Started browsing through my new baseball book “The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers” and noticed Matt’s blog entry on Clemens and his slim chances of winning the Cy Young Award due to his low win totals as a result of poor run support from his fellow Astros. Found that the book contained an article by Bill James where he puts forth a formula which attempts to predict the Cy Young Award Voting, and he gets pretty good results from seasons past. The formula is as follows:
Wins times 6
minus Losses times 2
plus Strikeouts divided by 12
plus Saves times 2.5
plus Shutouts
plus Runs Saved ( runs not allowed by the pitcher, compared to a pitcher with a 5.00 ERA ((5*IP/9)-ER) )
plus 12 points for pitching for a first place team.
I decided to compute the numbers for the top 25 starters ranked by ERA, and the top 10 relievers ranked by Saves, and see where Clemens came out in the prediction:
Name CyPoints
Chris Carpenter 198.68
Dontrelle Willis 157.23
Chad Cordero 142.40
Roger Clemens 139.38
John Smoltz 136.21
Pedro Martinez 128.26
Billy Wagner 127.00
Roy Oswalt 125.10
Jake Peavy 123.00
Mark Mulder 122.90
Derrick Turnbow 118.39
Matt Morris 115.73
Jason Isringhausen 114.97
Andy Pettitte 112.51
Brad Lidge 112.29
A.J. Burnett 110.61
Carlos Zambrano 109.02
Livan Hernandez 105.82
Todd Jones 105.43
Chris Capuano 104.75
Trevor Hoffman 101.27
Tim Hudson 100.52
John Patterson 97.52
Brett Myers 95.18
Brian Fuentes 91.40
Braden Looper 91.38
Josh Beckett 90.56
Brandon Webb 83.33
Ben Sheets 82.81
Noah Lowry 80.89
Esteban Loaiza 74.35
Jose Mesa 72.75
Aaron Harang 68.46
Brad Penny 49.47
Brian Moehler 42.16
James’ formula seems to predict, as expected, that the voters will place far too much emphasis on Win totals, as it predicts that Clemens, who is having an awesome season, will finish fourth in the Cy Young Award voting, well behind the winner, Chris Carpenter.
Later,
Tom
I had just exchanged emails with Chad and thought I’d check in with Redleg Nation. With respect to the Cy Young Award predictor, ESPN maintains that feature on a daily basis.
Just thought you’d like to know. No need to do all the work yourself if it’s being calculated elsewhere.
Keep up the good work, guys.
So who you think had the sense of humor, Neyer or James?
I’m betting Neyer on this, Rob is in my SABR group and he has a dry sense of humor (very Midwest) and I have exchanged emails over the years with him on his other Charlie Brown reference he occasionally tosses out when he has mentioned CB’s favorite player, Joe Schlabotnik.
There is also an entry for the mythical Sid Finch.
That’s funny
So, what does it say about Tom Browning?