Pull yourself away from the lure of the pennant drives, baseball purists! Hidden away on a couple of teams that have been never really been in contention this year are a couple of pitchers locked in a fierce battle for the AL Cy Young, with ERA’s in the mid 2’s. The Blue Jays’ Roy Halladay made a push in August with a 4-1 record and a 1.96 ERA, only to be done one better by Cliff Lee, who went 5-0 with a 1.86 ERA. Outstanding!

Sadly, little attention is being paid to this fight because it is widely (and correctly) assumed that the result is already a foregone conclusion. Barring a monumental collapse, Cliff Lee will take the prize due to his exceptional winning percentage (he record currently sits at 19-2). Get ready for writers to wax poetical about how “even through the dog days of a lost season, Lee refused to lose. When he took the ball, the team behind him knew winning was the only option”, or some such silliness.

But we know better, right? We know that wins are a terrible indicator of a pitchers performance seeing that they are half due to factors out of a pitcher’s control, that “pitching to the score” is a myth, and that the run and a half difference in run support the two pitchers have received from their teams (Halladay has received a paltry 4.63 per game from Toronto’s woeful offence, compared to Lee’s 6.02 runs per game – 10^th best in the league) is key to the difference in their winning percentages. So let’s look at some better indicators.

First, from the world of fantasy baseball – these aren’t perfect either, but I figure they’re the sort that some particularly deep-thinking member of the BWAA might consider:

Not much to choose from. Lee is allowing slightly fewer runs, but Halladay has pitched about an extra two and a half games (he is averaging 7.5 innings a start compared to Lee’s 7.1). Of course the raw number of strikeouts is silly, so let’s quickly move on to the holy trinity of pitching stats:

Without getting too far into BABIP theory, these are holy because they’re the fundamental things that pitchers can really control- how many opposing batters a pitcher strikes out, walks, and how many balls have no chance of going for home runs.

There’s a ton of luck involved in how many hits a pitcher gives up, and one of the reasons that Halladay’s WHIP is better is that he’s been getting luckier in how many balls have dropped in. (His BABIP is .272, compared to Lee’s .285 – both tend to regress to .300). Halladay he leads the league with 12 HBP, but gets off the hook as they are not included in WHIP. How does all this work out? Well, a stat like DIPS (hat tip to BDD’s own Voros McCracken) that just takes into account what a pitcher can control gives the edge to Lee, with a DIPS of 2.76, with Halladay right behind in the AL at 3.08.

Anyway, Halladay has been the more dominant strikeout pitcher (he’s throwing his Curve much more this season), while Lee has given up fewer free passes (his control over his changeup has been vastly improved). And the Doc has kept more many more balls on the ground with his sinker.

Another favorite (and not entirely-pointless) criteria for the Cy Young is a pitcher’s consistency. Lee comes out slightly on top with 20 quality starts to Halladay’s 18 (despite Halladay) having one more game started. Incidentally, an example of what run support can do for a pitcher is that Lee has never lost a game that he has pitched a quality start in, while four of Halladay’s losses have been quality starts. As well, Lee picked up win in a game when he did not pitch a quality start, (he allowed 6 runs in 5 innings against Texas, but the Indians won 15-9) while Halladay has never been gifted a win by his offence.

Some more random points to stir up debate:

• Lee pitches in a more favorable home park – the Indian’s home field has been the least HR friendly “park effect” of any stadium this season.
• Halladay has been helped by the best infield defense in the AL (in terms of both range and fielding percentage) behind him – and he still has 9 unearned runs (another lousy stat) to Lee’s 3.
• Only one runner has attempted to steal on Cliff Lee this season (he made it). Halladay is notoriously slow to the plate and has allowed 11 steals, (with 5 runners caught).
• Leaving the realm of cold, hard, statistical arguments for a second, Lee had a 6.29 ERA last season and was sent to the minors last season, for crying out loud. Maybe he deserves a little respect (and Halladay already has his Cy).
• Doc Halladay is a horse. In addition to 8 complete games, Halladay received a hold this season when he pitched on his throw day due to a depleted bullpen. He went 2 1/3 scoreless innings and gave up one hit, preserving a one-run lead against the Phillies in a game the Jays went on to win.

I’m not going to try to provide some final, all-encompassing number that distills everything on paper down to who is having the best season (although I think it’s Lee so far). There are better places for that and just like the MVP, I don’t have a particular problem if some people have different ideas of what makes a Cy Young pitcher that are slightly different from the bottom line of what makes the best pitcher in the long run.

So go ahead, writers, vote for the most dominant, the most consistent, the hardest working, the most in control, the most efficient, the most impressive, the rarest accomplishments, the best fit for his team, the best year, or even a good story. But there really should be a raging debate going on and a lot of hype over starts from two great pitchers at the top of their game putting on a show down the stretch – if only something as arbitrary as wins didn’t rule the day.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled playoff drive.

The tribe had a couple of chances, loading the bases in the third and getting runners to second and third in the fifth, but Lirano retired Ben Francisco first with a K and then a groundout to get out of both jams. Here’s a pitch f/x look at his sparkling performance, as compared to his wretched first start of the season:

Velocity

His fastball didn’t approach his 95-97 heater of 2006, and wasn’t really any faster on average than it was earlier in the season. I’ve circled the two fastballs that he put a little extra on in order to strike out Ben Francisco with the bases loaded (he also threw him three changeups and two sliders). They were his hardest and third hardest of the night, and apparently took a lot out of him, because from then on the speed of his heater fell off in a hurry.

Control

Liriano is never going to confused for a control pitcher, but there was a lot to like about his command last night for a power pitcher. Note that most of his changeups were just dropping out of the zone or at the very bottom (where they are a much better pitch), all his sliders were to the outer half of the plate, and his fastballs out of the zone were generally a couple of inches (tempting…)

Now compare that to his April 13th debacle:

Here we’ve got fastballs (and sliders?!) sailing high and out of the zone, and when he did throw his pitches for strikes they were grouped right down the middle, at the belt. Stare at these two charts long enough and like one of those magic eye puzzles, the first one turns into a picture of a man on the mound with a plan and the means to attack hitters, while the second is some poor sap just trying to get something over the plate.

Selection

I expected Liriano to have been a little scared to throw his slider his first time back on the mound, but he actually threw just as many of them in both starts. The only difference was slightly more changeups and fewer fastballs, which is not surprising since it’s a “feel” pitch that he clearly didn’t have.

Movement

Of course, velocity and control wasn’t the only thing that made Liriano “electric”, so here’s how Liriano’s pitches were moving earlier in the season (for a quick explanation of how to read a movement chart, click here):

And now here’s the same thing for last night:

His sliders are tighter, the bottom is dropping of his changeup again, and probably most importantly, his fastball has another 2-3 inches of both sink and tail to it. That can sometimes be caused by lowering the arm angle, so for the final trick of the night, here’s how Lirano’s release point has improved:

Release Point

And, well…it was just a mess back in April. It doesn’t really look like his arm angle has dropped, but instead his release point has moved closer to his body, and generally tightened up. In his first start, Liriano’s fastball release point was varying by up to a foot from side to side, and his sliders were coming out of a totally different area, almost six inches above the rest of his pitches (which makes them easier to identify). It looks like his time in the minors did him a lot of good, and while he might never return to the eye-popping form he had before his surgery, this is a whole new pitcher on the mound.

“I honestly think that this team has forgotten how to pull baseballs,” Stairs said Sunday. “That's why our home runs are down. You get into batting practice and you're hitting balls to right-centre, left-centre, instead of working on the proper way of pulling baseballs, and elevating baseballs.”

“I'm a pull hitter,” said Stairs, who leads the club with a mere eight homers. “I always will be. But right now, I don't know how to pull the ball.”

“As soon as Alex learns how to pull the ball again properly, he'll be on fire,” Stairs said. “He's got that swing now to hit the ball to right field and that's not him. He should be a pull hitter. What was wrong with the year he had last year? Not a thing. So why change and make him go to right-centre? That's just the way I see it.”

I find this all rather amusing because last year supposedly the problem with Mickey Brantley was that he was too “pull happy”. At the end of the season Gibbons mentioned that the team needed to use the field more, and Brantley's flaw was seen by many as the main reason he was released, and as much of a factor in the Jays offensive decline as the “injury excuse”.

And for Stairs specifically, every time he goes the other way the Jays' announcers soil themselves over his opposite field power and “unselfish” tendency to hit the ball where it's pitched.Anyway, Matt might be on to something. Sure you can't pull every pitch, but hitters hit for much better power and average when they do manage to pull the ball. And that's just not happening for the Jays this season as compared to last:

While this could be a result of not getting on balls due to mechanical or pitch selection problems, it's interesting that especially in Rios' case, he's actually improved at hitting balls up the middle (Denbo's bread and butter), but his power when pulling the ball has totally disintegrated to way below league average. It's true for the team as a whole as well – the Jays ridiculous power outage this season has come almost completely from an inability to pull the ball.