AL Cy Young

Now, I’m going to talk baseball.

Wait!  Come back, please!  I know you’re the artsy type, here for comics talk, and you likely don’t know your Wee Willie Keeler from your Willie Mays Hayes, but I’ll try to keep it fun for you nonetheless. Artists and athletes aren’t that different from each other, after all.  You hone your skills with a specific set of instruments over several years, and sports are essentially entertainment anyway, so we’re all basically in the same profession.  Just that in comics we don’t get big paychecks and our testicles are normal sized, so that’s an even tradeoff, right?  (Except if you’re a woman, then I guess you just don’t get the big paychecks.  So…moving on.)

Baseball, our national pastime, the sport of sticks and balls and going all the way with that special someone.  Yes, baseball.  Besides being a euphemism for sex, it is also an entertaining game to watch, especially as 30-second highlights on ESPN.  It’s been around since at least the Polk administration, which is a really long time if you don’t know who Polk is or when he was President or that a guy named Polk was President.  It’s so engrained within our society that it is naturally behind football in popularity.  By a lot.

Still, it is a popular sport in America, Latin America, and Japan.  It is one of the few ways Latino immigrants can come to this country and get heckled, not for the color of their skin or their ethnicity, but for leaving a hanging slider in the strike zone and losing the game for us in the ninth inning.  Truly, this is what Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted.  While I do enjoy watching Japanese players like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui come across the Pacific to play, I wish they’d bring their giant robots along with them.  I’m sure that would help baseball’s popularity.

Now I hope I have entertained you long enough because I’m going to get into some deep baseball-speak.  Hopefully, you won’t get too lost or bored, but if you’re the nerdy type who loves crunching numbers, then good news!  Baseball loves crunching numbers.  People are downright obsessed with them here.  There’s this whole thing called sabremetrics that pumps out new stats every year, throwing different things into a beaker to find what meaningless number comes out.  DIPS, PECOTA, VORP, Pythagorean Expectation.  These are real things that people came up with.  If you like to invent stats with names like VORP, then baseball is just waiting for you to come up with something named DETHRAGE.  (If that stat hasn’t been invented yet, I want some credit for when it does get invented.)

Personally, I stick with more traditional stats like ERA, Ks, and WHIP.  These are pitching stats, and in the American League, the pitcher with the best stats is Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners.  Baseball traditionalists, a.k.a. old fogies, guffaw mightily when you suggest Hernandez is the best pitcher of the year, that the Cy Young award should go to someone like C.C. Sabathia of the New York Yankees or David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays.  Why do they guffaw mightily?  Largely, that’s their thing as fogies, but also because Hernandez’s record is a measly 13-12 while the other guys have 21 and 19 wins respectively.

Wins, you say?  Yes, that’s another old stat that’s been around forever.  Back in the no-black-people days, it was common for a pitcher to get 30 wins in a year.  Now due to increased specialization, five-man rotations, and probably more blacks, a pitcher is lucky to get 15 wins in a year.  So how does a pitcher get a win?  By preventing the opposing team from scoring more runs that his teammates can score, of course.  As one of nine men on the field, the starting pitcher has sole dominion over every aspect of the game from what pitch the catcher wants him to throw, to how the manager wants the defense behind him play, to the easy ground ball the first baseman flubs, to the left fielder grounding into a double play for the third time today with the bases loaded, to the middle reliever who somehow can’t keep a five-run lead.  Yes, the starting pitcher has control over all of this somehow, and his worth should justifiably be determined in such a manner.  Things like ERA are secondary to wins because it’s the starting pitcher’s job to win, which I’m sure is good news for the first baseman, right fielder, and middle reliever.  Boy, are they off the hook.

Felix Hernandez only has 13 wins, which is pitiful.  I guess having a Major League best 2.27 ERA and Major League best 232 Ks while only trailing Roy Halladay in Innings Pitched in all of the Majors isn’t enough for Felix to be King Felix (as his nickname would have him call us).  According to the fogies, he really should’ve willed his teammates to score more than nine runs in his 12 losses.  What a layabout.