Mariners ace Felix Hernandez just did something to redeem the awful Mariners season by winning his first Cy Young Award. Bagging the award nets him a $1 million raise next year.
Hernandez won only 13 games this year, making his win total the lowest ever for a Cy Young winner. But the dude totally deserved it—the league’s best ERA, second-most strikeouts, and a wins above replacement (WAR) significantly better than his top Cy Young competitors.
Too bad the Mariners sucked so bad. He got one or zero runs of support in ten of his starts. Fuck you, Chone Figgins.
Awesome! A silver lining to an otherwise suicide inducing season. Good for him. And he’s what? 24 years old I think?
Living the fucking dream, yo.
I doubt it’s a raise. It’s probably a bonus. If you had a paying gig, you might know the difference.
@ 2 — “By winning, Hernandez received an automatic $1 million raise in salary next year to $11 million.”
Eat a dick.
I’m more concerned with what the UW Regents decided to do about Husky Stadium in their meeting today.
Still holding out for it being replaced with an airship playing field – nothing more fun than tailfin parties before a resounding Steampunk football game in the air.
King Felix! Hooray!
Amazing, that we saw two Cy Young-caliber pitchers start this horrendous season on our staff. No wonder pundits thought the Ms could have pulled off a miracle, if they could have just won enough in our weak division to make the playoffs.
I don’t know how much you can blame Figgins. His best skill is base-running, but that’s not of much value if no one hits behind you. 340 is an excellent on-base percentage for a guy batting only 259. (Compare that to Icharo’s 359/315.)
Figgins was left on base 70% of the time. He had a worse OBP in 2006 and still scored a third more runs. I’m hoping he comes back next year like he came back in 2007. And I hope he gets some fucking backup.
@7 — The problem with Chone Figgins is that he got paid $8.5 mill to have a WAR of only 0.6. Ichiro had the best WAR on the Mariners this year at 4.8. But even guys like Ryan Langerhans and Russell Branyan had a higher WAR than Figgins. He got paid a ton of money to do only marginally better than a replacement-level 2B off the street.
I do like seeing WAR mentioned on Slog, that’s for sure.
Congratulations, Felix. You are The King.
WAR, good God, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
RBI ftw.
Fnarf likes sabremetrics? Nice!
I’m pretty sure Will is just RBI-trolling. At least I hope he is. If you like the arbitrariness of RBI, Will, you must really like the uber-arbitrariness of GWRBI!
Stats aside, Felix is throwing some ungodly shit. Late-breaking, 93-95mph sinker/cutter that is incredibly “heavy”*. His stuff is very hard to square up, resulting in a lot of weak grounders & pop-ups. He doesn’t bother to waste pitches, which allows him to go deep into games. Good thing the M’s signed him up long-term.
*For the life of me, I can’t come up with a scientific explanation for the “heavy” ball. Ryan threw a heavy ball, as did Clemens, but not so much Big Unit, though all threw with very similar velocity. Paging Bill Nye!
Give me artistry at bat or give me death.
Figgins sucked the first half, did pretty good the second half.
@11, I’ve been following sabermetrics for longer than you’ve been alive, ever since that fateful day early in 1984 when I stumbled across Bill James’s Baseball Abstract, the second year of its professional publication.
At one point I even devised my own statistic, PNOPS, or “Positionally Normalized On-base percentage Plus Slugging percentage”, pronounced “pee-nopps”, naturally. It was a pretty terrible statistic, but in 1994 there were not a huge range of publicly-available options, at least not during the season; i.e., none.
You can read about the terrifying fiasco of PNOPS, and the reaction of some of the real leading lights of modern sabermetrics, like David Grabiner, Dale Stephenson, and others, including Neal Traven, who even posts here on Slog once in a blue moon, on Usenet: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport…
Fnarf loves nothing more than tooting his own horn.
@16, I tried to get you to toot it for me, but you’re always on the rag.
Okay, it’s true that Figgins is a lousy fielder, and I’m not just talking about his absurdly high error count.
In a game this year, with one out and the bases loaded, he fields a sharply hit grounder and throws it HOME. He gets the guy, which gives you an indication of how much time he had to make the double play.