Cy Young Awards thread

[buckweaver]

Ken Tremendous is not a sabermeric writer, sorry. He's a TV comedy writer who wrote some funny things about a stubborn baseball announcer.

This is what I mean by saying that I don't vouch for everyone who happens to write about sabermetrics on the Internet in the same way that no journalist should get lumped in with "scoops" from Bleacher Report.

Point me to something from Forman or Cameron or Tango or Lichtman or Wyers or Gleeman or plenty of other credible sabermetricians. Don't point me to FJM and say, "See? The sabermetric community (whatever that means) is closed-minded."

I'm not lumping in Bill Madden with Susan Slusser just because they both happen to be longtime baseball writers for newspapers. They're very different.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Ok, scratch that reference if you like. Continue to believe the sabermetrics crowd is based only in rational thought and the scientific method. You may want to check in with Evan Grant and see what his inbox looked like after his MVP vote last year.

Here is the BABIP column -- it was actually a FIP column by Jeff Fletcher, who has always seemed to me to be a new-age kind of writer. He argued that Lincecum should not have won the Cy Young and noted that the reason he did win was that he struck more people out. He didn't get more people out and he didn't allow fewer runs, but there was an assumption that he did more of it by himself while Carpenter relied on his fielding.

http://www.aolnews.com/2009/11/20/what-the-fip-cy-voters-still-missed/

I would like to see you address the last point of my previous post, that we are told by the creator of the measurement to disregard differences of one to two runs -- 20 percent or more.

The oWAR difference between Trout and Cabrera is 0.9. I have a very difficult time believing there is a full two wins of difference in their defense alone.

 

[buckweaver]

And if/when Cabrera does win, you can be sure he will be called an idiot throughout the Internet because of his vote.

That's because he doesn't defend it well. THAT's what gets mocked more than anything when it comes to "old school vs. new school".

Again, there are plenty of old-school writers who don't like WAR and don't get blasted for it because they argue their points well and don't attack everyone who doesn't agree. Buster Olney and Jerry Crasnick come to mind. Tom Boswell (who's actually pretty new-school in a lot of ways) is another.

I think you're being too kind to the sabermetric community in general as a bastion of open-mindedness. Dogma has taken root there too.

You clearly didn't read the hundreds of comments on Baseball Think Factory, Tango's blog, FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus and Baseball-Reference when Sean changed his formula for WAR earlier this year.

There is no set "sabermetric" dogma in WAR (or most other subjects): There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of different and often opposing viewpoints on these subjects. Everyone weighs statistical factors differently and has different ideas on what exactly should be taken into account, and by how much.

WAR is not settled as The One True Stat, and never has been. It's always been an estimation, it's always been a subjective estimation, and it's always been tinkered with. FanGraphs tinkers with their formula just like BBRef tinkers with theirs. And they use very different methods of computing it (FanGraphs relies on FIP for pitching WAR, BBRef on runs allowed.)

Please show me where the dogma lies. It doesn't exist.

Arguments happen every day on all of these sites because a LOT of people in the sabermetric community disagree on a LOT of issues.

 

[Tom Petty]

Silly thread, we all know that who ever has the most wins should get the Cy Young. Winners win god damnit and the award was named after the pitcher that won the most.

Well, no need for me to post on this thread.

well, winners do, ya know, win.
if they didn't win, we'd refer to them as losers.

 

[buckweaver]

Ok, scratch that reference if you like. Continue to believe the sabermetrics crowd is based only in rational thought and the scientific method. You may want to check in with Evan Grant and see what his inbox looked like after his MVP vote last year.

I refuse to accept that idiots who write e-mails to newspaper columnists are representative of ... anything. C'mon now, I worked in newspapers, too.

Continue to lump in real sabermetric writers like Dave Cameron and Sean Forman with stupid Internet commenters. That's totally open-minded.

In that case, am I allowed to lump in Bill Madden with zagoshe and old_tony? Please.

 

[LongTimeListener]

You clearly didn't read the hundreds of comments on Baseball Think Factory, Tango's blog, FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus and Baseball-Reference when Sean changed his formula for WAR earlier this year.

There is no set "sabermetric" dogma in WAR (or most other subjects): There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of different and often opposing viewpoints on these subjects. Everyone weighs statistical factors differently and has different ideas on what exactly should be taken into account, and by how much.

WAR is not settled as The One True Stat, and never has been. It's always been an estimation, it's always been a subjective estimation, and it's always been tinkered with. FanGraphs tinkers with their formula just like BBRef tinkers with theirs. And they use very different methods of computing it (FanGraphs relies on FIP for pitching WAR, BBRef on runs allowed.)

Please show me where the dogma lies. It doesn't exist.

Arguments happen every day on all of these sites because a LOT of people in the sabermetric community disagree on a LOT of issues.

Then, really, what in the world is WAR for? To say "these guys are pretty good and these guys are REALLY good, but we can't narrow it down much more"? Well, I and every other baseball fan can already do that between Trout and Cabrera, thanks very much. Based on what you just wrote, I don't see how you can even look twice at it in figuring out your vote.

This discussion just reaffirms my belief that WAR is as much of a guess as the eye test ever was. One of the commenters on your original link noted that last off-season, Pujols lost 2 1/2 points off his WAR -- from 2003.

It's gobbledygook.

 

[buckweaver]

Then, really, what in the world is WAR for? To say "these guys are pretty good and these guys are REALLY good, but we can't narrow it down much more"? Well, I and every other baseball fan can already do that between Trout and Cabrera, thanks very much. Based on what you just wrote, I don't see how you can even look twice at it in figuring out your vote.

This discussion just reaffirms my belief that WAR is as much of a guess as the eye test ever was. One of the commenters on your original link noted that last off-season, Pujols lost 2 1/2 points off his WAR -- from 2003.

It's gobbledygook.

Then ignore it!

Who gives a ****, really? I'm not trying to convince you to use it. I frankly don't like it much myself. I do like the components that go into it, and I think those components show Trout to be much more valuable overall than Cabrera (as does WAR itself, on both sites.)

If you want to use it, use it. If you don't, don't.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Well, OK then. As I don't have a vote, it won't make much difference either way.

 

[outofplace]

It makes a difference that some voters are using guesswork as "evidence."

 

[buckweaver]

I don't, either.

But I will hold steady on the opinion that FJM, Jeff Fletcher (whoever he is; Twitter says he works for the OC Register now, but he's flown completely under my radar so I have no opinion on him), and Evan Grant's readers are not at all representative of the "sabermetric community".

If Dave Cameron or Tom Tango or Aaron Gleeman — or, hell, even Nate Silver — ever consistently make those type of arguments, then I'll concede the point that the sabermetric community may be too dogmatic for its own good. But I don't see it — what I see every day is a LOT of vibrant, healthy disagreement among all of these people. That's the opposite of dogma.

The one thing maybe they all can agree upon? That people like Bill Madden are just yelling at the clouds when they write columns like that.

 

[Versatile]

Jeff Fletcher is a smart guy and veteran baseball reporter. He was at FanHouse. And I think you might recognize some of his work, buckweaver.

 

[Moderator1]

Jeff just started in Orange County. Last week. Before FanHouse, he wrote baseball in northern California.

 

[buckweaver]

That's fair. I'm not trying to say he's not good; just that he's flown under my radar, like thousands of other writers, I'm sure.

Can't recall his work ever being posted here, and definitely not on Baseball Think Factory or some of the other sabermetric sites, that's all.

But that FIP column was good. He made a strong, well-thought-out case for Carpenter and, as someone who grew up watching the groundball-loving Greg Maddux, I can appreciate the argument that strikeouts are not the be-all, end-all to pitching dominance. (I do think he glossed over the IP problem, since 32 innings is a huge difference between pitchers — Lincecum made 4-6 more starts.)

I still wouldn't say BABIP is used by anyone credible in the sabermetric community as a major factor in award voting. It's really not that important of a stat, despite the fact that quite a few non-sabermetric people latched onto BABIP as a high holy sabermetric number for a while only to become disillusioned that it didn't tell you more than ... what it's trying to tell you. BABIP has been refined over the past 10 years just like WAR. We now know that certain types of pitchers — for instance, knuckleballers like Dickey — DO have an ability, a talent, to keep their BABIP consistently lower than average. Not the case for power pitchers, as Verlander is finding out this year. Major league hitters will always be able to time a great fastball and hit more line drives ... eventually.

Anyway, you can probably find plenty of Internet bloggers (or professional contrarians like Keith Law) who will cherry-pick any stat they can find in support of the pitcher they like. But they don't know what they're talking about and shouldn't be taken as representative of the sabermetric community any more than loudmouth Jason Whitlock should be taken as representative of all sports journalists. He's a fool with a platform.

 

[Dick Whitman]

It's really not that important of a stat, despite the fact that quite a few non-sabermetric people latched onto BABIP as a high holy sabermetric number for a while only to become disillusioned that it didn't tell you more than ... what it's trying to tell you.

I think a lot has to do with the BABIP chapter in "Moneyball." It was, as Lewis passages are apt to be, quite persuasive. And also did not leave any room for nuance whatsoever.

 

[deviljets7]

Buck,

I don't get to read as many sabermetric articles as I used to so I might be wrong on this one, but for me the issue with BABIP and some other stats is how they are used.

I think the stat is very valuable and useful for predicting the future and examining the likelihood of a player maintaining his performance. That said, I do think it is unfair to us it as a way to credit or discredit a player's performance when it comes to award voting, because someone feels the result "should" have been different.

 

[buckweaver]

It's really not that important of a stat, despite the fact that quite a few non-sabermetric people latched onto BABIP as a high holy sabermetric number for a while only to become disillusioned that it didn't tell you more than ... what it's trying to tell you.

I think a lot has to do with the BABIP chapter in "Moneyball." It was, as Lewis passages are apt to be, quite persuasive. And also did not leave any room for nuance whatsoever.

Good call. Our understanding of BABIP has evolved quite a bit since then, but you're right, Lewis beat that dead horse like Ike Turner.