Playing 162 games in just 180 days, baseball players develop an extensive collection of individual statistics. These are helpful when, at the end of each year, Major League Baseball hands out distinctions such as the MVP and Cy Young Awards. The formula used when determining who receives these honors is not as black-and-white as that for divisional races. Each year, a few obvious candidates emerge as favorites, and it is about this time of year, in September, when we can't help but guess who will win.
Let's talk AL Cy Young. CC Sabathia boasts a 19-6 record as the staff ace of the New York Yankees' pitching staff. David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays, now sitting in first place, also has seen great success this year with 17 wins and just 6 losses. Price has the edge on Sabathia in ERA, with a 2.75 to Sabathia's 3.03. In addition, the aces are pretty close in strikeouts with 167 for Price and 179 for Sabathia. The two faced off in a Monday night game that eventually saw the Rays win 1-0 in 11 innings. They certainly are pitching like legit Cy Young contenders in the heat of a pennant race.
So which of the AL East hurlers snags the award? Price, because his ERA is better? Or will it end up with Sabathia - who will likely win 20 games - to sit on his mantle beside the 2007 award he won with the Cleveland Indians?
How about a pitcher who has a .500 record pitching for a team that's a mere 32 games behind first and is already mathematically eliminated? That's right, 24-year-old Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners has enjoyed success pretty quietly this season. King Felix has an American League-leading 2.39 ERA as well as a Major League-high 214 strikeouts. Hernandez could reasonably finish with 250 Ks with four starts remaining.
This shows that wins don't mean much at all when it comes to comparing pitchers. Sabathia and Price both play for teams with high-powered offenses that lead the majors in wins. As for run production, the Yankees and Rays finish one-two in all of baseball. It is no wonder why Hernandez is a measly 2-6 in games where he gave up two or three runs while Sabathia and Price are 8-3 and 8-5 respectively. The Yankees and Rays consistently provide the run support that Hernandez hasn't seen all year. Pitchers' wins have no relevance when discussing who is having the better year.
Running counter to the explainable discrepancy in records, Hernandez leads the league with 27 "quality starts." A start is dubbed "quality" if the pitcher has pitched at least six innings and has given up no more than three earned runs.
For obvious reasons, the quality start is one stat for pitchers that sabermetrics - the study of baseball statistics - prefers instead of wins. Other touted sabermetrics also favor Hernandez instead of Sabathia and Price. In Hernandez's favor, for example, is Fielding Independent Pitching, which was formulated to remove the abilities of fielders behind the pitcher out of the picture. Simply put, FIP measures how many runs a pitcher would give up, per nine innings, if he had fielders with abilities at the league average. So view it as similar to ERA and note that Hernandez has pitched to an FIP of 3.00 while Price did to a 3.46 and Sabathia to a 3.56.
The Cy Young Award will be voted on by the Baseball Writers' Association of America following the conclusion of the season. Will these journalists look past Hernandez and his .500 record to crown winners of close to or more than 20 games? Of course, it is these journalists who have glamorized the "wins" of pitchers over the years. But it is also the same group that gave Zack Greinke the award last year after winning only 16 games for the Kansas City Royals. Greinke's total was the lowest for a Cy Young award winner since 1994.
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