2019 Awards Thread

My questions for the NL CY is if Strasburg and Corbin are going to get votes, what a trio. Wouldn’t want to face them in the post-season.

Strasburg is def gonna get a decent number of votes. Beginning to wonder if he may rise up to #2 in the end, due to having a very excellent season along w/recency bias in terms of his past month (vs the performances of Scherzer and Ryu).

strasburg leads the majors in baseball prospectus WARP

Four Cy Youngs might never happen again!

But that's one area where usage patterns don't matter at all--there's got to be a Cy Young winner every year.

I was wondering, though--as starters pitch fewer and fewer innings, will closers again become more of a factor in Cy voting? If the main argument that sent them into exile is they pitch so many fewer innings than starters--certainly true when the gap was, say 250+ innings to 70--will the same argument hold if it's 170 innings vs. 70 high-leverage innings?

Semien MVP?

I've been saying all through this thread that Trout has it clinched, but a couple of days ago Posnanski said he's sure that Bregman will win. The main point of the piece was that, while Trout has lost three or four MVP votes he could've/should've won, he's at least lost every time to an MVP-caliber season--no Morneaus or Dawsons in there. He thinks Bregman will continue that pattern.

Verlander did almost everything he needed to do to clinch--300th/3000th strikeout, win, 12 K and no walks--but, what else, two of the four hits he gave up were HR, so he got dinged for three runs. I honestly think there's an opening for Cole to take it tomorrow if he throws up another 90+ Game Score-type start.

soon enough -- maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow -- we're gonna look back and wonder why trout didn't win like seven MVPs

not playing full seasons is going to be the story. bergman is a deserving winner this year

bregman

If Trout supplied more value in less time (not clear), it makes no sense to penalize him.

Catch-22: Houston's piling on runs today and Cole's pitching well, but in terms of what he needs to have a chance at the Cy, the extra runs may hurt more than help. He'll get the win, but I figure he needs eight dominant innings, and he'll probably be pulled after six.

cole with 10+ strikeouts in mlb-record ninth straight outing

bregman: 8.4 bWAR
trout: 8.3
semien: 8.1

WAR's great for narrowing the field, but once you have, and it's that close--surely within the margin of error--I'd discard it and look at everything else.

I would still pick Trout for MVP, despite the missed time.

and look at everything else

Including ballpark factors wrt Semien/Oakland Coliseum!

park factors are in WAR, right?

That's what I meant--WAR has taken park, position, etc. and determined that these three guys essentially provide equal value. So you look elsewhere in deciding your vote, things that aren't factored into WAR. I know I don't get a lot of agreement here, but in a close vote, I'd want to weigh when the player was at his best against, for instance, when the team took hold of a pennant race. Rendon was fantastic when the Nationals surged in August or whenever it was; I know Bellinger will likely win, but I think there's an argument to be made for Rendon. (And stepping into the breach after Harper's departure, that counts in my mind too.) In the AL, the fact that Bregman overtook Trout when Trout was hurt (and playing for a team going nowhere anyway), while Bregman's team had long since more or less clinched their division, that's an argument for Trout.

I know it drives some people up the wall when I post about such stuff. But I don't think that's any more specious than deciding player A deserves the award over player B because player A had a 0.3 edge in WAR (while player B might have had the edge in someone else's WAR calculation).

Interesting fact re. Semien - led the team in RBI as their leadoff hitter

clem, I don't think that's unreasonable, but to me breaking down by parts of the season gets a little too arbitrary -- all the games count. I am more ok with rewarding a player for playing on a better team actually, for the reason that more of their games were meaningful. but as you say, they provided equal value and you have to pick your tiebreakers somehow, and they're all imperfect

i think Trout wins, it's similar to clem's Verlander/Cole argument that Bregman didn't necessarily do anything absurd to set himself apart from Trout. I think it'll be somewhat close, though maybe he suffers from being on the same team as a couple of HOF starting pitchers and a guy who seems on the road to being one, not to mention some other MVP-caliber batters.

I think Verlander edges out Cole but it'll be maybe even closer than the MVP race.

DeGrom and Bellinger seem like total locks in the NL.

is Bellinger really that amazing a fielder to boost his WAR so much? Yelich has Cody (and the rest of the NL) handily beat in AVG, OBP, SLG and OPS+, way more SB and only trails him by 3 home runs. this would look like an easy choice for Yelich, until you hit WAR.

I saw him make a helluva throw/assist vs Mets.

I think you may be forgetting that Dodger Stadium is a "pitcher's park" (still, I think).

This is very hard for me to type, because I know it is a controversial metric that will get a lot of blowback on here, but the ILB Fantasy League rates Yellich's 2019 > Bellinger's.

For direct comparison between player seasons, raw counting stats (and basic rate stats) aren't helpful. Gotta keep those Rockies hitters away from the hardware.

I didn’t realize how big the bref war gap was between Yelich and Bellinger.

ah - park factor was something i hadn't considered. tho, doesn't OPS+ account fo that, or am I mistaken?

It does.

High school counsellor voice*

There are no wrong answers

... or they are *all* wrong!

my calculations find that greg garcia is once again the MLB leader in WAR, once adjusting for team-playerness and grit

some discussion here of defense in comparing trout and bregman (none of it definitive, of course)

(Given how well we can measure defense, Mike Trout’s 0.1 WAR lead over Alex Bregman is not large enough to be the foundation of an argument to give Trout the MVP over Bregman.)

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) October 1, 2019

I **love** how Eno confuses "well" with "poorly" in his first tweet.

Top NL outfielders by defensive Win Shares:

Victor Robles - 4.9
Lorenzo Cain - 4.3
Cody Bellinger - 4.3
Harrison Bader - 4.0
Kike Hernandez - 4.0
Kevin Pillar - 3.9
Ronald Acuna - 3.8
Harold Ramirez - 3.7

Yelich is 2.4. You have to divide Win Shares by three, so the difference between Bellinger and Yelich (1.6) is basically a half Win Share.

Strike Hernandez from that - he earned a lot of his playing second base this year

is Bellinger really that amazing a fielder to boost his WAR so much? Yelich has Cody (and the rest of the NL) handily beat in AVG, OBP, SLG and OPS+, way more SB and only trails him by 3 home runs. this would look like an easy choice for Yelich, until you hit WAR.

― FRAUDULENT STEAKS (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Tuesday, October 1, 2019 12:55 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

he’s a freak athlete, the guy plays first base and also plays a great centerfield, it’s p nuts

I thought that was only a thing in OOTP baseball! Obviously I need to watch a few dodger playoff games

Players selected Gerrit Cole, Lucas Giolito and Justin Verlander as finalists in the American League and Hyun-Jin Ryu, Mike Soroka and Jacob deGrom in the National League in voting for Outstanding Pitcher honors in the 2019 Players Choice Awards.

— Brian McTaggart (@brianmctaggart) October 16, 2019

maxless

not necessarily surprised at no Max, but somewhat surprised that Strasburg or Flaherty didn't wind up in his spot.

how do we justify Soroka over Strasburg and Max?

MLB jocks

they aint too smaaaaaht

giolito and soroka seem like 'good narrative' picks, although they could also have gone with minor or lance lynn

I didn't know Tom Tango had a formula to predict Cy Young winners: (IP/2 - ER) + SO/10 + W. Couldn't be simpler. Even there, still a toss-up, but he does give Cole a slight edge.

Cole -- 99.8
Verlander -- 98.5

Do you mean subtract the walks?

I cut-and-paste that from Tango's site...you would think so, yeah.

Wait a minute: W = wins. As Tango says, he's trying to predict the winner, not determine who deserves the award, and by his estimation, wins still carry a little weight--about 10% of the total in his formula. Here's what led me to the formula:

http://www.billjamesonline.com/youll_ryu_the_day/

One of the things I like about the formula is that, although it doesn’t weigh wins as heavily as other formulas ( which certainly reflects the trend in voter preferences), it doesn’t entirely dismiss them either. It recognizes that wins still carry some weight with some of the voters, and can help sway some votes if pitchers are close in other regards. I think that’s reasonable – clearly wins don’t mean as much as they used to in winning the Cy Young Award, but they do still mean something. deGrom was able to win the award in 2018 despite a modest win total because his ERA was light years better than everyone else’s, but if it was closer, you can bet that his lack of wins would likely have become a bigger factor.

i'm sure noted hockey fan tom tango is just having fun with stats but we could also . . . just wait for the results

On Monday, MLB announced the six candidates for AL and NL Comeback Player of the Year. The list includes Lucas Giolito, Hunter Pence and Jorge Soler in the AL and Josh Donaldson, Sonny Gray and Hyun-Jin Ryu in the NL.

i'll take giolito and gray