Vote For Freeland

I have been trying to decide if I would vote for Kyle Freeland first for NL Cy Young. Any pitcher who posts an ERA under 3.00 while pitching for a team that plays home games in Coors likely deserves the honor. When I looked at FanGraphs WAR, however, deGrom is at 8.3 WAR, Freeland at 3.6. That discrepancy seemed huge to me. I believe it’s partly due to FanGraphs WAR being more FIP based, but I also wonder if they are missing an adjustment for Coors beyond run scoring. Baseball Reference has deGrom’s pitching WAR at 9.1, second to Aaron Nola, while Freeland is at 7.6, fourth in the NL. That rating seems more in line with reality.

Part of the Bill James Starting Pitcher Historical Rankings and the Baseball Musings Starting Batter Rankings is an adjustment to the games scored bases on the scoring environment of the park. That’s based on the previous 100 games played in the park, so it’s a moving target and adjusts as the run environment changes. In the calculations for those rankings, a long-term historical average of nine runs per game is used as the base line.

I used this game by game adjustment on total runs allowed for NL pitchers with at least 25 starts, and figured their runs allowed average and their adjusted runs allowed average (per nine innings pitched). I also used the baseline of 8.7 runs per game, which is the average in NL parks this season. Here are the 41 NL pitchers with at least 25 starts:

Pitcher	Runs Allowed	Adjusted RA	RA per 9 IP	Adj. RA per 9 ip
Jacob deGrom	48	47.9	2.07	2.06
Aaron Nola	55	53.6	2.48	2.42
Max Scherzer	65	63.1	2.74	2.66
Kyle Freeland	62	56.8	2.95	2.70
Patrick Corbin	66	62.4	3.09	2.93
Mike Foltynewicz	62	59.6	3.27	3.15
Miles Mikolas	67	65.6	3.25	3.18
Zack Greinke	75	71.6	3.35	3.19
Jack Flaherty	52	50.9	3.27	3.21
Jameson Taillon	65	63.9	3.29	3.23
Zack Wheeler	69	68.8	3.41	3.40
Trevor Williams	61	61.6	3.44	3.47
Jon Lester	72	68.2	3.80	3.60
Kyle Hendricks	79	73.5	3.88	3.61
German Marquez	86	75.4	4.20	3.68
Derek Holland	71	71.7	3.90	3.94
Chase Anderson	71	69.7	4.04	3.97
Jose Quintana	78	73.1	4.27	4.01
Jhoulys Chacin	81	81.4	4.01	4.02
Julio Teheran	79	76.1	4.19	4.03
Sean Newcomb	74	71.2	4.21	4.05
Jose Urena	77	76.9	4.27	4.26
Alex Wood	70	70.8	4.22	4.27
Ivan Nova	76	75.5	4.36	4.33
Tanner Roark	90	87.2	4.49	4.35
Luis Castillo	89	82.6	4.72	4.38
Andrew Suarez	77	75.1	4.53	4.42
Gio Gonzalez	81	79.7	4.50	4.43
Tyler Anderson	94	84.4	5.03	4.51
Steven Matz	74	73.4	4.59	4.56
Nick Pivetta	85	81.0	4.80	4.58
Wei-Yin Chen	70	66.6	4.87	4.63
Jake Arrieta	86	85.2	4.70	4.66
Junior Guerra	74	72.0	4.80	4.67
Jonathan Gray	96	85.3	5.29	4.70
Vincent Velasquez	77	75.0	4.85	4.72
Matt Harvey	84	78.8	5.04	4.73
Chris Stratton	79	77.9	5.14	5.07
Zachary Godley	98	95.4	5.27	5.13
Luke Weaver	83	82.4	5.48	5.44
Clayton Richard	98	99.4	5.56	5.64

So Freeland does get a nice adjustment, but not enough to justify beating out deGrom. I think I would still vote for Freeland second.

from baseballmusings.com https://ift.tt/2NB1YJ2