest total since 1997.
And Wade Davis was 10th in the majors with 32 saves. That’s the fewest saves for someone who finished 10th in the majors since 1992 (strike seasons excluded).
Looking at BR play index right- this year had the most games in the 30 team era of a MOV of 5 or more runs. Had 733 such games(out of 2430 total). Last year had 656.
You take it to 4 runs. 1018 such games. Last year had 932. So a lot more blowouts this year compared to last year- which would reduce the number of saves.
This year with only 646 1 run games. 3rd fewest in the 30 team era. Down from 686 last year. And only 182 extra inning games this year- fewest ever(tied with 2005) in 30 team era. So I think all of these numbers explain the save drop.
With Kimbrel, if he has this year last year with the Red Sox- he may have won the AL Cy Young quite frankly.
How about Chad Green? Is he the poster child for the new fireballing multi-inning reliever?
He might be a prelude to that fully emerging in a year or two. We definitely saw signs of that this year – good call.
Judge symbolized another extraordinary aspect of this season: the roller coaster. He went from the best hitter to one of the worst back to the best. The team equivalent of this was the Dodgers, who went from challenging the all-time wins record to one of the worst losing stretches by any team, to back in control. There was also Cutch, who began the season looking every bit like the player the Pirates couldn’t unload; caught fire and hit as well as he ever has for a while; then returned to his slump.
There were other players who had a big move in one direction only: Machado, Buxton, Thames.
I would nominate Robbie Ray as the example of extreme pitcher strikeout rates. We knew Sale could strike out a ton of guys and be a highly effective starter, but we didn’t know that about Ray.
We knew Robbie Ray could strike out a ton of guys, we didn’t know if he could be a highly effective starter.
I love his playing style! Browse this page to see the results of the last game!
Does Paul know that he married a bot?
That’s his mom. Have you seen him hit? Dude’s at least half robot, man.
Half man, half robot man.
“Julio Urias wished he would have just needed TJ; the recovery rates for his anterior capsule shoulder surgery are not nearly as promising.”
I haz a sad.
“On May 17th, [Freeman] was hitting .341/.461/.748, good for a 203 wRC+. Then Aaron Loup hit him with an up-and-in fastball that broke his wrist. He would return six weeks later, but wrist injuries are notorious for lingering, and Freeman hit “just” .290/.375/.507 after returning from the disabled list. A season that looked like it might establish Freeman as a contender for best hitter in baseball was cut short by an errant pitch, and we’ll never know what Freeman could have done if he’d have stayed healthy.”
Or maybe, like Trout, he just regressed to the mean:
Trout before injury: .337/.461/.742, wRC+ 207
Trout after injury: .285/.420/.552, wRC+ 164
You would not normally expect to see the words “regression” and “164 wRC+” together, at least not in that order.
Mike Trout had a what could have been season too and he is Mike Trout, I know we get fatigued but he is still the best player in the game and had arguably his best year, even shortened,
I wonder if we’re going to get to a point where it would make sense to lower the innings threshold needed to qualify for the ERA title. Only 23 pitchers in the American League had enough innings to qualify this year.
and only 31 in the NL. Only 58 total in MLB.
But then one asks, what is the point of the ERA title?
I think it only matters in this: if people go to a leaderboard to vote for an award, and it is filtered on an arbitrary “qualified” limit, and that limit excludes perhaps the actual WAR leader (as it did for Kershaw last year, and looked like it might have for Trout this year), then the default limit is not a good choice.
Also, voting for awards based on rate stats isn’t a great choice because then you have to figure out in your head how to weight playing time.
The nice thing about the batting average title qualification threshold is if someone is under, you can do the padding with “out” PAs and see if their rate stat is still good.
No such thing with pitching rate stats, because there is no floor. You could be Kevin Jarvis (sorry Kevin if you’re reading).
Judge obviously more embodies baseball’s massive power surge, but I’d also shout out Cody Bellinger. The NL and AL rookie home run records were both broken in the same season. That’s nuts. And while Judge embodies the new freakish athlete in baseball, I think Cody well sums up the changing approach of hitters. Of course, the change in ball has some role, but as someone who watched a large portion of his homers, I can say that there were very few wall-scrapers. Really, you just watch his swing, and you can see that he has essentially two goals: hit the ball in the air, and hit it as hard as possible.
If Judge is the change in the player pool, and Ramirez is the change in the ball, the Bellinger is the swing change.
There’s no doubting the claims of these guys to being definitive players, but I think it’s fun to look a little lower on the WAR scale.
Byron Buxton got a huge BABIP swing from first half to second, but more importantly he got the ball off the ground more. He stopped walking entirely, but he still moved his OPS from .594 to .893. Hit it hard in the air and play great defense and you can succeed. His two halves showed the difference between being an athlete and having an approach.
I wanted to go with someone like Ryan Zimmerman for the power spike story, again just because he’s lower on the WAR list and I like when FG highlights interesting cases down there, but yeah, I think Ramirez is perfect for it so we’ll just leave that one as is.
The most interesting pitching stories to me were about players leaning into their best pitch instead of trying to broaden their arsenal. Trevor Bauer didn’t lead MLB in strikeouts, but he did strike people out for the first time by embracing his great curve like never before. He gave up more home runs than ever but still had his best season ever. Scott Alexander became yet another reliever succeeding with basically one pitch, turning himself into a poor man’s Zach Britton by pitching how Britton pitches, going from 70% sinkers to 90% sinkers. I expect to see more and more of this.
Didn’t have to read very far into this writing to realize how lame it was.
Your approach is to take the obvious choices and then still distort and miss represent the situations that made for their success.
If it is required writing for “an end of season piece” then at least make it worthy of the season defining title.
You get my vote for Miss Represent of 2017.
you could argue your point; but no, resort to a cute phrase. Guess you’ve been saving that one, eh?
Great article. Aaron Judges’ great season seemed more polarizing than any. Just 10 years ago 208 strikeouts induced a giggle from anyone reading off the page. Managers protected players from that special number
Also glad someone mentioned Mike Trout, as baseball looked to establish other stars. It can’t be ignored what the best player in the game produced (even after breaking his thumb) over about 2/3 of a season.
Sale did have the 3rd highest K% in the history of MLB. However, when it is put into perspective with each season’s league average K%, it is only the 187th best all-time among qualifying pitchers. Sale’s 36.19% K rate against MLB’s worst ever 21.64% league average is only 67.22% better.
Even if you limit it to after 1968 (when mound was lowered) Sale’s 2017 season was only the 75th best. After 1968 there where 17 times a pitcher doubled the league average. Randy Johnson and Nolan Ryan at 5 each accounted for 10 of those. Pedro and JR Richard had 2 each. The remaining 3 times were done by Dwight Gooden, Mario Soto and Frank Tanana. 1999 Pedro had the highest at 128.50% and 1984 Gooden was close behind at 124.07%. The top 5 round out with 2001 Johnson, 1976 Ryan and 1979 Richard.
The highest of all-time was 1924 Dazzy Vance at 209.98%. His K% was 21.46% while the league average was only 6.92%. (K% data not available before 1916).
yeah the Sale season while really good to me is hardly one of the most dominant in MLB history. Especially when you factor in like you did the league K%. And the performance when he didn’t strike guys out. I mean when Sale didn’t strike you out- you batted .340 against Sale. By comparison, when Kluber didn’t strike you out- you batted .302 against Kluber. Gooden in ’84 .308. Pedro 99 .282. There’s more to pitching than just striking guys out.
I really don’t get the absolute love affair with Sale. He had a really good season. But is it one of the most dominant ever? No chance.
Take away strikeouts and walks (too lazy at the moment to look up sacrifices), and batters hit .330 against Sale in 2017.
Kluber (2017)- .296
Pedro (1999)- .330
Pedro (2000)- .255
“There’s more to pitching than just striking guys out” seems like the kind of thing people said 10+ years ago before we had a better understanding of how success and failure on balls in play works out. While it isn’t the full story, we’ve learned that K%, BB%, and HR% tell a lot of the tale of what the pitcher had in his control. For Sale, that meant 36.2%, 5.1%, and 2.8%, respectively (for 1999 Pedro, they were 37.5%, 4.4%, and 1.1%). Yeah, not among the most dominant ever when context is factored in, but pretty darn good.
but not the best of this year…. Kluber was 34.1%, 4.6%, and 2.7%. And Kluber’s walk total had 2 IW- you take those 2 out, and it’s 4.4%. So Kluber better in 2 of those 3 categories. FIP is real close to being tied- a difference of .05- but you take those 2 IW out(talk about something out of a pitchers control)- and the difference is .02.
And sorry but to act like you can totally discount balls in play is comical. K’s, bb, and HR may tell a lot of the story, but it sure as hell doesn’t tell the entire story. I mean- Kluber has a 24.4% soft contact- and only a 28.9% hard contact. Sale had 18.5% soft and 29.7% hard. That’s going to impact the results.
All in all, it’s easy as heck to see why Kluber will win the AL Cy Young award going away. The advanced metrics basically paint a tied picture, and everything else favors Kluber.
Wow, that Dazzy Vance season…somehow I’ve missed that over my entire life! I have a new favorite.
How do you strike out 262 batters when the #2 SP goes for just 135, and #3 for 86! Vance accounted for almost 8% of ALL strikeouts in all of the NL that year.
Just because numbers are fun – take the average team’s HR total, and apply it for 8 teams (the same as the number of NL teams at that time). Vance’s strikeout dominance would be like a hitter popping 125 HRs. Yum!
Did any of these players define 2017 as much as the juiced ball? That thing was everywhere.
Fun column.
But calling Sale’s season one of the most dominant in MLB history seems ridiculous.
Even by Fangraphs’ (run-ignoring) WAR, and narrowing the field to the last 30 years, Sale comes in 28th in WAR and 17th in WAR/180 IP. (And please don’t tell me to read the Jaffe article; the claim appeared in this one.)
This is one of several comments picking at that particular line in the piece, and I certainly understand the point, but I think you and Cameron are referring to different things. The WAR rankings and the contextual K rate info are useful for understanding how much better Sale was/is than his competition among pitchers. But in the context of the original piece, I read that to mean he was dominating hitters. And he clearly was. Even during an era in which hitters are accepting more strikeouts as a fair tradeoff for driving the ball more, the ability to strike out hitters remains the number one way to be a dominant pitcher. And Sale was did it at a pretty historic rate. The high K rate was dominant; every third batter who stepped in had to go sit back down. He just blew fools away, Randy Johnson-style. Watching him feels a lot like watching Johnson, and that feeling is “Nobody can touch him, it’s not fair.” That’s dominance.
But I also think, maybe more importantly, his dominance isn’t why he was on the list so much as it simply positioned him to be a good symbol of the 2017 season. He’s not here for being so much better than everyone else, but because his particular way of being better embodied the 2017 season so perfectly: lots of Ks, and being the workhorsest of all workhorse starters despite not throwing all that many innings. That’s some defining stuff about this season!
2 other guys struck out over 1/3 of the batters they faced- Scherzer and Kluber. And opposed to Sale, they got you out when they didn’t strike you out. Sale wasn’t that far ahead of those 2 there at all.
Also where I think Kluber was more dominant than Sale in particular is when he saw good teams…. look at this comparison…
Kluber 4-2 1.93 60.2 ip 11/78 bb/k .159/.207/.285 .492 ops 6 hr allowed
Sale 2-4 4.64 54.1 ip 16/77 bb/k .249/.307/.411 .719 ops 8 hr allowed
Sale did a lot of his damage against bad teams. Against the good teams while yes he struck out a lot- he also gave up quite a lot. Meanwhile, Kluber dominated those good teams.
I think Kluber would have been a far better example because his usage is something that probably going forward is what we’re going to see more and more. Kluber’s last 4 months had all of 3 pitcher of the month awards- and the month he didn’t win, he was 5th in fWAR. And opposed to Sale, he didn’t fade in August and September. That’s more of sea change in concept than anything that Sale did.
Granted that there’s not a definitive meaning of “one of the most dominant seasons in baseball history,” but no reading of that phrase that matters to me fits this year’s #6 spot in ERA-.
I can accept that Sale’s year was more valuable than that number alone suggests. I can’t accept that raw SO% is all that matters in judging dominance.
I took the top 400 total K seasons since 1901 and compared their SO% against their league’s rate. Sale’s 36.2% was +14.8% above the AL rate, which ranks 16th in this measure. His net SO-BB% ranks 8th by this measure. Those are great, but they’re ALL that marks his season as historically great. Run prevention still matters, especially since there’s no sign that Boston’s a bad defensive team.
Tell me this: Sale’s 2015 SO-BB% ranks 27th by this same method. But he had a 3.41 ERA and 86 ERA-. Was THAT also one of the most dominant seasons in history?
Sale’s a great pitcher, and SO-BB% is a very important stat. But I think Sale’s not quite as good as his SO-BB% suggests. And it bugs me that people compare him to guys like Kershaw, Pedro, and Big Unit. He’s not on their level.
Sale has put together a great 6 year run. by fWAR he is tied for 2nd in WAR with Max Scherzer. Behind only Kershaw- and ahead of guys like Kluber, Price, Verlander, Bumgarner, King Felix. I think what probably frustrates Sale fans is that he’s not gotten a Cy Young yet- and not even gotten in the top 2. Only 2014 did he even get 3rd.
Sale has had a weird resume. 2 of the 1st 5 years he had FIP’s of 2.57 and 2.73. The 2.73 year his ERA was 3.41 so didn’t get much love. The 2.57 year(’14) his ERA was great at 2.17, BUT he only had 26 starts and 174 innings. But then in the other 3 years- he outpitched his FIP(but not enough to make a difference).
You can make a great case that he’s been the best AL pitcher on the whole for the last 6 years. His career MLB ERA is #2 active right now and his career MLB FIP is #4 active right now. I think that’s why some of his fans are pushing so hard for him this year for the Cy Young. And there are some for awards that feel awards should be for who is the best pitcher/player(in case of MVP)- not who had the best season.
Sale is certainly great, and will probably earn his Cy Young soon enough. But I have no interest in season awards for who “IS” the best.
Among other problems, it’s highly impractical. What time span shall we consider for this judgment? “IS” Sale “better” than Kluber because he leads in AL bWAR over the last 6 years, even though Kluber leads over the last 3?
And if we’re just judging who “IS” the best … Kershaw will own the NL 6-year WAR lead next year even if he misses the whole year or gets dealt to the AL. Can we just give him the 2018 NL CYA now? Or how many games can Mike Trout miss and still get the MVP?
I think “best year” is the essence of the annual awards.
trust me, I agree with you 100%. Awards should be who the best guy was between April 2 and October 1. And that’s it. Nothing that happened before April 2 should matter one iota. Absolutely nothing.
Kluber and Sale both you could say defined 2017. Star pitchers who crashed and burned in the playoffs. Include Severino and those 3 who should be top 3 vote getters in the AL Cy Young pitched 8 innings so far to a brutal 18.00 ERA.