2008 MLB Awards : NL Cy Young

A lot of pitchers played well in the NL this year.  Johan Santana led the league in ERA, but failed to take the Mets to the Promised Land; moreover, I would argue he was actually better last season in the AL (lower WHIP; higher K/BB; higher K/9).  Brandon Webb led the league in Wins, but threw three consecutive stinkers while his team was trying to win the NL West (8/26 against this year's division doormat Padres and 8/31 and 9/06 against the Dodgers, who ultimately won the division) and saw his ERA balloon from 2.74 to 3.42, ending the season at 3.30 and 10th in the NL.  

So it really has to go to Linecum.  

2008 MLB Awards : AL MVP

Every year, at least one award has to be a wide-open mess, right?  That's the AL MVP this year.  The only guys in the top-10 OPS who are going to the postseason are Youkilis (#4) and Guerrero (just sneaking into the #10 spot).  It would be hard to give it to Guerrero because his revival coincides with Texeira's arrival in Los Angeles of Anaheim.  Milton Bradley led the league in OPS, but barely cracked 500 plate appearances and so his totals aren't very impressive.  Alex Rodriguez's numbers are nearly identical to Carlos Quentin's; A-rod has to do better to win another MVP at this point, and Quentin has been absent due to his own stupidity when his team needed him -- would the White Sox and Twins be playing a 1 game playoff if Quentin had been available for all of September?  I'm guessing not.  Huff through Cabrera all have nice numbers, but their teams didn't exactly contend this year. 

 

Then we have 6 guys in the 11-20 OPS spots who are going to the playoffs (or were contending for the playoffs on the last day of the season); Jermaine Dye (#11 with .884), Justin Morneau (#12, .877), Evan Longoria (#15, .874), Carlos Pena (#16, .871), Joe Mauer (t-17, .869), and Dustin Pedroia (t-17, .869).  15 points of OPS is barely any separation at all, but they can be differentiated a bit along the following lines:

• "high" SLG, "low" OBP : Dye & Longoria
• "middle" SLG, OBP : Morneau, Pena, Pedroia
• "low" SLG, "high" OBP : Mauer 

To my mind, each of these guys needs to do something different/better than Youkilis to remain in consideration.  That knocks out Dye, Longoria, and Pena, all of whom are #3-5 hitters with lower OBP, SLG and totals than Youkilis.

So... Morneau has more runs and RBIs than Youkilis.  I've read an awful lot about how many at-bats Morneau has had "with men on base", but I want to separate out the stats for when there's just a runner on first from those with men in scoring position.  Here are Morneau's lines:

By Situation

AB

R

H

2B

3B

HR

RBI

BB

HBP

SO

SB

CS

AVG

OBP

SLG

OPS

Scoring Position

181

79

63

16

3

8

99

38

1

17

0

0

.348

.443

.602

1.045

1B Only

152

11

47

11

0

8

23

16

2

30

0

1

.309

.382

.539

.921

None On

287

7

77

20

1

7

7

22

0

37

0

0

.268

.320

.418

.738

And Youkilis's:

Scoring Position

147

66

55

14

1

8

78

23

3

24

1

1

.374

.445

.646

1.091

1B Only

121

17

41

11

0

13

29

16

2

21

2

4

.339

.424

.752

1.176

None On

270

8

72

18

3

8

8

23

7

63

0

0

.267

.340

.444

.784

So neither is particularly useful when no one's on base.  Youkilis is considerably better when there's only a guy on 1st, since he's got more power.  Both are about equally efficient driving in runners in scoring position (very roughly 99/219 = .452 RBIs/PA with RISP for Morneau vs. 78/170=.459 for Youkilis -- this doesn't take into account the total number of runners in scoring position, but I don't have time to do that work right now).  I'd probably take Youkilis as MVP over Morneau.

That leaves Mauer and Pedroia, "table setters" for Youkilis and Morneau, which complicates things because each player's success is dependent upon the other.  Joe Mauer is the only one in the top-40 OPS with more walks than strikeouts, though Pedroia comes admirably close.  I love players who do this, so now I just need a reason to pick a guy who sets the table over one who clears it.   I think there are good cases to make for all three of them, so let's give it to Mauer if he has a great play-in game against the White Sox and have Pedroia and Youkilis share it otherwise. 

Update: no soup for Mauer.

2008 MLB Awards : NL MVP

This one really is an easy one, I think.  The only guy really competing with Pujols OPS-wise is Chipper Jones, whose body cheated him of better total numbers.  The only guys in the top 10 OPS who are going to the postseason are Chase Utley (#8, and 200 points behind Pujols) and Aramis Ramirez (#10), and Pujols' total numbers are across-the-board better than theirs.  Ryan Howard hit the most HRs and had the most RBIs, but his slugging percentage, on-base percentage, and intentional walks are way down from his MVP season, and even compared to last year, when he finished 5th.  

On a final note, there were 3 guys in the top 40 OPS in the NL who walked more often than they struck out: Albert Pujols, Chipper Jones, and... Brian Giles.

2008 MLB Awards : AL Cy Young

Let's start with an easy one: the AL Cy Young award should go to Cliff Lee, right?  Well... first let's quickly dismiss everyone lower than Mike Mussina on the ERA list, out of respect for Moose's first 20-win season.  And I would probably argue that Mussina was better than Jon Lester this year; their numbers are very similar, except for Mussina's considerable advantage in Walks.  What about Mussina's season vs. Matsuzaka's?  Well, Matsuzaka's winning percentage, strikeout rate, and ERA are relatively impressive, but his walk rate was terrible, he averaged well under 6 innings per start, and made 5 fewer starts than Mussina, so I'd be sorely tempted to rank Mussina's season as "better".

But Matsuzaka and Mussina just don't stack up against Cliff Lee this year.  Lee's winning percentage is just as impressive as Matsuzaka's (but with more wins) and his K/BB ratio is even better than Mussina's.  And he's got the lowest ERA in the league.

But... there's this other guy, Roy Halladay.  He's got 11 losses to go with his 20 wins, but Cliff Lee benefitted from 6.13 run support, compared to 4.72 for Halladay.  Give Roy another 1.4 runs per game, and his W-L record would look more like Lee's.   Halladay also had a superior K/BB ratio, better WHIP, and pitched 23 more innings (9 complete games to Lee's 4).

But Halladay already has a Cy Young award, so even though he was arguably better this year than in 2003, it'll probably go to Lee.

The Man with the Golden Arm (Algren, Nelson) 1949

Did not finish.  Stopped just after Molly and Drunkie John are introduced.  Haven't seen anything to interest me, doubt I'm gonna.

Thud! (Pratchett, Terry) 2005

Yup, I'll read any Sam Vimes novel.  In a month the plot of this will be mostly tangled in my head with that of the Fifth Elephant (murder in the dwarf mines under Ankh-Morpork, theft in the dwarf mines in Uberwald, what's the diff?), but I'm not complaining.

Primary Inversion (Asaro, Catherine) 1995

A mostly promising first novel.  There's a lot of clunky over-exposition of the "I JUST USED A WORD I MADE UP AND WILL NOW EXPLAIN WHAT IT MEANS" type, and there's some awkward plotting to get everyone important in her life "on stage" at some point during the book, and the middle of the book drags, but when Asaro gets to the places where she's just writing and not worrying about hitting her next plot point, it's pretty good.

Class of 2012 and no early decision

The latest Tiger E-News had the headline "Freshman class ranks as Princeton's most diverse" with the text:

"
Princeton has enrolled the most diverse freshman class in its history for the third consecutive year, selected from a record-high number of applicants following the University's transition to a single admission process. The class of 2012 includes record representation of students from minority backgrounds and international students, has the highest percentage of incoming students to receive financial aid and, for the first time in University history, is evenly balanced in terms of gender.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S22/15/15O66/
"

If you follow the link, the article goes on to give numbers about how various indicators continue to shift slightly in the direction of greater class diversity, but the most interesting number shifts aren't acknowledged: 

                2012    2011    2011ED   2011RD
                -----------------------------------
#applied        21370   18942   2276     16666
#admitted        2122    1791    597      1194
%accept          9.93    9.46   26.2      7.16
#matriculated    1243    1246    597       649
%matriculate     58.6    69.6    100      54.4

(ED=early decision; RD=regular decision; also note that the article says there were 1838 admitted to the class of 2011; however that doesn't match up with the 9.4% overall acceptance rate; http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2007/05/18/news/18499.shtml shows the correct(?) number of 1791.  Early decision numbers taken from http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/64/75S14/index.xml?section=newsreleases.)

At any rate, no surprises that the total number of applications were up and the overall matriculation rate was down.  At first I was a little surprised that the overall acceptance rate actually went /up/, but suppose that's an artifact of the increase in the number of applications not catching up with the necessary increase in the number of admissions (due to a lower overall matriculation rate) to obtain the "correct" number of incoming students.

I was also initially surprised that the matriculation rate for the class of 2012 was so much higher than the rate for non-early decision students in the class of 2011, but then remembered this is probably due to the fact that there are a certain number of people in the class of 2012 who knew they really wanted to go to Princeton and would have enrolled early decision had that option been available.

Something to keep an eye on as the kids get closer to college age, and of course fun for anyone who likes to look at numbers.  Now I want to go hunting for the Harvard rates...

Charlotte Gray (2001)

We love Cate Blanchett.  We really like Billy Crudup.  There's nothing at all wrong with Michael Gambon.  So why were we underwhelmed by Charlotte Gray?  Probably because it's just a war drama with a very mediocre script that goes completely flat by the end, stretched to a 2 hour running time, and the actors can't seem to rise above it.

Lost in the Funhouse (Barth, John) 1968

Even the author's introduction is precious!  Look, I'm all for experimentation, but if I'm reading your writing, ideally it should be within a story you're telling, and not simply an exercise.  Too many of the short stories in this collection are simply exercises; this is too bad, because the Ambrose tales have experimental elements (nearing the point of pretension in "Lost in the Funhouse") but also tell interesting stories.

Juno (2007)

The darling independent film of 2007, we watched Juno with high expectations, and largely they were met. The dialogue struggles whenever they try to use "CURRENT TEEN SLANG!" and we're completely unbelieving part of the ending (see below), and Allison Janney's and Jennifer Garner's performances are a little cartoonish (maybe it's just how the characters are written?), but the movies succeeds with a number of plausibly written and honestly acted scenes.

spoilers


The fact that Juno wants to get back together with her boyfriend who offers nothing during the first 8 months of her pregnancy (other than not staring at her belly) doesn't work. It's not that I don't believe that they couldn't get back together, it's that I don't see that feeling adequately explained from Juno's perspective, and it's too big a plot point for me to simply accept.