Well, yes. I think Scott Rasmussen is a good example of that. But the people who are determining these complex formulas for determining who is good value and who's not are not pushing an agenda. They aren't using anything other than what players did. One of the guys who started this was doing it as a hobby and working for NOAA.

Skepticism about advanced metrics isn't bad. They go through plenty of trial and error and the whole field is constantly evolving. But the flat-earth mentality about them *is* bad.

Funny you should mention Scott Rasmussen.  I had never heard of him either until TK's post and I just got through watching a very small part of an interview on C-Span Book T.V. with him.  I set the recorder for the rerun later tonight but I doubt I'll be able to stomach it.  He and his co-author seemed just fine but the interviewer is absolutely nauseating.

If I have any more to say on that topic, I'll use the politics thread.

artie_fufkin wrote:

"The paradigm isn't shifting anytime soon, but more efficiently-run teams would almost certainly equal better baseball."

The paradigm has shifted completely when a guy who won 13 games on a last place team and didn't pitch in a game that mattered all season is considered the hands down favorite to win the CYA.

When they change the definition of Cy Young Award winner to "best pitcher on a winning team" hopefully they just skip the charade and rename it the Yankee.

tkihshbt wrote:

Well, yes. I think Scott Rasmussen is a good example of that. But the people who are determining these complex formulas for determining who is good value and who's not are not pushing an agenda. They aren't using anything other than what players did. One of the guys who started this was doing it as a hobby and working for NOAA.

Skepticism about advanced metrics isn't bad. They go through plenty of trial and error and the whole field is constantly evolving. But the flat-earth mentality about them *is* bad.

I believe I implied a few posts back that the day would come when a computer would be a better judge of talent than a baseball man, so I'm not disagreeing about the last part.  But the paradox of any science is that the scientist always has an agenda and always has a conflict of interest.  At the very minimum the scientist wants to say, "Hey, my way works better than other methods!"  That, by itself, shouldn't bias the system to prefer one baseball player over another for subjective reasons, but typically there is more than one system in competition.  That's when the fun begins: anyone player/team/etc will tend to favor the system that makes him/it look better, and then come up with an elaborate post hoc explanation for why it IS the better system.

Max wrote:

artie_fufkin wrote:

As I mentioned earlier, I have no issues with a guy like Carlton winning the award when he puts up numbers. If Hernandez had won 20 games, I wouldn't have a problem with anyone voting for him. But 13-12 isn't a record that ought to impress anyone.

OK.  Forget what I said earlier, we NEED to revisit the "Win" statistic.  It is, I assert, the dumbest 'statistic' in baseball, possibly in sports.  For starters, it's a counting statistic, like K's or HR's, and tells us little about a players performance because it isn't normalized, as in Win pct.  Nor is it corrected for team, park, etc.  But worst of all, it is an arbitrary measure, only loosely related to team wins (the only counting statistic in baseball that matters) with a perfectly silly definition. 

So, while I have no problems with someone arguing that an award should be preferentially given to a player on a contender, you could do a much better job of supporting that argument than using Wins.  It is so old fashioned that it would be like giving a student an A in an English Literature class because that student got the highest score on a spelling exam.

I must not be expressing myself well. Again, I'm not saying the Cy Young Award should be given to the pitcher who wins the most games. It's a component. What I object to is dismissing wins as unimportant. The point of playing the game is to win the game, not to accumulate the most strikeouts or the best ERA or having the best WHIP or WARP or VORP or whatever alphabet soup statistics are out there.
A pitcher who wins 13 games on a last place team does not deserve to win the Cy Young Award. I don't understand why there's even a discussion about it.

Last edited by artie_fufkin (11/01/2010 9:37 am)

I think the point that Artie is trying to make (and please correct me if I'm wrong) there's a difference between building statistics on a terrible team and playing in meaningful games as a member of a team that makes, or nearly makes the post-season.

I think I've mentioned before that I bowled professionally for a couple of years.  Probably the best analogy I could make is that it's a hell of a lot easier to throw strikes in my Wednesday beer league than it was to throw one when it determined whether I was going to have spending money the following week.

Regardless of the statistics, is Hernandez really the "best pitcher" when none of the pitches he threw after April had any real significance?  If your answer is yes, then he clearly wins the award.

It seems to me that there are two approaches:

1.  We can go with pure numbers approach and simply give the Cy Young Award to the pitcher who wins the most games, the Nolan Ryan Award for the pitcher with the most strikeouts, the Bob Gibson Award for the pitcher with the lowest ERA, and the Whitey Ford Award for the pitcher with the best overall performance in the World Series.

2.  Alternatively, we can have an award and call it the Cy Young Award, or the Best Pitcher Award, or the Most Valuable Pitcher Award and base it upon whatever factors each individual voter applying his own criteria but to be a qualified voter each voter must agree to be locked in a room for at least 4 hours a day with nothing but a pad and pencil and videos of games featuring pitchers who were not on the roster of a New York team for more than 50 games.

forsberg_us wrote:

Tonight we get Lincecum v. Lee part deaux.  Texas wins or goes home.

Will anyone actually watch?

I am , pitching duel into the 6th