New Triple Crown Analysis for Pitchers

As casual baseball fans know, a pitcher wins the “Triple Crown” when he leads his league in wins, ERA, and strikeouts in the same season. The more-than-casual baseball fan realizes that only one out of those three categories truly represents the talents of a pitcher, as opposed to the combined talents of a pitcher and his team. Whereas a pitcher’s ERA depends upon the defense behind the pitcher, and Wins depend upon the defense and the offense supporting the pitcher, only strikeouts truly represent the ability of the pitcher independent of his supporting cast.

A pitcher’s Triple Crown occurs so rarely in baseball that these distinctions are hardly worth quibbling. However, these three statistics play into another element of pitcher evaluation far more frequently: these three statistics have dominated Cy Young Award analysis for as long as that Award has been given out.

The instances in which the voters have placed too much emphasis upon all or any of these statistics, particularly Wins, in picking the Cy Young Award winner are too numerous to count, but here are some good examples:

- In 1990, Doug Drabek of the Pittsburgh Pirates led the NL in wins with 22, ahead of Ramon Martinez (20) and Frank Viola (20). Martinez and Viola each pitched more innings than Drabek, faced more batters, and had better K:BB ratios than Drabek. At best, it could have been described as a very close race. Nevertheless, Drabek managed to get 98% of the Cy Young Award vote.

- Also in 1990, Bob Welch famously and historically won 27 games for the juggernaut Oakland Athletics. While he topped Dave Stewart, Roger Clemens, Dave Stieb, and Chuck Finley in wins, he ranked behind all four other pitchers in ERA (2.95), homeruns allowed (26), and runs allowed (90). Stewart finished with nine more complete games, two more shutouts, 29 more innings pitched, over 100 batters faced, and 39 more strikeouts than Welch. Meanwhile, Clemens pitched four shutouts, allowed only seven homeruns, had 209 strikeouts, and lead the league in ERA (1.93), strikeout to walk ratio, homeruns allowed, and shutouts. Nevertheless, Welch was the easy Cy Young Award winner.

- In 2002, Barry Zito won the AL Cy Young Award with a 23-5 record and a 2.75 ERA. This stopped Pedro Martinez, who went 20-4 with a 2.26 ERA, 239 strikeouts, 38 fewer walks and 11 fewer bases on balls than Zito.

- In 1980, Steve Stone went 25-7, topping the 22-9 Mike Norris for the AL Cy Young. This despite the fact that there was no other statistic in which Stone topped Norris, Norris allowed nine fewer hits in 34 more innings, and pitched 24 complete games compared to Stone’s nine .

In this era of baseball statistical valuation, there is no reason for Cy Young Award voting to reflect the traditional Triple Crown method of player valuation. Ideally, Cy Young voters would spend time to learn about all the major statistics of all the major candidates, but quick-glance statistical methods will probably never go out of style.

With this in mind, I propose a new quick-glance method for picking Cy Young Award winners: the New Triple Crown Method. Fans and voters can still do a quick-look analysis by looking at three major statistics, but we’ll just change the statistics.

Wins

Starting with Wins, we can no longer live in a world where Wins are used as a proxy for a pitcher’s success. Now more than ever, with abundant offenses and situation-specific bullpen usage, a pitcher’s performance is loosely tied to whether the pitcher is rewarded in the Wins column. As long ago as 1987, Nolan Ryan went 8-16 while leading the National League in ERA; in the 21st Century the best pitcher in the league almost never leads his league in wins.

I propose using Innings Pitched to determine a player’s value instead of Wins. There’s no such thing as cheap innings in baseball, but there are cheap wins.

Perhaps the most useful asset a pitcher brings to the table for his team in the modern era of baseball is durability, and while Wins loosely measure the number of times a team won when the pitcher was on the mound, Innings Pitched gives a more accurate view of how well a pitcher contributed to his team’s success in the form of providing stable and consistent starting pitching.

For the sake of illustration, let’s look at two seven-inning outings by two major league pitchers.

Pitcher A pitches seven innings, gives up five earned runs on ten hits and two homeruns, but gets the Win when his team scores eight runs to support him.

Pitcher B pitches seven innings, gives up no runs on three hits, buts gets the no decision when his team loses 1-0.

Which pitcher pitched better? Which pitcher is the better pitcher?

If you look at Wins, you’d think Pitcher A had the better game. If you look at innings pitched, you see them as equal. It appears to me that if we are going to judge a pitcher on just three statistics, innings pitched is a better measure of a pitcher’s value than wins. This is just one example, but it seems that the number of times a pitcher gets a cheap Win without pitching well overwhelms the number of times that a pitcher gets cheap innings in a game in which he is clearly pitching poorly.

Put another way – mediocre pitchers rarely rack up innings, but often rack up wins.

ERA

A pitcher’s earned run average can tell you whether a pitcher is a good pitcher or a bad pitcher. Comparing ERA’s within a run of each other is often a less-than-useful task because of the importance of the pitcher’s defense to the pitcher’s ERA.

For example, suppose Pitcher A has a 2.91 ERA, while Pitcher B has a 3.01 ERA. Naturally, we might suppose Pitcher A to be the better pitcher. But what if it is revealed that Pitcher A’s team has a 3.66 team ERA, while Pitcher B’s team has a 4.35 team ERA. Now the possibility exists that, if Pitcher A and Pitcher B switched teams (or more importantly, defenses) Pitcher B might have the better ERA.

Fortunately, we now know how to deal with this – thanks to Voros McCracken’s DIPS analysis, which measures a pitcher’s value through his statistics that are independent of the defense behind him, we can more accurately measure what part of a pitcher’s ERA is attributable to the pitcher’s individual abilities. A pitcher’s defense independent ERA has several incarnations, but I like The Hardball Times version, called Fielding Independent Pitching or “FIP”, which The Hardball Times defines as:

“Fielding Independent Pitching, a measure of all those things for which a pitcher is specifically responsible. The formula is (HR*13+(BB+HBP-IBB)*3-K*2)/IP, plus a league-specific factor (usually around 3.2) to round out the number to an equivalent ERA number. FIP helps you understand how well a pitcher pitched, regardless of how well his fielders fielded.”

Strikeouts

Nolan Ryan’s best statistic does represent a pitcher’s ability independent of the defense behind him but, just as with Nolan Ryan, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Ryan famously leads all major league baseball players in career strikeouts, but what is less well known is that he is also the all-time leader in bases on balls, which are also a defense independent statistic. Indeed, there is a valid argument that a walk hurts the team more than a strikeout, because if a batter doesn’t strikeout he can still be retired on a batted ball, whereas a batter who walks definitely gets on base.

If a pitcher’s value is to be measured by the number of batters he is able to retire without the help of his defense by striking them out, then the pitcher’s value should also reflect the number of batters he puts on base without requiring the hitter to hit the ball.

Strikeout-to-walk ratio, then, should be considered a better measure of a pitcher’s defense-independent abilities than total strikeouts.

Applying the New Method to the 2009 Season

Applying what we have learned, our “New Triple Crown” quick-look Cy Young Award analysis would look like this:

National League Cy Young Award

National League Wins Leaders (thus far):

1. Adam Wainright , 18

2. Chris Carpenter, 16

3. Jason Marquis, 15

4. Josh Johnson, 15

5. Jorge de la Rosa, 15

National League Innings Pitched:

1. Adam Wainright , 219.0

2. Danny Haren, 217.1

3. Tim Lincecum, 211.1

4. Bronson Arroyo, 205.0

5. Ubaldo Jimenez, 205.0

Switching the focus from Wins to Innings Pitched eliminates three pitchers who have racked up wins pitching for very good teams – Carpenter for the Cardinals and de la Rosa and Marquis for the Rockies. As for Adam Wainright, well it would appear that he is legit. Bronson Arroyo, who has been a rock for a bad Cincinnati Reds team gets a look he wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.

National League ERA Leaders:

1. Chris Carpenter, 2.34

2. Tim Lincecum, 2.47

3. Adam Wainright, 2.59

4. Matt Cain, 2.71

5. Jair Jurrjens, 2.75

National League FIP Leaders:

1. Tim Lincecum, 2.35

2. Javier Vazquez, 2.76

3. Chris Carpenter, 2.78

4. Josh Johnson, 3.03

5. Joel Pineiro, 3.05

This analysis shows us two different things. First, it thins out the list of guys with ERA’s between 0.00 and 2.75 from five to one, and widens the gap between Tim Lincecum and the rest of the league. It also shows us just how important the defense of the St. Louis Cardinals has been to the success of their pitching staff, as Chris Carpenter drops from first to third, and Wainright falls out of the top five.

National League Strikeout Leaders:

1. Tim Lincecum, 247

2. Javier Vazquez, 222

3. Danny Haren, 208

4. Yovani Gallardo, 204

5. Adam Wainright , 193

National League Strikeout-to-walk Ratio Leaders (amongst qualifiers):

1. Danny Haren, 6.12

2. Javier Vazquez, 5.16

3. Ted Lilly, 4.21

4. Ricky Nolasco, 4.20

5. Joel Pineiro, 4.17

Well, that’s just a whole different list, isn’t it? Goodbye, Tim Lincecum and Adam Wainright , hello . . . Ted Lilly and Ricky Nolasco? Plus, Danny Haren, whose 208 strikeouts look humble compared to Lincecum and Vazquez, jumps to the head of the pack.

American League

American League Wins Leaders:

1. C.C. Sabathia, 18

2. Scott Feldman, 17

3. Justin Verlander, 16

4. Felix Hernandez, 16

5. Jered Weaver, Roy Halladay, Josh Beckett, 15

The top five leaders in the AL for innings pitched in 2009 are:

1. Roy Halladay, 221.0

2. C.C. Sabathia, 220.1

3. Justin Verlander, 217.1

4. Felix Hernandez, 216.1

5. Zack Greinke, 210.1

The most obvious effect of this analysis is that Scott Feldman (176.2 innings) is no longer in the conversation, while the under-supported Zack Greinke (14 wins) takes his place with the elite pitchers of 2009. In truth, Scott Feldman’s success in 2009 is more of a compliment to his team than to his own abilities; though his season has been a good one, he is not an elite American League pitcher.

American League ERA Leaders:

1. Zack Greinke, 2.14

2. Felix Hernandez, 2.45

3. Roy Halladay, 3.01

4. C.C. Sabathia, 3.31

5. Jon Lester, 3.33

American League FIP Leaders:

1. Zack Greinke, 2.41

2. Justin Verlander, 2.96

3. Felix Hernandez, 3.19

4. Jon Lester, 3.22

5. Roy Halladay, 3.24

The effect here is clear – we have validated Zack Greinke while revealing Verlander to be better at preventing runs from scoring than Sabathia, Hernandez, Halladay, and Lester, all of whom rank ahead of him in ERA.

American League Strikeout Leaders:

1. Justin Verlander, 245

2. Zack Greinke, 224

3. Jon Lester, 215

4. Felix Hernandez, 196

5. Roy Halladay, 193

American League Strikeout-to-Walk Ratio Leaders (amongst qualifiers):

1. Roy Halladay, 5.85

2. Zack Greinke, 5.09

3. Justin Verlander, 4.15

4. Carl Pavano, 3.74

5. Josh Beckett, 3.67

Again, the effect here is clear – strikeouts make Verlander look better than Greinke, and both better than Halladay, but K:BB ratio makes Greinke look better than Verlander, and Halladay better than both of them. And . . . why, hello Mr. Pavano!

Conclusions

Traditional Triple Crown analysis shows that C.C. Sabathia may be the next American League Cy Young Award winner whose wins misstate his value with respect to the rest of his league. In the New Triple Crown analysis, Sabathia doesn’t look quite so great as he fails to rank in the top five in either FIP or strikeout-to-walk ratio. The New Triple Crown analysis benefits Zack Grienke, however, as his rankings in FIP and strikeout-to-walk ratio only validate his rankings in ERA and strikeouts, and his innings pitched ranking more accurately represents his value when compared to his team-influenced wins total.

But the big winner here is Roy Halladay. His league leading innings pitched make up for his tied-for-fifth wins total and his league leading strikeout-to-walk ratio makes up for his fifth ranked strikeouts total. The American League Cy Young Award should be a battle between Zack Greinke and Roy Halladay, a conclusion not at all clear from our traditional Triple Crown analysis.

Meanwhile, in the National League, the main point of the New Triple Crown analysis is the discrediting of some dubious wins totals. After Adam Wainright , who leads the league in both wins and innings pitched, our new analysis sheds Jason Marquis, Jorge de la Rosa, and Chris Carpenter from our list of elite pitchers. Carpenter also appears to be a paper-tiger in the ERA category as well; our FIP analysis shows him behind Tim Lincecum and Javier Vazquez, two pitchers he leads in ERA.

But the real revelation in the National League is Dan Haren, who doesn’t rank amongst the top five NL pitchers in Wins or ERA and ranks third in strikeouts. Under our New Triple Crown analysis, we find that Haren is second in National League in innings pitched and actually leads the NL, by a substantial margin, in strikeout-to-walk ratio. Dan Haren actually appears to make a better Cy Young candidate than Wainright , which tells us a lot about the traditional Triple Crown analysis can be deceiving, since Wainright leads the NL in wins, is third in ERA, and is fifth in strikeouts.

At the end of the day, a truly educated pick for this year’s Cy Young Award winners would rely upon all of these statistics and several others in order to pick the year’s best pitcher (to say nothing of looking at more pitchers overall). But voters will be voters, and those voters will continue to depend on quick-look analyses to decide how to cast their votes. If this is going to be the case, then the New Triple Crown analysis is far preferable to the traditional Triple Crown analysis, and will allow Cy Young voters to accurately pick the best pitcher in each league.

Asher B. Chancey also writes for Baseball Evolution and you can read his work there by following this link.