What Statcast Says About the National League Cy Young

Over in the American League, there’s a clear two-horse race between Chris Sale and Corey Kluber for the Cy Young Award. Both are head and shoulders above the rest of the league and both have very strong cases for the honor, depending on what metrics you prefer.

Over in the National League, that isn’t quite the case. Max Scherzer is the clear front-runner at this point, with a host of other pitchers behind him all trying to make an argument why they might have had better seasons. Clayton Kershaw has a lower ERA. Zack Greinke pitches in a much tougher park. Teammate Stephen Strasburg has a lower FIP.

Those are just the stats that measure outcomes, though. Let’s see what Statcast has to say about the sort of contact the other candidates are allowing to see if anybody has a real case against Scherzer.

First, a handful of stats on which we typically when evaluating pitchers. For the purposes of this post, I looked at the five pitchers who’ve produced an average of 5.0 WAR between FanGraphs WAR (which is FIP-based) and RA9/WAR (which is based on runs allowed). Apologies to Jacob deGrom, Jimmy Nelson, Aaron Nola, and Robbie Ray, who have all had good years, but didn’t quite fit here.

Max Scherzer leads all NL pitchers in WAR, is barely second in innings among those included here, and is the only pitcher to rank either first or second by ERA and FIP. He’s way ahead in strikeouts as well, but look at that BABIP. He’s the best among this group on turning balls in play into outs, but what if that isn’t all Scherzer? What if there’s actually been quite a bit of luck or good defense involved, and he’s not wholly responsible for all of those great numbers?

I’ll attempt to address that question in a moment. First, some other WAR-like metrics.

Again, this is why Scherzer is the favorite. He’s leading no matter who you ask. But back to that BABIP issue. How’s his defense? Here are the team metrics both for Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating as of a couple days ago.

We have three teammates, but that doesn’t actually seem to make the picture much more clear. By DRS, the Nationals are rated poorly; all three Nats receive a slight bump in Baseball-Reference’s WAR because of it. However, by UZR, the Nationals’ defense has been fine. In any event, we can’t really know from what kind of defensive performance any of the three pitchers has personally benefited, as each amounts to only one-fifth of the season and is subject to variation. Clayton Kershaw appears to have gotten a benefit from the Dodgers defense, but we don’t really know for sure. We can get a little bit closer to knowing using Statcast.

Expected wOBA (xwOBA) uses launch angle and exit velocity, along with walks and strikeouts, to arrive at an estimated performance for each pitcher. We can compare these xwOBA marks to their actual wOBAs to see if there are any discrepancies.

Based on xwOBA, not only is there nothing to indicate that Scherzer should be regarded as anything less than the favorite in the Cy Young race, there’s actual evidence that he should be doing better than the results have provided. Scherzer’s xwOBA of .243 is actually the best in baseball. It is possible that Clayton Kershaw has been slightly unlucky, as well, in some respects, while Gio Gonzalez has reaped some benefits. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should be mentally adjusting Kershaw or Scherzer’s ERA lower. Scherzer has a 80.4% left-on-base rate that has helped him, while Kershaw has an astronomically high 88.1% mark. Out of nearly 5500 qualified seasons since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Kershaw’s 88.1% LOB-rate is the second-highest to John Candelaria’s 88.8% back in 1977.

Taking away strikeouts and walks, we can see what kind of difference the pitchers have had on contact, including home runs. Below is wOBA and xwOBA when the batter hits the ball.

Max Scherzer is at the top again, and it appears he might have been a bit unlucky in this case. We see the same with Kershaw, and we see that Greinke has been hit a bit harder than the rest of the group. How much faith you have in a pitcher’s ability to control batted balls will dictate how much credence you want to give a stat like xwOBA, particularly here, on contact. We can remove home runs from the equation, looking at wOBA and xwOBA on balls in play, perhaps getting a better picture of how defense or luck might have played a role.

Kershaw and Scherzer again lead the way when it comes to the xwOBA for these balls, but here we see that every pitcher has benefited some from defense or luck. Gonzalez and Greinke have received the biggest benefit despite mediocre defenses behind them overall, while Kershaw — despite the best defense by the numbers — has received the least help. There isn’t really any way around it: Max Scherzer has been the best pitcher in the National League. The cursory look at the numbers on the top is supported by the Statcast numbers at which we’ve just looked. If you wanted to look at only Statcast numbers, Scherzer has been the best pitcher in the NL there as well.

I took a fairly rough route to create a wins above replacement based on xwOBA. This obviously isn’t a definitive creation, nor is it an absolute value. It doesn’t factor in opponent, for example, nor are home runs included at all. If you wanted a WAR metric that includes strikeouts, walks, and Statcast-expected offense based on launch angle and exit velocity, however, this is rough estimate. I included a small difference for AL and NL pitchers and just took innings divided by eight to get replacement runs. The rest was done by creating runs above average from xwOBA and then converting those runs to wins. The entire list is presented below without commentary.