To be honest, I totally get the Kershaw thing. Sure, it can be argued that Halladay had a slew of mitigating factors to make his numbers even better. But when the advanced numbers were so close (as you pointed out with the table of their ERA estimators), why shouldn't the across-the-board basic-stat dominance sway the vote?
And why assume the wins carried the day? It could as easily have been the K's, or the dominance on an otherwise putrid team (Kemp, notwithstanding).

I'll give you two reasons for preferring Nova over Pineda. One, Pineda benefited from an impossibly, unsustainably low BABIP that was the only thing keeping this "close" (sic).

Two, Nova had a considerably better ERA+, not just ERA. Yes, I am aware that the second reason arguably isn't as strong as it looks, when you look at actual opponents faced. It seems to me as though your real argument here is that the voters didn't look at "the right" advanced statistics, rather than that they just fixated on wins.

It seems odd for a BP writer to complain about Kershaw's landslide victory given the results of your advanced metric:

Kershaw - 7.3 WARP
Lee - 6.2 WARP
Halladay - 4.8 WARP

Of course, it's unlikely than more than a small fraction of the 32 NL Cy Young voters looked at WARP, but it doesn't make sense to me that you omitted it from this article.

Yeah, I guess I'm looking for the argument that Halladay had a better season than Kershaw, and I'm not seeing one. Certainly, Lee did not.

Forget stats for a minute. Kershaw put up the season he did in spite of an absolute circus out in LA. Kershaw also didn't have the benefit of the best rotation of the generation pitching behind him. Frankly Kershaw WAS the obvious choice - apparently your head is buried so far into the stats sheet that other intangible things escaped your attention.

Which brings us to Pineda. Post all-star break he was 1-4 with an ERA over 5 and only 58 IP. I am guessing if he didn't completely crap himself in the 2nd half, he would have gotten more consideration.

As for Nova, you could make a good argument for him, but frankly if Hellickson had that lineup behind him, he probably wins 20 games. Granted the XERAs are similar, but at the end of the day, "lucky" or not, Hellickson's season was consistent throughout, and he was better in all meaningful stats outside of Wins, which is by large part determined by run support. Nova even had the media advantage by pitching for the Yankees - the fact that the New York hype machine didn't turn out strong for Nova should tell you everything you need to know from the guys who watched him fling it every 5th day.

Sorry but this article is much to do about nothing. You are pretty much trying to create issues where there aren't any. I am the first guy to say the BBWA gets it wrong a lot, but not this time. Certainly there are better arguments to be made elsewhere.

The problem I have with Derek's analysis is that he seems to think it is rational for any particular voter to pick Kershaw, but not for most of them to do. Who says Kershaw's landslide victory reflects a belief on the voter's part that he is *much* better? It reflects a belief of most of the voters that he is at least a little better.

If everyone were fully rational, *every* vote would be unanimous, as they would all reach the same conclusion about candidates who might be only thinly separated.

Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay played for the same team. I don't know that they faced equivalent teams, but it strikes me that the reason Lee may have faced slightly stronger players is because he's left-handed, which is a quality of him, not of luck.

You leaned very hard into the voters because no one voted for the guy with the lowest ZpHX or xFIP or something, but if you do that, you'd best be taking everything into account yourself.

Did you account for this handedness issue? It doesn't appear that you did. And if the platoonmates vs. lefties were stronger, it's very hard to give Lee a bonus for that.

I think that the general argument that A and B are close so A should get about as many votes as B is flawed at the outset. If we're voting for Most Giraffes and Steve has 198 and Joe has 199, we're all going to vote for Joe. (Christina Kahrl made the a similar baffling argument re: Votto's MVP, which I understood to say that Votto probably deserved it but so many people voting for him was a crime against math.)

I'm far from a supporter of the voters; I'm still mad Alan Trammell didn't win the MVP when he obviously deserved it. But the tenor of the article is unjustified by the actions of the voters.

I'm surprised that you didn't also address the AL ROY voting between the two corner infielders, and the lunacy of Mark Trumbo coming in ahead of Eric Hosmer.

The problem I have with this article is this: Even people who have a strong understanding of the different run estimators disagree on whether or not they should be used when assessing past value, which is what we're looking at for awards.

While it's entirely possible, if not probable that many voters still rely too heavily on wins, this year's voting doesn't lead to that conclusion. You could also make the blanket statement that the results show a prevailing preference for value estimators that use runs allowed as a starting point over those that are based on defense-independent estimators. Or, you could suggest that the voters look at a variety of advanced metrics, but fall back on their intuition when the advanced metrics disagree or are inconclusive.

If anything can be gleamed on how much the voters still value wins from parsing this year's voting results, I'd point to the fact that Ian Kennedy, who had the NL's best W-L record, only finished fourth, behind all three sabermetrically viable candidates. If wins still carried the degree of weight implied in this article, that would be an unlikely result.

It's way too early to say Hellickson will "still wind up a very good pitcher" with just one very lucky year completed.

The only way to determine if the voters really thought Kershaw was such an obvious choice or not would be to change the system of voting. Give each voter ten points to allocate among no more than five pitchers. Thus, a sample ballot might have Kershaw 3.3, Halladay 3.0, Lee 3.0, Lincecum 0.5 and Kennedy 0.2. Then total up the points. It would have been closer I guess, but Kershaw still would have won, and deservedly so. To criticize any individual voter (or number of voters) for voting for Kershaw this year is really going overboard in the non-traditional direction. God knows the writers' votes deserve criticism sometimes, but Kershaw winning this year ain't one of them times.

I suspect you would only feel that we have come out of the so-called dark ages if wins and traditional ERA were held against contenders. I know pitching wins have been over-rated, but would you ultra-advanced stats people really enjoy baseball more if we eliminated pitchers' wins altogether? If they add absolutely NOTHING in evaluating awards, would you eliminate them if you were baseball czar? RBIs too? Would we just be left with SIERA, xFIP, FIP, tAV etc? What a fun box score that would be to read! I personally love sabermetrics, but in any movement there is always the danger of extremists. Someone who would consider a landslide victory by Kershaw an "outrage" would fit into this category.

A voter is swayed because somebody led the league in ERA, strikeouts, and wins.......OUTRAGEOUS!!!

This concept that "rational" thinking would lead to a unanimous result sounds kind of elitist and fascist, ya know? If all voters were rational in a political election, does that mean one candidate would win 100% of the votes? That anyone who voted the other way is irrational? I know a lot of people who think they know the ultimate truth, and that others should be re-educated to think the "rational" way, but they're kind of dangerous.

....and Verlander wins the MVP! A blow against those who irrationally discriminate against pitchers. Kudos to the voters who again got it right. If Kemp wins tomorrow (and I think he will by a good margin), which would be a blow to the irrational thinking that an MVP must come from a contender, then I think the awards have all come out exactly right. A happy meeting where sabermetrics and traditional common sense (Kershaw) both play a part.

So if I get this argument correct, because the three pitchers have similar estimated ERAs (such that they are all "coin flip" choices), we are to presume the voting should have been closer?!?

I don't know about the writers, but if I had to vote and my primary voting criteria didn't answer the question, I would look to secondary criteria. And, in this case, W, K, ERA and WARP all favor Kershaw - and IP is effectively even (1 IP separating the 3).

Is it then that surprising that 27 of 32 voters saw one pitcher who led in many categories while a wash in others and voted that way? I mean, who votes their 2nd choice 1st because they know their 1st choice will win and they want the vote to be closer?

As such, it isn't surprising that 27 of 32 voters were able to find a single stat that swung them to put Kershaw 1st on their ballot - because they had so many from which to choose. And even if they felt it was 1a and 1b, only one person can get that 1st place vote.

Maybe some progress has been made though that everyone here can agree on. After all, how long ago would someone who played on a team barely over .500 go up against 2 other players whom played on teams with over 100 wins yet still be given the award? There might be a debate here about player independent evaluation for handing out hardware and what a reasonable voting outcome should be given the closeness of the three players' performances, but it used to be that many players didn't even get considered because of the quality of the team mates they played with. I don't have time to quantify the theoretical proof to that statement, but when I look at the AL Cy winners list I think I see a fairly remarkable shift over the last 10 years. Before that, everyone I see on the list pretty much played for a team with a strong record in that given year.

Slightly different topic, but in response to the Verlander winning MVP comment above: I think it would be more fair if the hitters had their own equivalent of a 'Cy Young', as prestigious as the CY Young and MVP are now, for which only position players were eligible. And then throw everyone into the MVP discussion - hitters and pitchers - on equal ground.

It would eliminate the "Pitchers already have their own MVP award!" meme. It would allow for a rational discussion of - and dismissal of - the "Verlander only played in 21% of his team's games" meme. After all, Verlander was involved in more plate appearances than any position player, though when defensive plays from a good center fielder or shortstop are factored in, the needle can swing the other way. And most of all, it really would make it more fair, given that pitchers are in fact eligible for two prestigious and *financially lucrative* awards, where position players are only eligible for the one. (Both are eligible for Gold Gloves; Silver Sluggers are pretty meaningless.)

Here's the outrage in the AL MVP vote....some idiot writer from Cleveland didn't even list Verlander on the ballot and a home-town bonehead from Dallas gave Michael Young a first-place vote. I urge a baseball IQ test before some of these jokers are allowed to vote for awards.

Can't wait to see what you have to say about Verlander winning the MVP. The PVORP and WARP numbers strongly suggest he wasn't contributing nearly as much value to his team as Bautista and Ellsbury.

As to the NL CY, one must also consider how people vote. While it is true that the difference between Kershaw and the Phillies duo was small, it does not follow that the voting results would be close. There seemed to be wide agreement (including by you) that Kershaw was marginally better. Thus, a small difference in value turned into a voting landslide.

I also can't get as excited about who finished fourth and fifth in the AL ROY. While Pineda's performance statistics show him ahead of Nova, they weren't as dominating as King Felix's, and you have to give Nova a fair amount of credit because, even with all those runs the Yankees scored, New York is a much harder place to pitch (heck the Yankees even sent the guy to the minors in mid season so that Bartolo Colon could stay on regular rest). I can't even get too excited that one voter actually placed Nova first on his ROY ballot. While his peripherals were clearly below Pineda's, his FIP, xFIP and SIERA were all materially better than Hellickson's, and K/9 was close, so it's not clear that his advantage in wins was the sole factor in that vote.

Oh pleeeeeaze. The Sheehanesque outrage just doesn't fly. This is not a Vukovich moment. A reasoned article consisting of your opinions on topic would be fine, but "disgraceful"? It makes BP look curmudgeonly. Perhaps it's a page view thing.

I'd like to hear John Perrato's view on the voters for these awards, their bias, and rationals.

Are folks really getting worked up because BBWA voters seem to be ignoring FIP, xFIP and SIERA? Come on now, guys. I'm happy that they are finally kind of getting OBS. Next stop WARP.

I'm confused, as at the beginning of your article you used WINS as the only barometer for why King Felix shouldnt have won the Cy Young in 2010, and then say that WINS is a bad measure to use when you are talking about Nova over Pineda. Confused