FIRE JOE MORGAN: This Is What Happens When Rick Sutcliffe Tries To Come Up With Unconventional Wisdom

FIRE JOE MORGAN

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Friday, September 14, 2007

 

This Is What Happens When Rick Sutcliffe Tries To Come Up With Unconventional Wisdom

Red Sox-Yankees, 4:49 PST. Dusty Baker's in the booth and yet somehow Rick Sutcliffe manages to outcrazy him:

Rick Sutcliffe: We were talking last week, OB, about the Cy Young winner, and it's probably going to be Sabathia or whoever wins tomorrow, Chien-Ming Wang or Beckett, but you know who's had the best year? It's been Roy Halladay.

(No one responds.)

Dave O'Brien: The 0-2 ...

Roy Halladay. Cy Young. Hmm. That's thinking outside the bun. What if instead of picking the guy with the best ERA in the league, we pick the guy who has the 19th-best ERA? How about instead of choosing a guy who leads his team in WHIP, we vote for a guy who's third on his own staff (behind Dustin McGowan and Shawn Marcum (yes, I realize Marcum has some relief appearances thrown in there, but Jesus, it's Shawn Marcum we're talking about here))?

In previous years, yes, Roy Halladay has sometimes been a phenomenal starter. But let's let these very traditional, very digestible statistics speak for themselves:

3.91 ERA, 1.25 WHIP, 129 K, 45 BB

Cy ... Young? Has Sutcliffe even watched baseball this year? Maybe someone is pulling an elaborate experiment on him wherein Sut is constantly wearing contact lenses that show him baseball games from 2003 in place of the current year's games. Yes, that must be it.

--

Later, Robinson Cano strikes out and Sutcliffe tries to remove himself from the giant, crazy person-shaped hole he's just dug.

Rick Sutcliffe: Getting back to Roy Halladay -- the reason I say that is he doesn't have the Yankees or Red Sox lineup behind him, and yet he's gotta face them. I mean, it's so much tougher to pick up a win when you've got to pitch against these two lineups and you don't have that lineup behind you.

There's some grain of truth behind what Sut's saying, but it's obscured by the K2-size mountain of ludicrosity that is picking Roy Halladay for the Cy Young. Yes, Halladay has faced Boston 5(!) times and the Yankees twice. But I'm fairly confident that saying that the quality of lineups he's faced has not, in fact, accounted for the three-quarters of a run in ERA that separates him from some of the best Cy candidates.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that C.C. Sabathia has pitched 40 more innings than Josh Beckett and Chien-Ming Wang to this point in the season? That's pretty fucking incredible. If you're leading the league in innings and you're still third in ERA, you're doing a pretty awesome job at pitching.

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posted by Junior  # 7:50 PM
Comments:
There are 10 AL pitchers with a higher VORP than Halliday.

What a weird thing to say.
 
I meant: Halladay. Not Halliday. Sarry.
 
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