The kids and the aces

Justin Verlander won't get any Cy Young votes
this year (teammate Max Scherzer will win),
but he's still the better pitcher.

TBS' announcing crews said several profoundly inane things over the course of the 21 games since the end of the regular season schedule, but I doubt any were as silly as Buck Martinez' assertion Thursday night that the "Moneyball" A's — Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder — lacked a starting pitcher as good as Sonny Gray.

Gray is impressive, yes. But with 64 major league innings under his belt entering the playoffs, he has hardly established himself on a par with the A's Big Three of a decade ago. Zito went 102-63, 3.55 with a Cy Young in seven seasons with the A's and he was probably the least talented of the trio. (Mulder was 81-41, 3.92 in five seasons; Hudson 92-39, 3.30 in six seasons.)

The A's were not alone in this year's division series in placing an elimination game in the hands of a rookie with less than 70 innings in the majors. The Pirates, as did the A's, moved their Game Two rookie up ahead of their Game One veteran for Game Five; for Pittsburgh, it was Garrett Cole over A.J. Burnett, for Oakland it was Gray over Bartolo Colon. St. Louis deployed Michael Wacha in a must-have Game Four.

Wacha won his start; Cole and Gray lost theirs, but hardly embarrassed themselves in the process. They pitched well, but ran into legitimate, top-of-the-line aces in Adam Wainwright and Justin Verlander on the other side.

Earlier in the week, as I contemplated the notion of the Twins making a bid this offseason for Tampa Bay's top gun, David Price (this is likely to be the subject of Monday's print column), I spitballed a "top four-man rotation." Pick any four major league starters, money no concern, for your team. Who do you want?

My four — more or less off the top of my head — was (alphabetically): Felix Hernandez, Clayton Kershaw, Verlander and Wainwright. My four (and yours can be quite different without being provably wrong) have both an established multi-year level of top-grade performance and the likelihood of something left in the tank.

I don't think it's a coincidence that three of the surviving teams pitched one of those guys to clinch their division series: Kershaw, Wainwright, Verlander all got the call, and they surrendered a total of one earned run in 23 innings in their three games.

That's trump ace pitching.

Pic of the Week

Felix Hernandez pitches before stands filled with
placards in his first start after his perfect game.

Looks like he's surrounded by swarms of bumblebees.

The Mariners have a special section dubbed "The King's Court" in honor of Hernandez; attendees at his starts in that section get discounted seats, yellow T-shirts and the placards. For his start of Wednesday, the entire stadium was dubbed "The Supreme Court," and everybody got the placards and shirts.

King Felix and the Melk Man: Perfect and Imperfect

A couple of significant news items in baseball Wednesday:

Felix Hernandez was perfect on Wednesday against the
Tampa Bay Rays.

Perfect: Seattle ace (and former Cy Young Award winner) Felix Hernandez threw a perfect game against Tampa Bay.

That makes three perfectos already this season (the other two belonging to Phil Humber and Matt Cain).

I offered some theories earlier this season on why we are seeing so many perfect games. The main one stands up for this game. Tampa Bay is a good team, but the lineup is built more for walks and power than for average. Such teams are susceptible to outstanding pitching performances, and King Felix provided that on Wednesday.

Humber and Cain, incidentally, have both struggled since their gems. Humber's ERA for the season is a bloated 5.87, 6.84 since the perfect game. Cain, a markedly superior pitcher to Humber, has had a 4.18 ERA in 10 starts since his perfect game, raising his ERA from 2.18 after the gem to 2.99 today.

Melky Cabrera and his All-Star MVP trophy.

Badly flawed: Melky Cabrera, the surprise MVP of the 2012 All-Star Game, was hit with a 50-game suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs.

The Giants outfielder, hitting.346/.390/.516, essentially admitted that he did it and is not appealing the test result.

Cabrera was a so-so player for several years with the Yankees and Braves, but had a breakout season in 2011 with Kansas City. The Royals traded him to San Francisco for Jonathan Sanchez — a pitcher who flopped with K.C. — and Cabrera was having an even bigger season for the Giants.

Until now. Cabrera's suspension will last the rest of the regular season, and it's bound to have a major impact on San Francisco down the stretch. The Giants are neck-and-neck with the Dodgers in the NL West, but their most productive hitter this season is now finished.

King Felix and the devalued win stat

Felix Hernandez' 13-12 won-loss record is easily the worst
of any starting pitcher to win a Cy Young. 

Felix Hernandez is your 2010 Cy Young Award winner, and well done by the BBWAA.

Tom Tango (via Rob Neyer) hit the nail on the head today even before the vote was announced: This isn't about the new sabermetric stats, such as fielding independent pitching and wins above replacement, taking over. It's about the growing realization that the Win isn't as meaningful as it was 100 years ago, or 20, or even 10.

In 1987, a pitcher led the National League in ERA, strikeouts and fewest hits per nine innings, but he finished fifth in the Cy Young balloting because his record was just 8-16. Nolan Ryan was clearly the best pitcher in the league, but it didn't get any recognition.

That wouldn't happen today. I don't know that King Felix would have won the award this year had his record been below .500, but he would certainly have been more in the running than Ryan was.

I suspect the turning point for the writers was 2005, when Johan Santana was heads and shoulders above the league but Bartolo Colon won 21 games and copped the award.

Lesson learned — and acted upon.

Greinke and the tyranny of the win column

The old-school argument against Zach Greinke's Cy Young candidacy can be summed up in one sentence:

Sixteen wins from a starting pitcher isn't enough to win.

Not when there's a CC Sabathia hurtling to 20 wins.

Sabathia is a fine pitcher having a fine season. He's doing essentially what he always does, and he does it well. His durability is without peer in the current generation of starting pitchers. If anybody deserves the salary he's getting, he does.

He's not having as good a season as Greinke.

Sabathia's current W-L record (19-7) works out to a .730 winning percentage. That's 89 points above team — which is impressive enough.

Greinke's 16-8 record (.667) comes for a .410 team. That's 257 points above team. Or about three times Sabathia's margin.

And then there's this: The Royals —a bad team to begin with — are, in a sense, even worse with Greinke pitching.

Of the 36 AL pitchers with at least 140 innings, none —zero — have as few runs scored for them as Greinke does. Teammate Brian Bannister, for example, gets 5.9 runs of support per game; Greinke gets 4.8, more than one run less.

Grienke has had eight no-decisions this season. In four of them, he allowed either zero or one run. Twice he gave up two runs, twice three. He has had five starts all year in which he allowed four or more runs; he 0-5 in those starts, He has, in short, zero cheap wins.

Sabathia? He's had a couple of cheap wins, giving up four runs in six-plus innings for a W once, five runs in seven for another.

Really these two are the Cy Young argument. Felix Hernandez is, like Greinke, racking up better stats than Sabathia, but whatever argument one makes for King Felix, Greinke trumps.

It's the old-school guys who value wins over all else versus the new wave. The old-school argument prevailed in 2005, when Bartolo Colon (2-8, 3.48) won the award over Johan Santana (16-7, 2.87); there seems to be a general consensus since then that the electorate blew it.

Sabathia's season is better than Colon's but Greinke's is better than Santana's.

This year, I think, the writers will get it right. Greinke will win.