While I was here making my post about rarities, I looked at my previous post from June 5 about pitchers to seek and to avoid.
As usual, it was good advice.
I advised that Alex Wood, Jameson Taillon and Cole Hamels should be good for more wins.
Wood had won one game at the end of May. He added eight wins, even though he made just eight starts after the All-Star Game after making 19 before that artificial midpoint.
Taillon had six wins in the first half, eight in the second.
Hamels had five wins at the All-Star break, four thereafter. He had three at the end of May and six over the final four months, essentially the same rate of 1.5 wins per month. But look more closely and you'll see that he was 4-0 in August after being traded to the Cubs, but was 0-3 in September as part of -- a big part of -- the team's overall slide.
I said Felix Hernandez would not do as well during the second half. He had five wins at the end of May, three more in June and zero over the final three months.
The June post said you could expect to see Masahiro Tanaka's ERA to go down and Jake Arrieta's to go up. Tanaka had a 4.54 ERA at the All-Star break and 2.85 thereafter. Arrieta's splits were 3.23 and 5.04.
Look at the list of pitchers with a 2 rating (the best in the Hittability/Strikeability ratings). Nine of the 10 pitchers on the list received Cy Young Award votes.
AL Cy Young winner Blake Snell was rated 3. So was Miles Mikolas, with a note calling him "a surprise player to watch," and he also receive Cy Young votes.
The lowest-rated players at 8 mostly continued to pitch badly. Zach Godley was the exception who turned his season around.
Trevor Williams, rated at 7, and Carlos Carrasco, Kent Freeland and David Price, all with average ratings of 5, pitched much better later in the season.
A Cy Young award note about NL winner Jacob deGrom. I have no problem with the writer who didn't give deGrom a first-place vote. He might have been thinking as I was, that at a time when most starters' goal is to pitch well and long enough merely to "give the team a chance to win."
I had written, possibly in this blog, a well reasoned piece on why Felix Hernandez shouldn't have won a Cy Young in a 13-win season. My argument showed that he hadn't performed well while the Mariners were in key games that could have helped them in that season's pennant race. I complained -- and continue to complain -- against the analytical hysteria that says individual pitchers' wins don't mean anything.
The Mets were just 14-18 in deGrom's starts. His record was 10-9; a poor bullpen was 4-9 after he left games. Was deGrom not pitching enough innings to give the Mets a chance to win? On close inspection, I can't say that. He pitched more than six innings in about two-thirds of his starts.
In 1992, I wrote for a publication that I think was named "Left Field Baseball" about reasons why Doug Drabek seemed to get fewer wins than would have been expected from the ace of a good Pirates rotation and team at that time. One of the factors I explored was whether Pittsburgh's batters didn't feel such a need to produce with Drabek on the mound because he would hold down the other team. I think that idea was partly responsible for deGrom's low total of wins. His average run support was 3.49; the Mets' offense averaged 4.17 for the season, or about 20 percent more than when deGrom was pitching. The clincher: in his 32 starts, he allowed more than three runs once -- when he allowed four. So I have no trouble with the voters' choosing deGrom, either.
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