Give Felix the Cy Young

As you can tell I'm a northwest sports fan as well as a foodie with all the Pac-10 posts. I'll keep my Blazer thoughts to another forum, but the Seattle Mariners are my favorite baseball team - have been for about 15 years, since Ken Griffey, Jr. came around.

The past couple seasons have been lean for the Ms, but they do have King Felix Hernandez, perhaps the best pitcher in the American League. He's been solid as he matured, but this year dominated the league and makes a strong case for the AL Cy Young Award that goes to the league's best pitcher.

With the regular season over the Ms will once again watch the playoffs on TV, but here is Felix's case for a postseason award.

Felix’s last two games:


9/29 – 7.2 innings, 2 runs, 4 Ks, W
10/4 – 6.2 innings, 2 runs, 6 Ks, W

Final stats:

19-5, 217 Ks, 2.49 ERA

Two other AL players had 19 wins – Justin Verlander was 19-9 and CC Sabathia was 19-8.

217 Ks was 4th – behind Verlander’s 269, Zach Greinke’s 242, and Jon Lester’s 225.

Greinke was the only pitcher with a lower ERA than Felix – a scorching 2.16.

Felix was also third in the league in innings pitched at 238.2 – Verlander had 240 and Roy Halladay 239.

So it looks like it’s between Felix, Greinke, and Verlander – and probably Sabathia. There are also run support stats we could use and various other pieces of sabermetrics, but I'm not going that detailed for this.

So here’s the tiebreaker, probably:

Felix’s Mariners – 85 wins, no playoffs.
Greinke’s Royals – 65 wins, no playoffs
Verlander’s Tigers – 86 wins, maybe playoffs (one-game playoff with Minny today to see who faces the Yankees)
Sabathia’s Yankees – 103 wins, playoffs.

My thinking is Sabathia’s wins weren’t as important to his team’s success as the other three, so I’d eliminate him. That, and I don't like the Yankees.

Greinke put up those numbers on a horrible team – and still won 2/3 of his games. That is tough, very tough to compete with.

It would probably come down to Verlander and Felix for me though. Verlander has more Ks, Felix the lower ERA.

Tough call. Experts seem to like Greinke, but do you really give the award to a player on the worst team in baseball? Legitimately he is more deserving than Sabathia, but what about Felix and Verlander? Who would you vote for?