It's awards season in baseball, and that means it's time for me to suffer my annual bout of overwhelming frustration. The voters are notorious for basing their ballots on irrelevant factors, and through the first wave of awards, that certainly appeared to be the case again: Gold Gloves and Rookie of the Year honors were both a joke (I could write a column on those travesties alone).
But then came the Cy Young awards. The voters have always been partial to pitcher wins (ultimately a meaningless statistic, because it is so dependent on run support from the team and not necessarily how well someone pitches) and to players from winning teams. But this year, Zack Greinke -- whose Royals went 65-97 on the year -- and the San Francisco Giants' Tim Lincecum -- who amassed a "mere" 15 wins -- took home the honors.
Some people have taken this as a sign that the voters are getting smarter and that the criteria for these awards are slowly shifting from conventional (read: stupid) ones to more advanced, statistically defensible ones.
Sadly, that's far too much of an oversimplification. Because, of course, the voters couldn't actually get it right without upsetting some of the old guard.
The real controversy has come from the NL Cy Young voting, in which two non-traditional baseball writers (i.e. they write for Web sites) took part in the balloting. And those two ended up having a big impact.
Leading up to the voting, there were three pitchers that most writers acknowledged had a chance at winning the award: Lincecum and the St. Louis Cardinals' Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter. Each ballot includes a place for a first-, second- and third-place vote, so many thought it was just a matter of ordering the above three in a specific manner.
But those two crazy Internet writers -- Keith Law, who writes for ESPN.com and formerly worked in the front office of the Toronto Blue Jays, and Will Carroll of BaseballProspectus.com -- didn't agree. Both of them left Carpenter off their ballots and left even more people up in arms about this supposed tragedy -- which may have cost Carpenter the Cy Young.
Jon Heyman of Sports Illustrated seemed to be one of many that took exception to this. Among his "tweets" concerning the matter: "i dont mean to pick on the voters. but how do 2 of them leave chris carpenter off the ballot entirely?" and "a buck shot. nice. RT @miklasz Buck Martinez: 'I worked with Keith Law in Toronto and he doesn't have a grip on anything.'"
The thing is, Law does in fact have a grip on things -- and it's quite clear that he has a much better grip on the concept of "value" than do many of his peers.
Instead of Carpenter, Law put Javier Vazquez on his ballot in the No. 2 spot. Comparing the two pitchers, it's easy to see that such a move is quite justifiable, even if you don't agree with it. Carpenter had a lower ERA this year (2.24 to 2.87), but Vazquez pitched more innings in a tougher division and was significantly better at striking batters out.
On his ballot, Carroll instead chose to put Dan Haren, who had similar advantages over Carpenter: more innings, significantly more strikeouts against the same number of walks.
This isn't hard stuff to get. Pitchers can arguably control only three things: home runs, walks and strikeouts. The more batters a pitcher strikes out, the better he is, because he's not leaving his outs in the hands of his defense and ultimately up to chance ( and even if inducing weak contact is a skill, a strikeout is still more valuable). Further, the more innings a pitcher throws, the more valuable he is to his team, particularly if those innings are stellar.
I'm a guy that appreciates sabermetrics and I'm trying to learn more about them, but I'm far from being a real stathead. These concepts are not advanced ones; they're very simple ones that a kid in elementary school would be able to understand. It's just saddening that a lot of people who cover baseball for a living don't.
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