Cliff Lee wins Number 20

[brimontz]

With the Indians playing like garbage all season, at least I've had the brilliance of Cliff Lee's pitching to watch. He's been amazing from Day 1. 20-2, and he gets his 20th win with a complete game shutout of the White Sox, including a stretch of 21 straight outs. Amazing.

I had several arguments during the off-season with people who wanted the Indians to either trade him or cut him or leave him in the minors, just because of his injury-marred season last year. I thought he was the number 3 starter or 4th at the very least. I'm glad I was proven right, as he's now the number 1 guy. He did have an 18-win season back around 2005 or so, so he had this in him, but man, he's been great.

He should win both the AL Cy Young Award and the Comeback Player of the Year Award. The competition isn't even close.

Brian

[Zephyr]

There might be a pitcher or two that've arguably been almost as good as Lee, but for various reasons don't have the numbers that will win Lee the Cy barring a huge collapse. He's had a great year though pretty much out of nowhere and it will be interesting to see what he does in 2009.

[brimontz]

Not many when you look at record and ERA. Webb's been great, but he's 19-6 with a 3.19 ERA in a league that tends to have lower ERAs due to the lack of a DH. Lee's at 20-2 with a 2.32 ERA. For the AL, the next closest to Lee is Roy Halladay at 17-9 with a 2.69 ERA. Good but not close enough.

Actually, it wasn't out of nowhere. He won 46 games from 2004-2006, including 18-5 (and several Cy Young votes) in 2005. Last year was injury-marred, and for some reason a lot of people gave up on him. His career record is 74-38. Most pitchers would take a winning percentage that is almost 66.7%.

Brian

[Zephyr]

Originally Posted by brimontz

Not many when you look at record and ERA. Webb's been great, but he's 19-6 with a 3.19 ERA in a league that tends to have lower ERAs due to the lack of a DH. Lee's at 20-2 with a 2.32 ERA. For the AL, the next closest to Lee is Roy Halladay at 17-9 with a 2.69 ERA. Good but not close enough.

Brian

Yeah but that's the thing - the voters look a lot at raw record and ERA, but if you dig deeper into the stats, you could argue that someone like Halladay has been about as good. First of all, win-loss record has a lot to do with factors outside a pitcher's control, particularly run support. For the voters it counts for a lot, but it's not always indicative of how well a pitcher actually pitches, which is more my focus if I were evaluating. I was looking at their gamelogs here:

Lee
Halladay

Lee has enjoyed 5.43 runs of support (per 27 outs used, see the bottom) and has had four times where he's had 10 or more. In comparison Halladay's averaged just 4.37 runs with only 1 game with 10 or more runs.

Now neither have given up many runs, so what I find even more interesting is the number of games at the low end: Lee has had only four starts all year where the Indians scored 2 or fewer runs, Halladay has had ten. This probably goes a long way to explaining how Lee is 20-2 and Doc is "only" 17-9 despite having roughly similar ERAs.

Now currently Lee's ERA is 2.32 to Halladay's 2.69, so there's somewhat an edge to Lee there, although one thing you have to factor in is quality of hitters faced. Even though both pitch in the AL, Halladay has faced, on average, tougher hitters this year. Baseball Prospectus has a little thing which ranks pitchers by quality of hitters faced by OPS (on base percentage plus slugging). I have it limited to AL pitchers with 100 or more IP:

http://baseballprospectus.com/statis...php?cid=399191

You can see Halladay is actually number 2, having faced hitters with a collective 766 OPS (interestingly, Livan Hernandez had the toughest hitters to face). Lee is over on the second page, at number 59, facing hitters with an average of a 731 OPS. This is probably due to Roy having to face the Yankees and Red Sox a combined eight times this year. I don't know precisely how much this would affect ERA, but it must at some level.

So when you factor in the run support and opponents, I think a lot of the difference between them disappears. In addition, Halladay has pitched a few more innings and has eight complete games to Lee's four. Unfortunately, unless the record and ERA are closer, voters don't really look at those things.

There have been other pitchers in the league (Lackey, Matsuzaka, Duchscherer) who, inning for inning, have been about as good as these two. All of them are way behind on the innings though.

Sorry I didn't mean to write an essay but I don't often get to talk baseball on this site!

[brimontz]

Good points, although I would mention that the games where Lee has had run support of 10 or more drives up the average run support. Lee also pitched nine innings of shutout ball, only to get a no-decision, as the other team won in the 10th 1-0.

Brian

[Tungsten]

Nice year by Lee. That trade that sent Sizemore, Lee, and Brandon Phillips to Cleveland for half a year of Bartolo Colon and Tim Drew might go down as one of the greatest trades of all time. Too bad they didn't hang on to Phillips.

[brimontz]

That was a great trade, and the Tribe got two other players in that deal as well. They gave up on Phillips too quickly, unfortunately.

Brian