Let's Skip the Cy Young Award This Year

The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901, but that doesn't mean there have been 114 years of winners. The Nobel folks have skipped a few, notably during World Wars I and II, when giving someone a prize for peace would have seemed a mockery of the very term. No doubt there were many advocating for peace at that time, probably even more than usual. They just weren't very effective.

Baseball awards aren't like the Peace Prize; effectiveness doesn't necessarily matter. The Baseball Writers Association of America gives them out every year whether there's an outstanding performance worth recognizing or not. To be sure, there are always pitchers who are good relative to the league, but that doesn't mean anyone had a Sandy Koufax-type season. Nevertheless, awards are given, and then forever after we look back on some of them with a bit of embarrassment, like the year they voted Crash the Academy Award for Best Picture. If that was objectively the best film of 2005 (and none of the other nominees, while good, seem likely to make it into the pantheon), it would have been better to just say, "Pass. Has Netflix been invented yet?"

The 2016 Cy Young Awards might be another cause for Netflix and Ignore. Between injuries to pitchers like Clayton Kershaw and some late fades by possible contenders—in the space of less than three weeks, Cole Hamels' ERA has risen from 2.67 to 3.42—we have some great pitchers having good seasons, vanilla campaigns in an arena that demands bolder flavors. Some benighted voters are going to give Zach Britton an award for gosh sakes, and we've got to save them from themselves. Not that Britton hasn't been wonderful, but we're supposed to be smarter than this now, giving 200-inning awards to 60-inning pitchers.

Let's dispense with two bits of practical business that kneecap this Cy Abstinence campaign before it even starts. Just as the Best Picture award is a business proposition for movie studios, the BBWAA awards are a way for baseball to seize a moment of November conversation at an otherwise quiet time for the sport. They might also make the winning players more of a draw, if Major League Baseball bothered to market its players outside of baseball broadcasts—that is, to an audience it hasn't already captured. No one is going to forego these awards just to uphold an abstract standard.

Koufax is setting an unfairly high bar, of course; to equal the great Dodgers left-hander, a pitcher not only has to more or less lap the league in run prevention, he has to do it in far less playing time than Koufax had. Pitchers don't throw 300 innings a season anymore, and given that Koufax was done at 30 for exactly that reason, we can be thankful for that. Nevertheless, there's a baseline level of excellence we can hope for. It's not that old crutch of the pitcher win, which says absolutely nothing about how the pitcher actually did. This has been debunked many times, but just in case you've forgotten, allow two examples to suffice: In 1987, Nolan Ryan led the American League in ERA and had an 8-16 record, while in 1989, Storm Davis of the World Series-winning Oakland A's went 19-7 with an ERA (4.36) that ranked 33rd out of 39 qualifiers.

Wins Above Replacement give a better sense of the kind of year a pitcher has enjoyed. When the Cy Young Award was inaugurated in 1956, it was awarded to just one pitcher per season, regardless of league affiliation. The dual award format began in 1967. Since then, the average AL Cy Young winner has been worth an even seven wins above replacement (Baseball-Reference version), while the average NL winner has been worth a fraction more with 7.4.

With about 12 games left in the season per team, it seems unlikely any pitcher will be even average by this standard. Corey Kluber of the Cleveland Indians, who had a 4.15 ERA through the end of May but has pitched to the tune of 2.54 in 19 starts since, leads the AL with 6.4 WAR. Max Scherzer of the Washington Nationals also had a slow spring—4.05 ERA through May—but has a 2.10 ERA since, striking out 169 batters in 137.1 innings and holding opposing hitters to a .178 batting average. He leads the NL with 6.3 WAR.

This isn't to say that we should let WAR do our thinking for us. The numbers are a guide, not a dictator. The two pitchers also have narrative on their side. Both have won the award previously and are certified stars. Both are objectively very good pitchers who have helped put their teams into the playoffs despite subpar performances and injuries to what appeared to be strong pitching staffs on paper. The Indians in particular will be praying for a whole lot of rain once Kluber makes his Game 1 ALDS start in October. With Danny Salazar and Carlos Carrasco shelved and Trevor Bauer pitching poorly, the wait to repeat 1948 might last another year.

No other pitcher has a WAR much higher than five, and they don't have much time to add to their totals. Some arguably do have the requisite narratives: Kyle Hendricks and Jon Lester are top two the NL in ERA, and Lester is no flash in the pan having been a very fine pitcher going back to 2008. Certainly there would be no shame in him winning the award, and both he and Hendricks are part of something that may be historic—we won't know for a while yet—the Chicago Cubs team that finally puts the ghosts of 1908 to rest. Then again, maybe they won't—Jake Arrieta, so dominant last year in winning a Cy Young Award that was well out of the let's-skip-it category, has had a 4.04 ERA going back to July, with a diminished strikeout rate. His last four starts have been especially dire by his standards, and while he's still tied with Lester for the league lead in wins (yes, someone will still care about wins, because, it has been said around these parts, we never win anymore—the very word has hypnotic power), it's hard to say he's earned an encore on the award.

All three of these Cubs pitchers work in front of a very strong defense, the best in the majors this year. The difference between Hendricks' and Lester's ERA and FIP (fielding independent pitching), an ERA estimator that attempts to isolate those aspect of pitching for which the pitcher himself is responsible, is more than a run each, with Hendricks gaining more than any other pitcher in the league. FIP is not perfect, but we're trying to credit an individual pitcher, not a team effort, and it gives us some sense of that.

Masahiro Tanaka leads the AL in ERA, and he has something in common with Rick Porcello, who leads the circuit with 21 wins, and J.A. Happ, who is next with 19, albeit with higher (but still top-10) ERAs. The average AL starting pitcher has struck out 7.7 batters per nine innings. Tanaka, Porcello, and Happ have averaged 7.4, 7.8, and 7.4, respectively. That is, they rely on their defenses when the best pitchers, to paraphrase Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin, are doin' it for themselves. Chris Sale, cutting up uniforms on an also-ran team, has at least as strong an argument.

But now we're in the thicket of numbers, like Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land, and honestly, it's less fun there than just using something like common sense. So let's leave it at this: you know that Raiders of the Lost Ark—the ne plus ultra of movie-serial homages that didn't win Best Picture—is a better film than Chariots of Fire (okay, Pauline Kael didn't know, but we know). Similarly, we can look at Pete Vuckovich's 1982 season (18-6, 3.34 ERA, 105 strikeouts) or Bartolo Colon's 2005 (21-8, 3.48 ERA, 157 strikeouts) and know that the voters, in the absence of clear thinking or clearer indicators that they were headed down the wrong path, marched in lockstep off an award-tarnishing cliff.

Robert Benchley once wrote of the crassly sentimental hit play Abie's Irish Rose, "People laugh at this every night, which proves why a democracy can never be a success." Cy Young Award voting goes him one better: All too often democracy proves why a democracy can never be a success. This is troubling if you think about it, especially this year. Zach Britton looms with his strong but attenuated record. November is going to be stressful enough. In a year that lacks a Greinke 2009 or a Pedro Martinez any year, it might be better to just let it go until it's safe to come out from under our beds again or another season passes, whichever comes first.