Monday, October 19, 2009

Our 2009 Roy Halladay Award ballot (Formerly the Cy Young Award)

If you ask us, they should just give Roy Halladay the Cy Young award every year, and then let him decide which pitcher in the league he deems most worthy of winning the award. Because you know he'd always pick exactly the right guy, with his trademark precision.

Alas, that's not the case, so indulge us as we go through our charade of a shadow ballot for the Baseball Bloggers Alliance:

1) Stupid Zack Greinke of the Stupid Kansas City Stupid Royals and his stupid excellent numbers (2.16 ERA, 242 Ks / 51 BBs, 1.07 WHIP, 9.4 WAR): There's no question that we want to give the top spot on our ballot to Roy Halladay, but Greinke's numbers across the board are just thatmuch too amazing to ignore. Those are Bob Gibson or Pedro Martinez numbers, so it would be a touch hard to defend our homerism if we were to ignore his great season. (Although having said that, we would note that Greinke's numbers probably wouldn't look nearly as shiny if he toed the rubber ten times against the Yankees and Red Sox.)

2) His Roy-al Docness, Harry LeRoy Halladay, Toronto Blue Jays (2.79 ERA, 208 Ks / 38 BBs, 1.13 WHIP, 7.3 WAR): Truth be told, there isn't a single pitcher in the Majors that we'd rather have than Doc. And if at some point in the next few years, if he should go to some other division where he's notfacing the Yanks and Sox and Rays all of the time, or if he should go to pitch in the Quadruple-A National League, he'll post numbers that will make people nauseous. We'll give the nod to Greinke because we're having a hard time quantifying the difference between their stregnth of schedules. (So essentially, we can't give Doc the award because we suck at math. We're sorry Roy...we've failed you again.)

3) Felix Hernandez, Seattle Mariners (2.49 ERA, 217 Ks / 71 BBs, 1.14 WHIP, 6.9 WAR): King Felix's ERA and win totals were better than Doc's, but most of the other relevant numbers are on par and we really could give a shit about wins. Plus, Doc plays in a man's game in the AL East. So we keep Hernandez in third for this year.

Honorable Mention: Justin Verlander, Detroit Tigers (3.45 ERA, 269 Ks / 63 BBs, 1.18 WHIP, 8.2 WAR) : We're pretty certain that lots of bloggers will point to Verlander's value metric as justification for him to be on the ballot. But he just got too many easy innings this season in a pitchers' park and a pitcher's division. The big numbers he posted versus the White Sox, Cleveland and Kansas City don't impress us much.

Interesting fun facts!
Although the three non-Halladays mentioned above had good seasons, they were no match for the mighty offense of the Blue Jays this season. Each of them got two starts against the Jays this season, and posted some of their worst ERA numbers against the Toronto Nine:

Greinke: 5.25
Felix: 6.59
Verlander: 10.97

Who knows? Maybe the Jays were trying to put a dent into their Cy Young chances for Doc.

16 comments:

Paul McCartney said...

JET!!

Anonymous said...

Tao, you've labelled WHIP as another ERA in your post...

Tao of Stieb said...

Wow...once listening WHIP as ERA would have been bad, but every instance? That's kinda spooky.

Could be the muscle relaxants.

Ian Hunter said...

Of all the Cy candidates, would you be surprised if I told you that Greinke had the lowest run support (4.83 runs per game) and 4 "tough losses". His Win/Loss record is irrelevant in this case, I just wish that Doc was on top this year.

Ty said...

Grienke's unluckiness with run support might be even more extreme than Doc's. He had 9 no-decisions this year in which he gave up a grand total of 18 runs. That's NINE GAMES in which he gave up an average of 2 runs per game and didn't get a single win! Outrageous.

Darren Priest said...

Couldn't agree with you more. It's interesting to note that even the very, very best in mainstream media still value the WIN above almost everything else. (I am thinking of the PTI guys. They may not be the most intelligent, but they are beloved.)

plain_g said...

joooobbbbaaaa sucks

Catch the Taste said...

Did anybody catch the graphic during the ALDS on TNT that listed the top four candidates for AL Cy Young and they left out Halladay, and included CC Sabathia. The announcers didn't even mention Halladay.

On a related note, watching what Cliff Lee is doing with the Phillies, I would like to see Halladay get that kind of action. I feel bad wanting him to stay here in TO if he's never going to get to play in those big games.

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