Team-Adjusted Wins in the 2012 National League

A while back I wrote a post detailing a proposed new baseball statistic called Team-Adjusted Wins, which involves adjusting a pitcher's win-loss record for the overall record of their team. The logic is that it's easier to have a winning record on a winning team, so, for instance, when Felix Hernandez went 13-12 the other year and won the Cy Young, that record was a lot more impressive than it looked because the Mariners were so awful in general. The hope with this statistic is that it preserves a lot of what people like about wins and losses while correcting for one of their chief deficits. No, it doesn't adjust for the randomness of when the bullpen blows a lead or a pitcher gets taken off the hook after leaving the game, but I think it's a major improvement.

So, in keeping with my interest in promoting the 2012 National League Cy Young Award candidacy of one Robert Allen Dickey, better known as the sun god Ra, let's take a look at the starting pitchers in contention for that award this year: Dickey, Clayton Kershaw, Matt Cain, Gio Gonzalez, and Johnny Cueto. Spoilers! Dickey comes out way the hell ahead.

Using the version of the statistic where you calculate a pitcher's expected wins and losses from their team's record in games not charged to that pitcher, we get the following numbers: Dickey, with 25 decisions, would be expected to have 10 wins, but instead has 19 wins, giving him +9 wins above team expectations; Kershaw, with 21 decisions, should have 10.66 wins, but instead has 12, for just +1.34 wins; Cain has 20 decisions, of which 11.04 would be expected wins given the Giants' overall performance, turning Cain's 15 wins into +3.96 wins above expectations; Cueto has 28 decisions, and his 19 wins are just +2.69 wins ahead of the 16.31-win expectation; and Gonzalez, with the same 28 decisions and 16.31 expected wins, has one more win, and thus one more expected win, than Cueto, at +3.69.

Dickey's way the hell ahead. The other four candidates combined have just 11.67 wins above team expectations, compared to Dickey's 9. All of the other contenders have worse numbers than King Felix did in his 13-win Cy Young season. Dickey, on the other hand, has a better score by this metric than Dwight Gooden did in 1985, when he went 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA. That's right: Dickey has improved the on the overall performance of his team by more than Doc Gooden did in one of the greatest years of pitching in the last half-century. He's been filthy good, in other words, racking up win after win for a heavily-challenged team. And, by the way, it's a team that's been mainly challenged not in its other starting pitchers but in its offense and its bullpen, the two factors that every starting pitcher has to contend with in each of their starts. (Well, okay, Dickey's thrown quite a few complete games, taking the bullpen out of the equation, but that's just part of why he's so awesome.)

Long story short, Dickey for Cy Young!