Inexplicably, MLB announced today that the morons that make up the BBWAA selected Cleveland’s C.C. Sabathia by a wide margin as the American League Cy Young award winner today over Boston’s Josh Beckett. Sabathia got 19 of 28 first-place votes and finished with 119 points, while Beckett only landed 8 first place votes and 86 overall. Anaheim’s John Lackey got the other first place vote.
Before anyone points out that voting on this award concluded well before Sabathia spit the bit in the playoffs and Beckett continued his dominance, let’s do a little side by side comparison of the two pitchers through the regular season:
C.C. Sabathia: 19-7, 241 IP, 3.21 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, 209 K, .259 BAA
Josh Beckett: 20-7, 200 2/3 IP, 3.27 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, 194 K, .245 BAA
Beckett has a better overall record by 1 win, virtually the same ERA, the same WHIP, but his batting average against is 14 points better than Sabathia’s and while he tallied 15 less strikeouts than Sabathia, he also pitched 40 1/3 less innings. Sabathia averaged 7.8 strikeouts per nine innings, whereas Beckett’s nearly a K per 9 better at 8.7 K/9. Pitching the same number of innings as Sabathia would’ve worked out to around 232 K on the season for Beckett. So how was Sabathia the more dominant pitcher this year? Simply put – he wasn’t.
Both had very good years, but Beckett’s was definitely superior to Sabathia’s. At least Beckett can comfort himself that while Sabathia may be making space on his mantle for his first Cy Young award, Beckett needs to find a home for the ALCS MVP award he won. I don’t think he’d chose to switch awards with Sabathia.
November 13th, 2007
Saw this one coming, but it still doesn’t justify it.
Horrible result.
November 13th, 2007
One voter — the NY Daily News’s reporter — explains in part his vote for Cy Young CC:
Beckett had 20 quality starts out of his 30 starts, 67 percent. Sabathia had 25 out of 34 (74%), Lackey had 24 out of 33 (73%), while Carmona had 26 out of 32 (81%). To me, that’s a big difference. Essentially, one out of every three of Beckett’s starts didn’t register as quality.
November 13th, 2007
Quality start isn’t a great measuring stick in my opinion. The definition of a quality start is an outing in which the starting pitcher went 6 innings while allowing no more than 3 earned runs.
To illustrate, a pitcher who allows 10 hits and 5 walks in 6 innings but allows only 3 runs due to some great defense or bad baserunning on the part of another team gets a quality start, while a pitcher who goes 9 innings and allows 4 runs on 5 hits does not.
Sabathia had a great year, but I heard it justified on ESPN talk radio tonight why C.C. won the award by the fact that “he’s more friendly” to reporters than Beckett, who is “cold and aloof”. Sounds like a great reason to base a vote on for the best pitcher in the league.
November 14th, 2007
“[B]oth had very good years, but Beckett’s was definitely superior to Sabathia’s.” Really? Not by all the stats and references made in the post above. Maybe I missed something, but from the stats you quoted here, from a completely objective POV (I couldn’t care less about either of these guys, or their respective teams), I’d call their regular seasons “incredibly similar” and their stays “nearly indistinguishable.” “Definitely superior” didn’t come anywhere near my mind when I read the comparison on ESPN before coming to SIMP to read this.
If anything, 40 more IP for Sabathia is the one stat where the two did differ significantly, and there, the ‘edge’ clearly goes to CC. So, I really don’t see how this is some travesty of justice.
Perhaps the voting shouldve been closer, but calling the voters morons cause they didn’t vote for your guy is just blind homerism.
November 14th, 2007
Borg, did you read my final comment where I mentioned how ESPN talk show hosts explained that Sabathia’s willingness to talk to the media probably swung more votes his way? Are you shitting me? You don’t vote for a guy because he doesn’t chum it up with a beat writer? How old are these writers? 11?
And what does pitching more innings (and coming up with 1 less win) have anything to do with a pitcher being better? I can go throw 300 innings if you want to give me a Cy Young Award! More innings pitched doesn’t equal a better pitcher. It just means you have Dusty Baker or some other pitcher killer for a manager who leaves you out there longer.
As for the writers being morons, let’s recall that these are mostly the same writers (since there’s one per city) who voted to give Rafael Palmeiro a Gold Glove at 1B in 1999 after he played only 28 games at the position. To ascribe any level of intelligence to the BBWAA is foolhardy. The body is clearly populated with morons, whether or not you agree as to Beckett’s qualifications over Sabathia’s for the Cy Young this year.
Lastly, my main complaint as I laid out in the first sentence of my post (and used as the hyperlink to the ESPN.com article) was the margin of victory. Braun vs. Tulowitzki for the NL ROY was a very close vote and it went Braun’s way. Had it been similarly close, I wouldn’t have the same issue I do with it now.
p.s. If we’re looking at strictly numbers, then why didn’t John Lackey get more love? An ERA .20 lower than Sabathia’s, same number of wins, and a QS percentage (if you like that stat) virtually identical to Sabathia’s. Why didn’t he get more love? There’s little rhyme nor reason to the BBWAA voting – I could write a book about this.
November 14th, 2007
Actually, check that – in my haste to throw the BBWAA under the bus, I ascribed the Palmeiro Gold Glove to them, when the voting on that award is actually performed by the managers. Mea culpa.
November 14th, 2007
I re-read your post three times, and to me, it appeared (and still does) that your issue was more that Sabathia won, and Beckett lost, and wrongfully so. Apologies if your ‘main complaint’ was the margin of victory. That didn’t come out to me in what you wrote. You do have a legit gripe there – the voting really should’ve been much closer, with stats as close as they had, and as successful of a season as their respective teams had.
However, I really don’t think you can argue that Sabathia didn’t deserve to win, that Josh “got jobbed,” or that Beckett’s regular season was “definitely superior to Sabathia’s” – you just can’t.
I didn’t see your comment before I posted mine (was posting from my Treo, late last night). If BBWAA are indeed voting because CC’s a nicer guy, or because Josh is perceived as a jackass, that’s indeed ridiculous. If that were even remotely true, then fine, call them the morons that they are. However, I have no idea whose speculation that was. A caller? An ESPN expert? A radio-show host? Or an actual BBWAA voter? Just ’cause someone who supports Beckett speculates on the radio, doesn’t make it true. If it did, we’d have Rush Limbaugh and his bag of blow-hard, bold-face lying spin-doctors running the White House… Oh, wait….
Maybe the issue should be that the CY Young Award should be voted on by more than TWENTY-EIGHT guys who are in some sorta self-aggrandizing club. If we got a few more peeps to write on SIMP, could we start giving out meaningful baseball awards??
November 14th, 2007
For what it’s worth, the ESPN baseball peeps (who I’d consider – at least – to be some of the country’s foremost experts on this subject, as they do this for their livelihoods every day), picked Sabathia – by a wide margin:
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3106401
ESPN.com’s choice (votes): C.C. Sabathia (14)
Others: Josh Beckett (4), Fausto Carmona (1), John Lackey (1)
That’s 14 out of 20, including virtually every big-name baseball guy ESPN has, such as Buster Olney, Jayson Stark, Steve Phillips, Tim Kurkjian, and even Red Sox-apologist Peter Gammons ALL picking Sabathia. Perhaps it’s a global conspiracy!
While I assume these folks made their picks at the conclusion of the regular season, they announced them just yesterday. Hmmmm…
FWIW, as well, they had Tulowitzki over Braun, 11-9. Huh.
November 14th, 2007
Maybe the issue should be that the CY Young Award should be voted on by more than TWENTY-EIGHT guys who are in some sorta self-aggrandizing club.
You hit it right on the head there Borg. That’s my real issue and when I look at things a day later, since perhaps Sabathia and Beckett were closer than I first believed.
However, I still put a lot of credence in winning 20 games as a milestone – all else being equal, the 20 game winner is normally the Cy Young award winner. But that’s my view.
In the end, the award rings a bit hollow for Sabathia given how he stunk it up in the playoffs, but the voting was done before the post season naturally.
As for the comment, it was made either by Orestes Destrada (sp?) or Jon Siebel around 4:30 pm last night on ESPN radio. From what I recall, I remember the talk show host not spinning it as his opinion but not stating it as absolute fact. I interpreted his comments to be that he has back-channel conversations with baseball writers and that perhaps one or two (or more) had indicated that they might vote for Sabathia over Beckett because they liked him better since all else was pretty much equal. Again, not hard fact, but given the history of this body (voting for Robin Yount for AL MVP over Rueben Sierra in 1989 or Mo Vaughn over Albert “Joey” Belle in 1995), it’s not a stretch to believe this did happen. To what extent, we’ll never know.