Cy Young Award 2017: The BBWAA is getting smarter
Cy Young Award 2017. The BBWAA voters have greatly improved over the last 20 years choosing a Cy Young winner who is among the league leaders in WAR.
The Cy Young Award 2017, voted on by the BBWAA, was recently announced in each league for this season. As has happened more often than not recently, they chose a pitcher who ranks at or near the top of the league in Wins Above Replacement (WAR).
The American League Cy Young Award 2017 winner was Corey Kluber, who ranked second in the AL in Fangraphs WAR (fWAR) and first in Baseball-Reference WAR (bWAR).
While the Cy Young Award 2017 winner for the National League was Max Scherzer, who won his second consecutive Cy Young and third overall. He led the NL in fWAR and bWAR. This shows how the gap is narrowing between the writers and the “stats guys.” The recent choices for the top finishers in Cy Young voting have almost always been among the leaders in WAR.
This is progress. There was a time when many writers were strongly resistant to anything considered to be advanced statistical analysis. They voted for the major awards based on what they saw with their own eyes and the traditional statistics they had grown up appreciating, like home runs and RBIs for hitters and wins and ERA for pitchers. Times are changing.
In the American League, Corey Kluber led the league in wins and ERA, so his Cy Young aligns with the traditional metrics that voters have used for many years.
The number three finisher in the voting, Luis Severino, was ninth in the AL in wins and third in ERA. He was also third in fWAR and sixth in bWAR.
Severino’s finish shows that Cy Young Award 2017 voters are not over-valuing wins like they once did.
In the National League, Clayton Kershaw led the league in wins and ERA.
In past years, he would be the easy winner of the Cy Young, even though he finished fifth in fWAR and sixth in bWAR (mainly because he only pitched 175 innings).
Max Scherzer had two fewer wins than Kershaw and an ERA that was 0.20 higher, but he was the league leader in both versions of WAR and he took home the trophy. Nice job by the voters!
It’s been 40 years since the first edition of the Bill James Baseball Abstract came out, and many, if not most, writers look at a variety of statistics these days. Some of today’s BBWAA members grew up reading Bill James in the 1980s and 90s, Baseball Prospectus since the mid-1990s, and Fangraphs since it came online in 2005. MLB teams are incorporating all of these numbers into their valuation of players, so it would be foolish for any writer to ignore them.