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Great Goggle-y Moogly Usually a reliever won't be considered for the Cy Young award, or else he won't be considered a leading candidate and rather will draw a few second or third place votes, like Keith Foulke did this year for the Oakland A's. However, Eric Gagne is not your average reliever and his 2003 year was certainly not your average year by a reliever. Gagne put together an outstanding season. It was quite possibly one of the best performances by a relief pitcher, and is certainly a candidate one must consider when looking at what is the best year by a relief pitcher ever. To determine the NL Cy Young award, I basically think you have to rank the starting pitcher candidates in order, and then determine where Gagne's season fits in. The crux of the question is going to be whether or not Gagne's season was enough to make up for the lack of innings he has compared to pitchers like Mark Prior and Jason Schmidt. Here is a table comparing five of the best starters in the NL during 2003
Those are some very impressive years, and that's not even considering a few people like Livan Hernandez or Hideo Nomo who could probably make reasonably comparable claims to the award, as well. However, I think the title of the best starting pitcher in the National League comes down to a battle between Schmidt, Prior and Brown. Webb and Vazquez had good years, but neither has been as dominant as the other three and it's reflected in their ERAs, ERA+s, as well as their K/BB ratio (Webb) and opponent OPS (Vazquez). Now, looking at Prior, Schmidt and Brown you can see that their numbers are almost identical. Schmidt leads in ERA, WHIP, opponents OPS and ERA+, which is adjusted for ballparks. Prior leads in innings pitched (by a tiny margin), K/BB ratio and K/IP ratio. Another interesting stat to look at is the quality of batters faced by the pitchers
It's a pretty small difference, but you will notice that Brown and Prior have faced batters about 3% better than the ones faced by Schmidt. When looking at the stats, I think that the best starting pitcher in the National League was Jason Schmidt, by a small margin over Mark Prior and a slightly larger margin over Kevin Brown. While Schmidt faced batters about 3% worse than Prior, he kept them to an OPS about 10% lower than Prior kept his batters to. Prior dominated his batters more, by striking out a better ratio than Schmidt, but Schmidt had the lower WHIP and ERA. Even though Schmidt pitches in a pitcher's ballpark, while Wrigley Field is actually a slight hitter's ballpark, the adjusted ERA still gives the advantage to Schmidt. Schmidt actually had a slightly lower ERA at home, but he gave up more hits at home too, and had a worse WHIP. Prior had a worse ERA at home, but also gave up fewer hits at home. I don't think you can really determine that much from that, so I will trust the adjusted ERA which says that Schmidt had a better ERA, regardless of any advantage he received from Pac Bell Park. And when you consider his other advantages in statistics such as WHIP, it becomes clearer that he was the best starter in the NL this year. Prior will come no lower than third on my ballot, and I think that I'll be marking down his name on my ballot many times in the next decade. So now it comes to down to Jason Schmidt versus Eric Gagne, and again, it's time for a table.
Now, read over Eric Gagne's stats again. Those are completely mind-blowing. This is domination that's not been seen since the 1896 war between Britain and Zanzibar. Pujols, Bonds and Helton all had higher batting averages than the opponent OPS against Gagne. Gagne struck out 117 more batters than he walked, which wouldn't be that impressive if he was a starter, but the man pitched 82 innings. He's the first reliever ever to strike out 100 more batters than he walked, and he topped that by 17. In an average 9 innings, he'd give up 6.21 hits and walks, while striking out 15 batters; and his adjusted ERA was 335. Just for comparison, and I know it's not quite a fair comparison, Bonds' OPS+ during his amazing last 3 years were 262, 275 and 231, and think for a moment about how dominant he's been. Gagne's ERA+ would easily be a single-season record, except he doesn't have the innings to qualify. Ah, the innings. Schmidt has 2.5 times the innings Gagne has, and he had a pretty impressive season himself. Now, if you were going to compare the innings straight up, you'd have a hard time choosing Gagne over Schmidt, as much as you might want to. It doesn't mean that some voters wouldn't do it, but I think you'd have a hard time justifying that Gagne has been more valuable than Schmidt. However, I don't think the innings should be compared against each other straight up. I believe that Gagne's innings have a higher value than Schmidt's innings. Gagne was Los Angeles's closer, and he racked up 55 saves in 55 opportunities, another excellent achievement. That also means that about 55 innings, and most likely around about 60 innings, were pitched when Los Angeles had a maximum of a 3-run lead. Roughly 75% of Gagne's innings came in close situations with the game on the line. Yes, a fair number of them were probably times when Los Angeles had a 3-run lead, but that's still a close situation, as anyone who had the "pleasure" of watching Jose Mesa close can attest to. It's really difficult to measure the quality of Jason Schmidt's innings; however, I think it is safe to say that his innings were not as important, on a one-to-one basis as Gagne's were. For every 7th-9th inning of a close, intense ballgame Schmidt pitched, he likely had a similar innings where he was pitching with a 5-run lead. Also, while Schmidt pitched with one and two run leads often early on in the ball games, these are not as important innings as they are later in the ballgame, especially come the 9th inning. Another factor to consider is that Gagne likely faced tougher batters than Schmidt did. I don't have the quality of batters faced for Gagne available, but Kevin Brown faced tougher batters than Schmidt, so you can logically reason that it is likely that Gagne did too, as he had to face the San Fran offence too, and couldn't beat up upon the pathetic Dodgers hitting like Schmidt could. Also, in the late innings you often get pinch-hitters coming up for the weaker hitters in the lineup, and while they not may be great hitters themselves, they were better than the hitters they were replacing. Keep in the mind that the hitters they were replacing would have been the hitters that the starter faced during the game. Gagne never, or very rarely at least, got to strike out a pitcher like Schmidt did several times a game. Not only does that mean he likely faced tougher batters, but it also makes his strikeout total that much more impressive, although he does the advantage of coming in "fresh" every game. Now, I have to admit that while I recognised the fact that Gagne's and Schmidt's innings were not created equal, I wasn't sure how to account for the difference. At least that was until I discovered a discussion at Baseball Primer about the NL Cy Young award, where they discussed this very topic and gave Gagne a leverage index of 1.8 for his innings. This figure could likely be increased if Gagne was used optimally, but that was not the case, although I still think 1.8 is a fair assessment. Now, some would call this the logic fallacy of "appealing to authority", but many people who read that site have a greater knowledge of sabermetrics than I do, and I feel much more comfortable using their figure than I would just making one up out of thin air. Using their figure, Gagne amassed 148 innings, compared to Schmidt's 207.2.
IP ERA
Schmidt 207.2 2.34
Gagne 148.0 1.20
MISSING 59.2 5.18
All Los Angeles would need to do, by my calculations, is to find someone who could pitch 59.2 innings with a 5.18 ERA, and that pitcher plus Gagne would equal Schmidt's production. This year Los Angeles had a team ERA of 3.16, which increases to 3.27 if you take out Gagne. Considering the replacement ERA would certainly be higher than that and considering that Los Angeles could presumably have made up some of the innings with guys like Paul Shuey, Guillermo Mota, Tom Martin and Wilson Alvarez, I think Los Angeles could have made up those innings with an ERA well under 5.18. Also, looking at their AAA affiliate in Las Vegas, there are some decent pitchers kicking around there like Troy Browhan, Bill Simas, David Lee, Rodney Myers, Steve Coyler and Bryan Corey, who I think could have done all right in the majors. There were enough options at Las Vegas that if one of these guys was pitching really poorly, L.A. could simply try the next guy out, and I think they would have found someone rather quickly who could them reasonably decent innings. While I wouldn't hold it against someone who voted for Schmidt or
Prior for the NL Cy Young, it is my belief that they should have finished
second and third respectively to Gagne. When you consider the leverage
of Gagne's innings, and then compare it to Schmidt's and consider
potential replacements, I think the argument can easily be made that
Gagne deserves the award, even with his low innings totals. The missing
innings are simply not of high enough quality to make me think that
Schmidt's innings should give him the title. Gagne's season was phenomenal,
and when looking at raw statistics you can only stand there in awe
of what he accomplished. However, when considering them in a more
sabermetic sense, I think Gagne still deserves all the accolades he
is getting. It's not a common opinion among the more sabermetrically-inclined
baseball fans, but I think this goateed, goggle-wearing, emotional
Quebec native deserves the NL Cy Young, and it's a good thing for
everyone that he didn't follow his dream of becoming a fourth-line
hockey goon.
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©Copyright 2003
Phil Orr
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