Choice and explanation.



On another topic this makes me realize, where the hell has KowboyKoop been?

For whatever it's worth, Mariano Rivera should probably be on that list. Not that he would have a chance at winning - it's a 2-horse race between Greinke and Felix at this point.

Greinkie is god.

Greinke, not close. Wins have too much to do with the teams offense and defense to matter and shouldn't have any bearing on who's the best pitcher.

Zach Greinke becuase some time the cream rises from the very bottom.

Shouldn't, but does. More and more voters are becoming sabrmetrically aware, but too many base ball writers are old and crusty, and care about stats that don't matter, and don't watch KC games to see how awesome Zach is with their own eyes.

You guys are shortchanging King Felix. At this point it's definitely Greinke's, but not by that much.

Greinke 2.31 FIP/3.33 xFIP
Verlander 2.89 FIP/ 3.43 xFIP
Lester 3.02 FIP/3.32 xFIP
Halladay 3.07 FP/ 3.16 xFIP
Hernandez 3.10 FIP/3.60 xFIP

Those are in order of FIP, not my preference.

If I had to choose I would go with Greinke.

If by "that much" you mean, "Greinke has only been about 33% more valuable than King Felix," then, yes, I agree.

The real race is the NL Cy Young.

Support Neutral Value Added

Greinke - 5.5
Lincecum - 4.3
Wainwright - 4.2
Hernandez - 4.1
Lee - 4.0
Carpenter - 3.9
Cain - 3.6
Haren - 3.5
W. Rodriguez - 3.4
Halladay - 3.1

VORP

Greinke - 79.9
Lincecum - 67.7
Hernandez - 64.8
Wainwright - 63.4
Haren - 62.7
Cain - 60.9
Halladay - 59.7
Carpenter - 57.4
Sabathia - 56.3
Verlander - 54.3

Greinke deserves it, should be a good test of the writers to see how much has changed since Bartolo Colon won his undeserved Cy.

Mariano is having an amazing year, but the must under-hyped season in 2009 has to be Andrew Bailey. 85ks in 78 innings, 1.95 ERA and 0.92 WHIP on an awful team. Actually, he has to be the ROTY, right? I haven't heard anything about him all year, but the numbers are pretty staggering, especially the amount he's pitched for a non-contender.

On the NL side, I've just never really watched Wainwright pitch. He snuck up on me as an effective reliever in 2006, and I never consciously bought the transition to successful starter, and every year he improves. I've had the race between Lincecum and Carpenter, with Haren, Josh Johnson, and Vazquez a tick behind, but Wainwright's been as good as all of them. I hope Lincecum wins, but the lack of W's could cost him. I don't know if voters will give a guy with 15-16 wins a Cy if there's a 20 game winner there.

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

LOL

Touché. You with all your fancy numbers and your vorps and warp drives and whatever (grumble grumble).

But yes, so far it is Greinke's. There's still 2 full weeks of season left though.

Despite a somewhat low Win total, it's got to be Greinke.

One stat that in lost in the shuffle:

He's only allowed 5 SB's and caught 8. You just cannot steal on this guy.

Also, he's issued no IBB's and his WP total is only 5 compared with Hernandez's 15, for example. He's only hit 3 batsmen. He leads the league in Shut Outs. He's 2nd in CG's. 2nd in SO's...

If they base this on Wins, they're idiots. It's easy to win 18 games for a team that will win 100 (Hi, Sabathia). It's not so easy to win 15+for a team like the Royals.

Go, Zack!

Also, props to Roy Halladay for another awesome season with a crap team.

I'm already on pre-tilt, assuming Zach isn't going to get the Cy Young. I'm hearing buzz for Felix, and CC's a yankee so he's going to get a huge chunk of the anti-statistical write-tards votes. Zach's VORP is lol good, at 88.8, 18.4 points ahead of number 2 felix, and is the forth highest since 2000.

Johan 2004 89.1
Big Unit 2001 90.6
Pedro 2000 with...... (LOLOLOLOL) 112 (WTF!?!?!?)


If it wasn't for pedro's 2000 season, he'd be in the running for the best season of the 00's, much less this year. And, just to throw in a little gratuitous Pedro knob polishing.. the gap between him and Randy (21.4), the second best performance this decade, is bigger than the difference between Felix and Zach. I mean seriously, what the fuck. If you just had a vorp of 21.4 as a starting pitcher, you'd be a middle of the rotation starter on a playoff team. There's a Chad billingsly's or Tim Wakefield amount of difference between Pedro 2000 and unit 2001. Or 2 joba chamberlains

So I've been gorging myself in Greinke stories, and I just read this one by Joe Pos., and I thought this point was hilarious, and true

Kornheiser said yesterday on PTI that Verlander can put himself in the Cy Young discussion with a great outing.

There should be no discussion.

Greinke has one more start, right? Can he surpass Santana and/or Johnson?

Yeah, I would guess he could if he pitches lights out.

I love me some Verlander and although he ended up giving up 4 runs last night,he was awwesome.

He is a strike out machine and has been going long and is certainly one of the top reasons we have a shot at the playoffs. But Greinke is still the guy I would choose.

Verlander has some consistency issues that immediately make me think he doesn't have a shot. He was horrid the first 3-5 starts and then he went on a tear, fell apart for a couple games, then went on a tear and then some so so baseball, little tear, ect.

I can't say that I have paid full attention to Zach but pitching wise it seems he has been pretty consistent and his team just plain sucks.

I'm going with Zach Greinke. Low ERA, high strike outs. I just watched him pitch against the Red Sox this week, and he's a beast! Boston doesn't have a chump line-up either. But he made them look foolish.

They were just talking about Greinke on the local sports radio show when I went to lunch and they said that in his 8 losses he had an ERA of like 1.85 or something. Pretty sick.

I heard that Fox picked up Greinke's last start, a game against the Twins which could have multiple story lines.

He increased his VORP by 8.9 in two starts and he only needs 1.9 VORP points to lay claim to the 2nd best pitching season of the decade, so I'm guessing he's got a pretty good shot at it.

Someone on the local radio here in KC put out a stat (actually I think it was on the Royals TV Broadcast sometime last week) that if you traded Greinke's outings with Sabathia's, Greinke would have something like a 23-3 record. I don't know how they came to that conclusion, but that is what they were saying.

Also, it is spelled ZacK, you know like strikeouts.

If Zack switched spots with CC, he'd be Dwight Gooden re-incarnate, in terms of hype.

McGee has feed me enough Greinke stories that he's now my runaway favorite player. I bought a KC hat today.

that's another underrated thing about him. He's a ****ing weirdo but no one knows it. He's great.

Guacamole is on Zack Greinke’s mind. He enjoys guacamole, unless it’s chunky. He doesn’t like avocados, actually, and when his fiancée told him that doesn’t make any sense, he shrugged his shoulders. Guacamole is of paramount importance to the best pitcher in the American League because his favorite burrito place just raised the price by 30 cents.

“I like the guacamole,” Greinke said. “Now, I don’t really love the guacamole. So I get it when I feel like it. They changed their guacamole from $1.50 to $1.80. I mean, $1.50 is already pretty darn high. So they changed it to $1.80, and I’ll never again get guacamole.”

It’s brought to Greinke’s attention that he just signed a $38 million contract to pitch for the Kansas City Royals well into the next decade. The team and Greinke’s agent haggled for weeks over the terms before hammering them out in one day, which doesn’t make sense to him, either. “Why can’t they go in the room the first time and do it?” he asked, before getting back to the subject at hand.

“It’s not about the guacamole itself,” Greinke said. “I just don’t want to let them win.”

Irrational spite. I love that.

I'm glad that baseball waits so long to announce the award winners. That way, nobody cares anymore.

Edit: Um, Greinke won the Cy Young Award. I didn't actually say that in my original post.

Poor, stupid Trent Dilfer doesn't even realize that he was a Felix Hernandez or CC Cy young award away from Death. Greinke's winning the cy young saved my faith in humanity, after the fall out of this Bellichick fourth down thing. Dilfer was first on my KOS list, and if CC had won the Cy young, I'm sure I would have ****ing snapped and headed up to bristol with an assault rifle.

I would just like to go on the record stating that I acted out my Greinke role-playing pre-Cy Young, and that at the time of the Grei'coitus, I was confident that it would be a C.C. robbery.

I'm not a Cy Young groupie.

You're probably a little bitter CC didn't win. I know how you love playing the martyr.

Jesus.


Also, your fear about CC was clearly in your head (or in the head of somebody else, whose article you read and believed). Greinke ran away with it, Felix was 2nd, and then Verlander, CC, and Halladay were miles behind in the voting.

No, my fear was Felix, who obv was the most likely person to win it, and it would have tilted me, but not enough to drive me nuts. CC was my nightmare scenario that would have unleashed a bloodbath. This is how little I think of baseball writers. Apparently more of the old writers are dying off than I estimated.