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David Robertson named finalist for Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award

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Via the man himself, David Robertson has been named a finalist for the Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award, which is given annually “for outstanding on-field performance and off-field contributions to [the player’s] community and is one of the awards given during the Players Choice Awards banquet annually.” Robertson was elected as one of six finalists (one per division) for his work with High Socks For Hope, helping those effected by tornadoes in his hometown of Tuscaloosa.

The winner will be announced after the season. Curtis Granderson won the award in 2009, when he was with the Tigers.

Curtis Granderson named AL Player of the Month

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What does hitting .286/.423/.657 with ten homers, 29 RBI, and 29 runs scored from one arbitrary end point to the next get you? How about August AL Player of the Month honors, which Curtis Granderson took home today. Not too shabby. August was Grandy’s best month of the season in terms of OPS, but he produced similar counting stats in May and wasn’t too far off on the triple slash line. Congrats to Curtis, the team’s best player since day one.

The Rookie of the Year race

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In the last two weeks we’ve looked at the two big races for the American League hardware. In the Cy Young race, I noted that the contending three pitchers were Weaver, Verlander and Sabathia. At the time, I marked Sabathia as the favorite. This is likely no longer the case given Sabathia’s recent struggles and how well Verlander has pitched, but the three contenders remain the same. In the MVP race, I argued for the inclusion of Curtis Granderson into the top tier of contenders. Granderson’s hitting the ball as well as anyone in the American League not named Jose Bautista right now, but one thing holding him back is the low mark he has received this year from UZR. At the time I argued that I didn’t Granderson’s defense to be nearly this bad, and recently Keith Law has chimed in to the same effect. Granderson’s candidacy is still alive. Spread the word.

The logical next step is the Rookie of the Year award. Like the Cy Young and the MVP, the Yankees have a candidate for the award in Ivan Nova. In this race, though, there’s a clear lack of a frontrunner. Each contender has a unique shortcoming, whether self-inflicted, team-inflicted or voter-inflicted. The race promises to be a free-for-all down the stretch. How does Nova stack up against the other candidates, and does he have a chance to win?

The only reliever in contention for the AL Rookie of the Year is Angels’ closer Jordan Walden. Walden has appeared in 49 games this year and has 26 saves. Over 47 innings pitched he’s boasted a 9.57 K/9, a 3.64 BB/9, and a 3.31 xFIP to match his 2.87 ERA. By Fangraphs’ reckoning this performance has been worth 1.6 fWAR; Baseball Reference values this at 1.5 bWAR. Walden should see some support from voters who place a high importance on the save statistic. After all, Neftali Feliz did take home the award last year as a closer. Walden could be a strong candidate to win.

Another candidate is Walden’s teammate, first basemen Mark Trumbo. Trumbo’s game is his power. He hasn’t hit for average (.259) and he hasn’t taken very many walks (4.6 BB%, .297 OBP), but like Jim Thome he has mashed some taters. In 438 plate appearances, Trumbo has 23 home runs and a .488 slugging percentage, so despite his anemic on-base skills, Trumbo has still put together a .333 wOBA. UZR is a fan of his fielding so far and grades him out at six runs above average, giving him an overall total fWAR of 2.1. Baseball Reference is a little more bearish, grading him at 1.6 bWAR. Trumbo has been more valuable to the Angels according to these metrics than Walden has, but whether voters view it the same way remains to be seen. Trumbo is a one-dimensional player offensively, and this may scare away some voters. Perhaps if he manages to slug his way to 30 he’ll become even more desirable.

While it’s hard to believe he’s eligible, Jeremy Hellickson has pitched his way into the conversation for the award so far this year. This year Hellickson has thrown 134.1 innings of 3.30 ERA ball with a 10-8 record. He hasn’t really been as good as his ERA would suggest, though, and in a lot of ways Hellickson has taken a step back from the superb numbers he put up in a small sample last September. His strikeout rate of 6.03/9 and walk rate of 3.35/9 are both worse than league average and support an ERA in the 4.50 range, as his 4.30 FIP and 4.56 xFIP indicate. Given that Hellickson hasn’t racked up a ton of wins, doesn’t play in a huge market and won’t be on playoff team, it’s hard to imagine him taking home the Rookie of the Year award. I imagine he’ll bounce back next year with a vengeance.

One very strong candidate for Rookie of the Year is in Seattle, second baseman Dustin Ackley. A midseason callup, Ackley has accumulated only 211 plate appearances. He’s adjusted well though, hitting .286/.370/.481 with 5 home runs, good for a .372 wOBA and a 140 wRC+, best amongst rookies. He’s done all this while playing good defense, and so while he’s only played in 50 games(!), he’s already accumulated 2.3 fWAR and 2.4 bWAR. It’s an impressive start for Ackley, but it’s likely that his lack of playing time will hamper his campaign for AL Rookie of the Year. Had the Mariners called him up earlier instead of waiting until June 17, he’d likely be the clear favorite. Ackley’s candidacy then remains a perfect illustration of the question posed to Fangraphs’ readers on Friday. How do you value someone who puts up tremendous production in a shorter context against someone who puts up less production rate-wise but more overall production in a longer context? It should be an interesting question for voters to grapple with, because rate-stat wise Ackley is the best position player candidate in the class.

Michael Pineda may have the strongest statistical case for the American League Rookie of the Year, certainly as a pitcher. He’s thrown 141 innings of 3.77 ERA ball, striking out 9.1/9 and walking 3.13/9. His FIP and his xFIP are right at that level, 3.60 and 3.57, respectively. Pineda is hurt by a subpar win-loss record, currently 9-7, but at least he’ll have a shoulder to cry on in Felix Hernandez. Fangraphs values his performance at 2.3 fWAR, and Baseball Reference has him at 2.2 bWAR, higher than any other candidate aside from Ackley. Simply put, Pineda’s been fantastic. He’s seen his ERA regress to the mid-3 level supported by his peripherals in recent weeks, but it shouldn’t detract from his excellent overall season. Whether voters are able to look past this, him tiring down the stretch, and a mediocre win-loss record is another question.

It doesn’t really feel right to put Ivan Nova in the same class as Pineda and Ackley, but it’s possible it will happen this November when the ballots are revealed. This is largely because Nova is currently the owner of a 12-4 win-loss record, one that might lead you to believe he’s been better than Pineda. He hasn’t been. Still, Nova has been impressive, particularly compared to preseason expectations. He’s thrown 117.2 innings of 4.21 ERA ball, a number which aligns neatly with his 4.11 FIP and 4.31 xFIP. His calling card has been ground balls so far, and he’s gotten them nearly 55% of the time. His strikeout rate (5.28 K/9) and walk rate (3.21 BB/9) are both below league average, but it’s possible he’ll flash better strikeout ability down the stretch thanks to the addition of his slider.

At the end of the day, Nova’s statistical profile isn’t all that impressive when put next to players like Ackley or Pineda. In fact, it’s nearly identical to Orioles’ rookie pitcher Zach Britton. Yet the fact that Britton sports a 6-9 W-L record and plays for a non-contending basement-dweller means his chances are virtually nill, while Nova stands a good chance of contending. If Nova manages to win fifteen games, he may sneak his way up the ballot. Can’t you hear a writer defending his vote by saying, “I voted for 15-game winner Ivan Nova. The pitcher’s job is to win games. Period.” Ivan Nova certainly can.

I mentioned to Joe on Friday that I would be pushing hard for Granderson to get the AL MVP, even if Jose Bautista deserved it more. It’s a total homer move. My brain knows that Bautista should likely be the winners, as it does that Pineda or Ackley should be the winner here over Nova, but I still can’t help but root for the hometown fellas to take home the hardware. How cool would a Sabathia-Granderson-Nova sweep be? Forget your sabermetrics, win-loss is where it’s at.

CC Sabathia named AL Pitcher of the Month

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MLB announced today that CC Sabathia has been named the American League’s Pitcher of the Month for July. Sabathia allowed just four runs in five starts last month (39.2 IP), striking out 50 batters while putting just 31 on base (18 hits, 13 walks). One of those walks was intentional too. Congrats, CC.

Handicapping the AL Cy Young Race

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As the season moves into the dog days of August, some of the discussion in baseball circles naturally turns towards end of season awards ballots. This is usually a lot of fun, particularly when the old school, traditional camp goes head to head with the sabermetric camp and acrimony and recriminations ensue. There’s nothing quite like watching a reporter argue for a pitcher based on the win-loss record against someone who hasn’t looked at a W-L record all season. In anticipation of this, I’ve set out to handicap the American League Cy Young race, and have done so by trying to consider all relevant factors. Plenty of voters really do prefer looking at win-loss record, earned run average and overall team success. Other voters are comfortable looking past that and examining stats like FIP, strikeout and walk rates, and other more advanced measures of pitcher success. I’m not arguing for a particular voter rationale as much as trying to predict which one of the American League’s best pitchers will garner enough support from voters to take home the bacon. It’s a very good crop of pitchers this year, so the debate should be lively.

Honorable Mentions: C.J. Wilson, Felix Hernandez and Justin Masterson. All three have had fantastic seasons in their own right, but it’s hard to imagine any of them cracking the top 3 of the ballot as things stand right now. Of the three, King Felix seems the strongest candidate to move up the ballot if he finishes strong and other candidates slip. He’s won before, and he’s having another superb year in Seattle.

The Fringe

Dan Haren, photo courtesy of AP.

Dan Haren

My preseason pick for Cy Young is having another typically superb season. Haren is a bit of a fly ball pitcher, so pitching in Angels Stadium with good outfield defenders has really helped him so far. This year, Haren’s strikeout rate has dipped into the 7.5 K/9 range, down a little from his usual ~8 K/9 mark. However, he’s been more stingy than ever with the free passes, walking only 1.36 batters per nine innings. As a result, Haren leads the American League in K/BB ratio with a 5.65 mark, ahead of Justin Verlander’s 4.97.

Haren’s win-loss record is currently a modest 10-6. With a dozen or so starts left on the season, he seems unlikely to win twenty games this year, so he’s not likely to pick up any support from the traditional crowd in that area. His ERA is 3.01, certainly a respectable mark but nothing as shiny some of the other candidates. His ERA doesn’t diverge too wildly from his FIP (2.65) or xFIP (3.12), so there’s no reason to expect him to tail off as the season moves on, except for the fact that he usually pitches better in the first half of the season than the second.

As a result, I expect Haren to wind up in the top 3 of a few ballots, but he likely won’t be a serious contender for the award. Aside from K/BB ratio, he doesn’t lead the league in any of the “important” metrics, whether they be traditional or sabermetric, and there just isn’t a whole lot of buzz about his season. It’s been an excellent year for Haren, but probably not one good enough to win him the award. This is a friendly reminder that the Angels obtained him using Joe Saunders as the primary trade chip. Moving on.

Josh Beckett

Sadly, this was the only photo of Beckett available on the Internet. C'est la vie. Photo courtesy of AP.

Josh Beckett would likely be a serious contender for the Cy Young if not for the fact that he’s thrown roughly 30 to 40 innings less than the some of the other heavy hitters on this list. Like other seasons, Beckett has had a few struggles with his health this year, but he’s still managed to put together a good campaign and has several factors working in his favor for his Cy Young bid. For one, he’s a very well known pitcher with a reputation as being an ace, and he pitches in Boston and gets plenty of exposure. Further, he has a very low ERA, currently at 2.17. Those two factors alone mean that he’ll show up on plenty of Cy Young ballots around the nation.

Beckett is having a good year, no way around it. Yet, interestingly, his very low ERA is slightly misleading. It’s not as if this is a breakout year for Beckett. His strikeout rate has dipped a bit from career norms, and his xFIP is right in line with his career average. In fact, he posted a lower xFIP in each one of his 2007-2009 seasons. This shouldn’t obscure the fact that Beckett has had great success in the run prevention category, and if he cracks the 200 inning mark and the Red Sox win over 100 games he might find himself creeping up the ballot for plenty of voters. It won’t be undeserved. But it will be an interesting testament to the importance that a sub-3 ERA has on the psyche of the Cy Young voting community.

The Contenders

Jered Weaver at the 2011 All-Star Game. Photo courtesy of Getty Images.

Jered Weaver

Aside from the pitcher deemed the Favorite, Jered Weaver has perhaps the strongest case for the AL Cy Young this year. Not only is his win-loss record a solid 14-4, but he also boasts a rather anemic 1.79 ERA. Weaver has a good strikeout rate thus far, punching out around seven and a half batters per nine innings, and he walks around two batters per nine. The key to explaining his tremendous success at run prevention this year is his astronomically low home run rate, 0.34 HR per nine innings. Weaver has given up only 6 home runs the entire year, well below what one would consider normal. Only 3% of his fly balls have turned into home runs this year; league average is around 10%, and Weaver himself is a career 7.5% HR/FB pitcher. It’s really an odd situation, particularly because Weaver is such an extreme fly ball pitcher. As a result, several run estimators expect Weaver to start yielding home runs at a much higher rate. His xFIP is 3.61, nearly two runs higher than his ERA.

I’m not advocating that Weaver be penalized in any way for maintaining such a low home run to fly ball ratio. If he ends the year with a 3% HR/FB ratio and a sub-2 ERA, he’ll likely win the Cy Young and it’ll be hard to argue that he doesn’t deserve it. The historical record is what it is, even if it’s not likely sustainable or repeatable. The season isn’t over just yet though. Weaver has a decent amount of time left and it’s reasonable to expect his HR/FB ratio going forward to be somewhere around his career rate of 8%, which means more home runs and a higher ERA. Weaver may be a front-runner for the award at the moment, but it’s possible that he loses some steam as some of those fly balls turn into home runs and his ERA regresses in the last two months of the season. If not, and he finishes with 20 wins, a sub-2 ERA and a 90 win Los Angeles Angels team, he very well may take home his first ever Cy Young.

Justin Verlander

Justin Verlander in the state of Karl Welzein. Photo courtesy of Getty Images.

Another pitcher sure to get some love from Cy Young voters is Justin Verlander. Verlander is currently posting his third straight sub-3 FIP season, but this year he finally has the ERA to match it (2.34). Verlander currently boasts an elite strikeout rate with an 8.79 K/9, but is walking a career low 1.77 batters per nine. For a career 2.81 BB/9 guy, this is a substantial reduction, and it leaves him with the second-best K/BB ratio in the American League. Like Weaver, Verlander is also well on his way to twenty wins, currently sporting a 14-5 win-loss record.

The thing that may stand in the way the most of Verlander clinching his first ever Cy Young is the risk of batted ball regression. His BABIP is currently .239, below his career mark of .288. Yet even if that inches up a couple dozen points, Verlander is still likely to have a very compelling case for Cy Young. He’s going to have the wins, the ERA and the peripheral stats to support him. He’s also thrown a ton of innings, more than CC Sabathia, and he’s thrown a no-hitter this season. If Detroit wins the Central, he may get an even bigger boost from voters. Verlander’s 2011 is absolutely superb. Whether he’s able to beat out Weaver and others is another question.

The Favorite 

"Throw ya hands in the air if youse a true playa". Photo courtesy of Getty Images.

CC Sabathia 

All the stars are lining up for Sabathia to win the second Cy Young award of his rather illustrious career. On the traditional side, the big fellow currently leads the American League in wins with 15. It’s absolutely true that he gets loads of run support, which is why wins aren’t the best barometer of pitcher skill, but plenty of voters still consider the factor. CC has 10 or 11 starts left this season, which means he’s a really good bet to end the year with more than twenty wins, a feat he accomplished for the first time last season. Like Weaver and Verlander, Sabathia also sports a very low ERA, currently 2.56. If Weaver’s ERA ticks up north of 2, it’s likely to make CC’s case look stronger.

Sabathia also has the benefit of pitching for a team contending for a playoff spot, perhaps directly against his competitors. Personally, I don’t think a better pitcher should be penalized for pitching on a worse team, but it seems clear that plenty of voters put a sort of premium on whether the Cy Young contender’s team makes the playoffs. If Sabathia’s Yankees win the Wild Card and Jered Weaver’s Angels or Justin Verlander’s Tigers do not, it can only help Sabathia’s case.

Sabathia should receive a good amount of support from the stat community. His case rests on more than just win totals, ERA and the Yankees making the playoffs. He currently sports the lowest FIP in the American League (2.49) and the highest fWAR total (5.6). He has an elite strikeout rate, a good walk rate and he’s getting loads of groundballs. His BABIP is fairly normal, and the only thing that could hurt him going forward is his relatively low HR/FB ratio, currently about half of his career rate. As a result his xFIP is 3.03, a touch higher than Verlander but still lower than Jered Weaver’s 3.61 mark. In other words, there’s nothing too fluky about Sabathia’s performance. Anyone who has watched him lately knows that already. He’s been virtually untouchable lately, in a stream reminiscent of his now-famous performance with Milwaukee in 2008. Sabathia is an ace in his prime, pitching in a tough division and racking up all sorts of indicators of dominance. In the midst of a very good year of pitching in the American League, Sabathia may end of with the best case for American League Cy Young. If the big fella wants a new contract, he’s doing a really good job of showing the world just how good he can be.

Josh Hamilton takes home AL MVP Award

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Josh Hamilton was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player today, receiving 21 of 28 first place votes. Robbie Cano placed third, not too far behind runner-up Miguel Cabrera. He did not receive any first place votes. There’s no shame in that, Robbie had a great season and just being mentioned as an MVP is a success all by itself. Jose Bautista and Paul Konerko round out the top five.

Hamilton hit .359/.411/.633 (.447) this season and was particularly harsh of right-handed pitchers, tagging them for a .401/.447/.716 batting line (.490 wOBA) in a not insignificant 352 plate appearances. His 8.0 fWAR led all of baseball even though he missed much of September with rib issues. Congrats to him, it’s well deserved.

CC Sabathia finished 13th, Alex Rodriguez 15th, and Mark Teixeira 20th in the voting.

Votto takes home NL MVP Award

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Joey Votto was named the National League Most Valuable Player this afternoon, receiving all but one of the 32 place votes. Albert Pujols, Carlos Gonzalez, Adrian Gonzalez, and Troy Tulowitzki round out the top five. Votto finished the year at .324/.424/.600 (.439) with 7.4 fWAR, second only to Josh Hamilton.

The Yankees were going to select Votto with their first pick (71st overall) in the 2002 draft, but the Reds beat them to it. The Yanks surrendered their first round pick to the A’s that year when they signed Jason Giambi. Congrats to Votto, this might not be his last MVP.