Spotlight Shifts from All-Stars to Cy Young

W. Ross Clites
Your City Sports-Cleveland

Saint Louis, MISSOURI--This is my first installment since I moved west of the Mississippi on Wednesday. The Cardinals are sure glad I am here, while the Indians are sure glad I am gone.

It could also be that the absence of LeBron has renewed Cleveland's faith in baseball and the team--playing pressure-free and finally healthy--is responding to an AL Central spoiler role.

Any way you would like to spin it, since my U-Haul touched down in STL both teams have won 5 straight games and not lost once. Let me go on believing that I was the missing piece in the sports scene for the Redbirds. But if I am going to be that ego-centric, I must also accept blame for holding back the youthful bats of the Tribe. My apologies, Cleveland, and you're welcome, Saint Louis.

Now, on to this week's Pitcher Rating highlights. Recently, a friend introduced me to an interesting section of espn.com's baseball page. Two gentlemen that definitely belong on the Mount Rushmore of baseball stat geeks, Rob Neyer and Bill James, evidently came up with a formula for rating pitchers a few years back. They co-authored a book in 2004, aptly named "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers." ESPN picked up the rights to one of the formulas found amongst the nearly 500 pages of text, and now markets it as a "Cy Young Predictor."

When I set out to create a uniform stat for judging starting pitchers to closers, this was all an unknown for me. I have Bill James' 2006 and 2007 Baseball Handbooks--both were gifts. I like to write, but ironically hate to read. Especially baseball nerd alert books. Very ironic, because that is all that I write about these days. It's like Edison deciding against the use of light bulbs in his own house.

I'd rather watch, play, coach, umpire baseball than read about it. For me, cataloging pitcher rating is just a byproduct of the spectator portion of the game. It is the same as keeping score when you are at the ballpark; it is exciting for me, but doesn't mean I want to read someone else's work.

Having said all that, this week's article (and all future posts about the 2010 baseball season) will set out to prove that my formula is even better than the powerful duo of Neyer and James. The two target some interesting stats, add some quirky bonuses, and weigh things in ways I wouldn't dream. Plus, they must think we are in England or Canada using "an" in front of "historical" on the cover of their book. Just because it is a correct option doesn't mean it needs to be used.

In their purest of forms, our invented stats do study the same data in a very similar fashion. We sought out to find who is the best on the mound in a given year, producing one quantifiable number. Neyer and James may have the original recipe, but I have reached a unique version of their classic stat from scratch. The newest ingredient is run support, RS. The idea is to level the playing field for people like Josh Johnson, whose team can't push across more than two runs when he is on the mound. He could easily have 15 wins if he had a bullpen or run support. Thus, his dominance is falling by the wayside. Pitcher Rating will recognize offensive shortcomings.

Enjoy my new take on something that is apparently old-hat. I will stick by my ingredients as having a better finish; Pitcher Rating doesn't have a bitter Keith Foulke aftertaste.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/features/cyyoung

Pitcher Rating July 21

Leave Comments on my Facebook page or Email Feedback to w.ross.clites@gmail.com

For MLS Expansion, 27 Is The Magic Number Garber & Co. Continues To Disregard

What a wild two months it has been for the next (and final) wave of expansion in Major League Soccer. The recent surge of headlines has been a welcome sighting; the league office had gone radio silent on the topic for far too long. If you can believe it, the awarding of Nashville SC as a future franchise is already coming up on its one-year anniversary. The most contemporary piece on the subject — team number 24 going to FC Cincinnati — turns six months old next week. It sure feels like just yesterday, but time flies when there is nothing else verifiable to report. Until early September, that Cincinnati announcement sat on the "Recent News" tab of MLS expansion sites collecting dust. Even the most speculative bloggers were in wait-and-see mode. Forecasting any further seemed futile until a deadline for the next batch of proposals was presented. The only other expansion story of 2018 came out in January, when David Beckham's South...

From Wounded Wood Duck To Thoroughbred In A World Series-Bound "Stable"

Do you know the typical setting of a rookie reliever making his 1,000th Major League pitch? That answer is an emphatic "No" perhaps followed by a good-natured "No one does." Even in today's pitch count-centric world, that's not a threshold any analyst is rattling off during a telecast. But, by diving heavy into the research, I found out that we may have witnessed the most iconic instance in baseball history on Saturday night. For your [modern] classic one-inning bullpen guys, with an average of 17 pitches per, you're looking at their 58th career appearance. With the focus on service time and "starting the free agency clock" it's become really tough to squeeze that many outings into a singular rookie campaign. On the rare occasion that a rookie spends an entire season with a Major League club — like a Jeurys Familia did with the 2014 New York Mets — 1,000 occurs during appearance number 61 in the dog days of summer (August 20). He went o...

The Best Season Few Talked About & Even Fewer Came Out To See

Pop quiz: How many wins did the Tampa Bay Rays end up with this season? Seriously, don't cheat. Attempt a guess, or at the very least, come up with a range. 75-80, right? A few games over .500, maybe? In major league seasons such as this, where all ten playoff teams were settled prior to the final Sunday, the average fan's stock response goes something like: "It was a busy Week 4 in the NFL. I know there's a tiebreaker or two on Monday, but I don't have a clue how the other teams ended up." Well, would you trust me enough to not fact check it on your own if I said the Rays got all the way to 90-72? And I'll do you one better. Take a look at all the promising teams that didn't make it to the 90-win plateau. A sexy sleeper pick by many, this was supposed to finally be the year where the Seattle Mariners' 17-year playoff drought would end (89) . Sparked by a managerial change in July, it sure looked like the St. Louis Car...

The Power That's Returned to 'Flower': Revising Marc-Andre's Postseason Legacy

For the life of me, I cannot come up with anything comparable for what Marc-Andre Fleury is doing in these playoffs. Resurrections of this magnitude rarely appear anywhere outside of the New Testament. Yet, here he is; back from the dead, leading (yes, leading) Pittsburgh to the Eastern Conference Final. The liability has been converted to an asset, and share-holders that stuck with him through his penny stock days (i.e. me) are loving it. There is a theme of this piece centered on rebounds. On the micro level, Fleury was able to respond from a 5-2 beat down in Monday's Game 6. In a hostile Verizon Center, he stopped all 29 Washington shots in Wednesday's series finale -- stealing the 2-0 victory . He was nothing short of spectacular in Round 2's only shutout. Fleury's name was apropos for the the barrage sustained. Even 5-on-5, the ice tilted in the home team's favor from the onset. To the nervous spectator, the game's first eight minutes read like a conti...

How The Super Bowl Has Ruined Your High School Football Program

Back to work the day after the Super Bowl is always a tough one. The football season has come to an end and all that's left behind is a bitter chill in the air. There's nothing overly exciting on the sports docket until Major League Baseball's new Thursday Opening Day and the first two days of March Madness — all of which should be national holidays. Until then, hockey and basketball teams will either be jockeying for playoff positioning or riding out the end of a disappointing season. That means an awful lot of tanking for Jack Hughes and Zion Williamson (personally I prefer R.J. Barrett), salary cap dumping, or attempting to land Artemi Panarin and Anthony Davis via trade. In each case, February has become more about off-field/court noise rather than the games themselves. Face it, most of the month is a real nothing burger for sports coverage. If you want to hear people talk on screen, your time would be better spent catching up on Netflix stand-up specials. The flu...

The Cloverleaf Chronicles I: Sun Angles

This is a companion piece to 4Most Sport Group's video series The Cloverleaf Chronicles . Read this in conjunction with Episode #1 on Sun Angles. If you are stumbling upon this blog before watching the video, treat it as the prologue to what you will see. I f you are arriving here as directed by our little educational segment, c onsider this the rich backstory for the "star" of that show. Okay, that'll be the only terrible dad joke, I promise. In all seriousness, this information is not entirely necessary to extract the thesis out of The Cloverleaf Chronicles' first installment. However, it is the perfect amount of "nerding out" for those, like me, that want to learn everything about everything. It's a medium dive, with plenty of Sun-related things there wasn't time to tuck into the video. Call it the director's cut. What we aim to do is drop a few anecdotes about our compelling heavenly body. We'll also sprinkle in some cultural hi...

The St. Louis Cardinals Were Clearly Sent Here To Break This Wild Card Format, Too

If you've been around baseball long enough, you know exactly where this National League Postseason train is heading: Controversy Junction. Whether it's natural progression or divine intervention, the sport somehow knows to make a stop here whenever a playoff system is in dire need of a modification. The San Francisco Giants — who have admirably held off the heavily-favored (and reigning ch ampion) Los Angeles Dodgers, as well as every analyst’s preseason darling (and completely overhyped) San Diego Padres all season — are going to potentially eclipse the 106-win plateau. They've already achieved an impressive/unforeseen 100-win season; just the eighth in their club's 139 illustrious years between New York and San Francisco. But you can mark it down: Their magical run is going to end at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals in the Wild Card Game. Wait, what? They are still leading their division with only four games to go. Bold Prediction Time: San Francisco is going to...

Search This Blog