He doesn’t have a lousy record.
He pitched to a 2.27 ERA, a 1.057 WHIP, gave up 7 hits per 9 innings, struck out 8.4 hitters per 9 innings, and 3.3K/BB, all while pitching more innings than any other pitcher in the league. His ERA+ was 174.
Those are great STATISTICS!!! His RECORD was 13-12!
While people who don’t know anything about performance or about baseball might attribute wins and losses to a pitcher’s record alone, the fact is that a W-L stat is really a team record, because it reflects team performance.
The fact that Hernandez pitched in front of a Little League offense is completely irrelevant to his pitching. And the record of his pitching was exactly what i told you before.
What you’re defining as “record” (pitcher wins/losses) is just another statistic… and a pretty lousy one, if you’re measuring usefulness of a statistic as giving true indication of actual performance.
By statistics that tend to objectively measure performance and/or skill, including “traditional” stats such as ERA, strikeouts, and innings pitched, Felix Hernandez was one of (if not the best) pitchers in the AL this year. The win/loss leader, C.C. Sabathia, ranks somewhere around the 10th.
Hernandez wins it and deserves it because his stats are so much better than anyone else’s. But even then, it wasn’t unanimous in terms of his 1st place votes. Voters correctly discounted his stats due to the fact that he played in an a low pressure environment in a weak division. Pitching is a combination of physical skill and mental control. His mental control was never tested, as his team was terrible and didn’t play a meaningful game. We’ve seen pitcher after pitcher put up superlative stats only to fail miserably in games that meant securing playoff spots or advancing in the playoffs.
Plus, complete domination of the mighty Yankees helped him with the voters. But again, he didn’t pitch a meaningful game (through no fault of his own). He is without a doubt an excellent pitcher, but I’d hesitate to crown him “king” just yet.
You could argue just as easily that Felix had the tougher environment since giving up even one run could, with the Mariners’ offense, mean the loss. That’s a ridiculous amount of pressure to be pitching under, day in and day out. By comparison, Sabathia had it easy - he could give up three runs and still reliably earn the win.
It should also be pointed out that the Mariners’ division includes the perennially-contending Angels and the Texas Rangers - the very team that beat your precious Yankees in the playoffs this year. Not to mention the fact that the Mariners have to face the Yankees themselves - something Sabathia did not have to do.
Regardless, there’s little if any evidence that being a “high” or “low” pressure environment is at all indicative of pitcher skill. I mean, just look at this year’s top playoff pitchers (surely you don’t get any “higher pressure” than the playoffs!). Roy Halladay and Tim Lincecum just made their very first playoff appearances this year, after spending their careers up to this year pitching for terrible teams. And both pitchers dominated in their very first games, Halladay throwing a no-hitter and Lincecum throwing a 14K complete game masterpiece. If “pressure” was such an important factor, you’d think both guys would’ve buckled under the strain. But as it turns out, just getting to pitch in the major leagues requires a level of concentration and ability to tune out distractions that makes the amount of “pressure” you’re getting virtually irrelevant. The stats back this up.
Similar to the Cano-Pedroia defense comparison, the real answer lies somewhere in between the quantitative and qualitative. There are plenty of examples of pitchers not performing as well in pressure-packed conditions as well. We’ve experienced this problem many times in NY, including twice with Javier Vasquez.
Cy Young voters have seen all the raw and adjusted stats, but a few still voted for C.C. and David Price. They’re clearly not convinced that Hernandez would perform as well in other places. Again, no right answer, and again, some leap of faith is required, whether or not you’re married to statistical algorithms.
The more I think of all this, the more I think that my upthread comparison to investment manager performance metrics is an appropriate analogy.
And yet every time, you err as far as possible on the side of the purely subjective and speculative.
The criteria for the award do not include the words “Who would have pitched the best as a New York Yankee?” I know it makes some Yankee fans feel better to think that a pitcher is only really tested when he plays in the Bronx, but the fact is that the Cy Young voters are supposed to be judging actual performance, not a whole bunch of “what ifs.”
When considering fielding, hitting and batter protection, I err on the side of the actual people that manage real professional baseball teams and those that actually vote.
And every time, you fail to consider the very obvious weaknesses of statistical models that can’t possibly account for the thousands of factors, and the correlations between those factors, or the mental part of the game.
What would Sabathia’s or Price’s won/loss records have looked like with the Seattle offense? The voters correctly ranked E.R.A over wins. They did the same thing last year with Greinke, and he pitched for a crappy team too.
Felix Hernandez had a better overall season than any other starter in the AL and absolutely deserves the award.
Anybody have any thoughts on the germinating playoffs expansion?
I think it’s a good idea. I don’t think 1/3 of the teams qualifying for the postseason is too many – it’s not much more than the 8 we have already. That’s probably the most I’d like to see, but that’s a slippery slope we can cross when we come to it.
But moreover, it makes the back end of the season more exciting. Now there’s little disadvantage to being the WC rather than the division leader. Adding a second WC team to each league also adds a huge advantage to winning your division – not only does the WC squad have to beat another good team just to get to the LDS, even if they win it still incurs wear on the players.
The most obvious problem is the lengthening of the season – I certainly don’t want the Series played any later than it already is. Selig says they can find time to shorten the season enough with day/night doubleheaders, but will that additional burden make late season play sloppy or risk substantial injuries?
The other downside I see is that the Yankees will never miss the post-season again as long as we live.
Thoughts?
–Cliffy
I suppose only Mariners fans listening to Mariners’ post-game shows would have heard it, but through the whole second half of the season opposing players and managers were emphatic in their praise of Felix, sometimes hinting and sometimes outright declaring that he was the best/most dominating pitcher in the AL.
I’m not arguing that there is no mental factor in pitching. The problem is that no-one can know how to account for it, least of all someone who is not actually, you know, a Major League pitcher. All we can do, in awarding something like the Cy Young, is look at what the pitchers have actually done while on the mound. While the stats might not tell us everything, they do tell us most things that we can reliably know (as opposed to fantasize about) regarding past performance, especially when it comes to pitching.
Even if we concede, for the sake of pandering to your irrationality, that there’s something about performing in “pressure-packed conditions” that can affect pitching, you haven’t yet made a case for exactly what those pressure-packed conditions might be. As someone has already pointed out, a pitcher who knows that his Little League-caliber offense probably isn’t going to produce more than two or three runs might, in fact, have more pressure on his that a pitcher who can rely on at least 5 or 6 runs from his hitters almost every game.
In games started by CC Sabathia this year, the Yankees scored 193 runs. In games started by Felix Hernandez, the Mariners scored 104. Sabathia had almost twice the run support, and collected almost twice as many wins. Isn’t that a coincidence?
Is it possible that Hernandez would fall in a heap from the pressure if he moved to New York or Boston? Maybe. But (1) i doubt it, and (2) it’s something we can’t know, and so has no place in evaluating how well he actually did pitch in an actual, real-life season facing actual, real-life Major League hitters. He might have pitched an ERA of 6.37 and a WHIP of 1.54 as a Yankee in the fantasy season you have going in your head, but until he actually does that for real, all we can judge is what he does with the opportunities he’s given.
The problem is that your whole schtick about high-pressure environments is subject to total and utter confirmation bias. If someone comes to New York and pitches really well, you conclude, “This guy can handle pressure-packed conditions.” And if someone doesn’t do well, you simply conclude, “This guy couldn’t handle pressure-packed conditions.” It’s perfect, because your wild speculation about the effects of a “high-pressure environment” becomes its own evidence as soon as someone fails in New York.
Thanks once again for ignoring my points entirely, just like you did in the Cano/Pedroia discussion. For the record, those voters whose judgment you value so highly gave Felix 21 out of 28 possible first place votes. Price, who certainly was one of the best in the AL this year, earned four. Sabathia, who was not, earned three. I don’t know what bar you’re setting for “not convinced,” but here in reality, we consider that a blowout.
Hernandez’s win is a strong rejection of win/loss as the dominant metric for pitching performance, and coupled with the CY wins of Greinke and Lincecum, also a complete rejection of the idea that good pitchers are those who play on “high pressure” teams.
Bad idea, IMO. One team in every four making the playoffs is plenty. I think that the presence of a single Wild Card is good for the game, but adding another is pointless pandering.
For example, this year it would have dramatically reduced the excitement in the NL at the end of the seasons. As it was, we had a scenario where any one of the Giants, Braves, or Padres could have missed the playoffs on the final weekend (with the possibility of one or even two single-game playoffs). But with an extra Wild card, all three of those teams would have been guaranteed a spot, and the final weekend would have been just for how. Even as someone who was rooting for the Padres, i don’t think that would have been a good thing.
I think that one team in every three making the playoffs is too many, and one of the reasons that i prefer baseball over other major sports is precisely that it rewards season-long quality with a better chance to win it all. While i might dislike the Yankees and their spending, the fact is that teams that win consistently during the regular season deserve to be in the playoffs. The playoffs themselves are something of a crapshoot, and i don’t think we should create more chances for the top teams to be eliminated in a short series. You might be right that the Yankees would make it in every year under an expanded playoff, but they already make it in basically every year anyway. And, because of the luck factor in short series, the Yankees would actually be less likely to win the World Series under an expanded playoff system.
I like it, but with significant reservations. Baseball has the longest regular season in sports and I like that it has meaning. Also, in baseball, the worse team wins a significant percentage of the time. The worst team will beat the best team in the game in a 7 game series about 15 percent of the time. The more teams in the playoffs the less likely the best team will wind up champion.
However, I do miss pennant races meaning something, and like the fact there would be a significant difference between winning a division and getting a wild card. I think I like a 1 game playoff first, but can deal with three, probably all in the park of the higher ranked wild card. I would also move the first round of the playoffs to 7 games from 5. I wouldn’t shorten the season and I would doubt anyone would agree to regular double headers, but if you shorten spring training a bit and get rid of some post season off days you can still end the thing in October.
If his record was 12 and 13 would it make a difference.? Would a losing record make a pitcher less palatable to Cy Young voters?
Rumor in my mail box: Galarragga and Boesch for Carlos Beltran. Any truth?
Well, there is one way we can sort of get at this question - look at how Felix pitches in Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park (surely, friend JackknifedJuggernaut can admit that those must necessarily be the highest pressure of high pressure situations for a lowly Seattle Mariner). And because he’s such a low-pressure guy, he must have done so much worse in those stadiums than at his home turf. Let’s see…
Felix Hernandez 2010 Ballpark Splits (from baseball-reference.com):
Safeco Field (16 games)
ERA: 2.06
WHIP: 0.966
K/9: 9.1
Fenway Park (1 game)
ERA: 1.23
WHIP: 0.682
K/9: 11.0
Yankee Stadium (2 games)
ERA: 0.00 (!)
WHIP: 0.706
K/9: 11.6
These are all traditional stats. And any sabermetrician will warn you of obvious small sample size issues. But hey, we’re not statheads here, we’re beer-swilling, math-hating, game-watching men, so whatever. Point is, Felix Hernandez pitched ridiculously well against the Red Sox and Yankees, even better than he did in Seattle.
This reminds me of a MAD Magazine feature from years and years ago, wherein they were trashing the NBA:
“The NBA plays an 82-game* schedule to determine which 4 teams don’t make the playoffs.”
- It was 82 games at the time; don’t know what it is now.
Bach during the Darkness of Harness era in Detroit, i used to sat the NHL schedule was 82 games with the point of eliminating the Red Wings from the playoffs. We were so bad that we were outscored when the opponent had a man in the penalty box.