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So Who Is Outraged Over Felix Hernandez’s Cy Young Award?

Well, the somewhat inevitable happened yesterday: Felix Hernandez took home the A.L. Cy Young Award despite only winning 13 games for a bad team. Both Hernandez’s supporters and opponents suspected that the Mariner hurler would walk away with the honor, the cause of much curiosity and controversy in recent weeks.

Now that the speculation is over – and Hernandez has been officially deemed worthy of the award – it has opened up a discussion about new-age analysis versus traditional stats. Here is a rundown of Hernandez’s most aggressive detractors and defenders:

He doesn’t deserve it: “Sorry, but I don’t see how a pitcher who goes 13-12 can win the Cy Young Award…It means essentially that a pitcher’s record is no factor in the decision; 13-12 is so mediocre that it could not have been considered at all by those who voted for Hernandez,” says Tom Jones in the St. Petersburg Times.

“What his win proves is that the stat geeks — those who consider the book Moneyball the bible of baseball and sabermetrics the gospel — have taken over the baseball world…It’s a new day in baseball. A sad day,” he concludes.

Hernandez had the numbers: Look, “the fact remains, glaringly so, that Hernandez’s lackluster record was purely a byproduct of the fact that his consistent magnificence was not backed up by enough runs to give him the deserved ‘W’s.” Don’t blame Felix for that, says Larry Stone in the Seattle Times. We’ve moved beyond just simple stats like win-loss record.

“Fortunately, all of us are more informed now, and did what I feel confident was the right thing. Hernandez now stands as a pioneer of sorts, a trailblazer for the no-longer radical concept of giving the Cy Young to the best pitcher, regardless of record.”

The seismic shift is overblown: “Long live King Felix,” says Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports. Here are some stats for you: Hernandez “led the league in ERA by nearly half a run. He threw more innings than anyone. He finished second in the AL in strikeouts, one behind the leader…This, and plenty more, was the argument for it.”

You can conceive an explanation without any “newfangled statistic in there, not a single mouthful of indecipherable alphabet soup needed to advocate for Hernandez.” The conclusion: he was better than all other A.L. pitchers. Period.

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