The 2011 NL Cy Young award race is all but narrowed down to just two pitchers – Roy Halladay and Clayton Kershaw, two very deserving pitchers who each put together phenomenal seasons.
Halladay is the reigning champ, a veteran who has won the award twice, while Kershaw is an up-and-coming superstar looking to establish himself as one of baseball’s premier pitchers. (It should be worth noting that Cliff Lee and Ian Kennedy will each also receive consideration for the award, but the general consensus among experts is that it’s down to either Halladay or Kershaw).
Kershaw was voted by his peers as Most Outstanding Pitcher in the National League, and may very well get the honor as officially recognized by the BBWAA on November 17.
A quick comparison of their stats:
|
Name |
W-L |
GS |
CG |
SHO |
IP |
HR/9 |
BB/9 |
K/9 |
WHIP |
OPS |
ERA |
FIP |
WAR |
|
Kershaw |
21-5 |
33 |
5 |
2 |
233.1 |
0.58 |
2.08 |
9.57 |
0.98 |
.554 |
2.28 |
2.47 |
6.8 |
|
Halladay |
19-6 |
32 |
8 |
1 |
233.2 |
0.39 |
1.35 |
8.47 |
1.04 |
.582 |
2.35 |
2.20 |
8.2 |
For the season, Kershaw threw 3,469 pitches and Halladay threw 3,468, so comparing the two certainly won’t be difficult in the fact that they threw about the same number of pitches.
Kershaw gets the nod in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, giving him the inevitable pitching Triple Crown, just the 11th such pitcher in modern NL history to do so. Halladay has the advantage in durability (7.30 innings per start to 7.07 for Kershaw), walk rate, and two of my favorite statistics – FIP and WAR.
FIP is what a pitcher’s ERA should be given the amount of base runners he allowed and WAR is Wins Above Replacement, simply what a player is worth to his team over what a replacement Triple-A level player would produce.
These are two stats for Halladay I can’t ignore, particularly the substantial lead in WAR. Halladay’s total of 8.2 ranks far better than the 6.6 he produced last year. In fact, this rates as the best season of Halladay’s career according to WAR, even better than his first Cy Young season of 2003 (8.0).
Halladay also tops Kershaw in a slew of sabermetric win-related statistics, such as Win Probability Added (3.82 to 3.48), Run Expectancy above average (39.43 to 34.71), and Clutch factor (0.22 to -0.65). Halladay had an opponent’s batting average on balls in play against of .298 while Kershaw’s was .269, and Halladay suffered three Tough Losses while Kershaw only had one, meaning Halladay suffered worse luck on the year.
There’s the argument that Kershaw played on a worse team, so therefore he should be credited more for winning 21 games on a mediocre team than Halladay, who won 19 on a first-place Phillies team. I’ve never been a big fan of looking at a pitcher’s win-loss record to determine Cy Young placement, but if you want to count this argument, Kershaw does get a little bit of an edge, especially when you consider Halladay was given 5.89 runs of support per game and Kershaw saw just 5.52.
It seems like a back and forth argument, and giving the award to one but not the other isn’t enough to lose sleep over. The edge goes to Halladay in my opinion for several reasons. He has a better FIP and a much better WAR, and he has been slightly more consistent for the whole season (78 percent quality starts to 76 for Kershaw).
Giving the award to Halladay would make Kershaw the first pitcher to win the Triple Crown and not go on to win the league Cy Young award, which I think makes it pretty safe to say that when the BBWAA officially decides to vote, Kershaw will get the trophy over Halladay.
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man.. this is so disappointing.. to say halladay deserves it over kershaw is pretty much down right offensive. looks like people are starting to look purely at an advanced calculation over what is actually in front of their face. A lot of these people that emphasize saber-metric stats as the most relevant and fail-safe way to determine a pitchers performance live in a baseball world bordered somewhere between indoctrination and my 12th grade calculus class.. and most of them have probably have never done hypothesis testing or a simple confidence interval.. wins above replacement.. simply what a player is worth to his team over what a replacement Triple-A level player would produce. just read that sentence. its a joke.. im sure the baseball writers are sitting in a circle right now posing that question to determine the winner.. look at baseball in its most organic state, don’t hide behind these empty numbers.. sabermetrics breaks down the game into tiny sub-sets.. and spits out correlations.. FIP is what a pitcher’s ERA should be given the amount of base runners he allowed.. really? so a pitchers’ control of the outcome is relinquished as soon as someone is on base? so if a pitcher has given up an insane amount of base runners he deserves no credit for maintaining a low era.. yes i get it.. the more base runners allow the more mathematically inclined you are to give up more runs.. but guess what? i watch baseball.. i don’t watch it with a calculator and a protractor. what a pitchers era should be? give me a break.. that’s like having a stat in football that tells us the amount of interceptions a qb should have thrown given the average time he holds on to the ball before releasing.. it assumes ability levels are uniform.. its communistic.. im so sick of these people thinking they are sitting on a piece of evidence that renders their opinion irreproachable. all it is a fake justification.. ill give you a stat. how about this. kershaw had NOT ONE win in games where he gave up more than 2 runs. thats insanity. theres something that tells me something. something concrete and palpable. halladay is prob my second favorite pitcher in the game.. and he has deserved every cy young he has gotten.. but he doesnt deserve this one.. because he wasn’t the best. you’re probably wondering who my first favorite is. its not kershaw..
We are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I don’t think saying Halladay deserves it over Kershaw is offense… Halladay had a pretty good year, and I think most people will agree with that. It’s likely a coin toss. I guess you take one side and I take the other. I appreciate the comment though.
Kershaw has won the pitcher’s triple crown; the discussion should end there. But for any doubters, here’s the cincher: compare how the top three candidates Kershaw, Halladay, and Kennedy fared against the top twenty NL hitters and the rest of the league. Against the rest of the league: OPS allowed was .548, .547, and .601 for Ker, Hal, and Ken, respectively. Now, against the 20 hitters Hal’s was .912, Ken’s was .948, and Kershaw… .610!
I included Kennedy instead of Lee because of Lee’s 17 wins not being enough to beat Kershaw or Halladay. Although I concede that good arguments can be made to include Lee over Kennedy, it doesn’t change the fact that Kershaw should win.
http://theresastatforthat.blogspot.com/2011/10/cy-young-2011-simple-case-for-clayton.html
I don’t have a problem with you saying Halladay deserves the Cy Young, but I do agree with the first poster’s well composed argument. You say that Kershaw was “luckier” because his BABIP was lower. I disagree. First off, both Kershaw and Halladay had BABIPs that are VERY consistent with their career numbers. BABIP should be define by a pitcher’s averages, not a league average, to determine luck. Another elemenet of BABIP is the type of contact that was made. The distribution between LD/FB/GB were in line with career norms for both pitchers and so there is no indication that their BABIPs should be out of norm. Their BABIP doesn’t indicate Kershaw was lucky, it indicates that making contact with Kershaw is more difficult and thus balls put in play consistently have a lower success rate (see missed bats). Secondly see HR per FB rates. Halladay’s was HALF his career average and well below any number posted in his career, yet his line drive rate was virtually indentical to his career rate – that means he got “lucky”. At the same time Kershaw’s was a little higher than normal, but nothing to declare him unlucky. Consider also that 3 of Halladays No Decisions came when the Phillies bailed him out of a certain loss by coming back in the 8th or 9th inning while he himself suffered no blown saves. Kershaw had none of his ND result from his team rallying from certain defeat and had one of his wins horribly blown. Halladay also had 3 wins when he gave up 4 runs – it certainly helps to get a Win when you don’t even qualify for a QS! It also helps that Kershaw picked off 9 runners while Halladay has 2 pickoffs in his career. The WAR is a big deal in my opinion as well, but when you actually watched these two guys play all year I just don’t think there is any question that Kershaw was by far the most dominate NL pitcher in 2011.