The Fundamental Logic of Not Making Trades

Time to distract myself from national tragedy with... the probable impending trade of the New York Mets' best and most awesome player! ...oh well, it's something, at least.

Trades are weird. You'd kind of think trades wouldn't happen People talk about two teams "agreeing" to a trade, but really, what happens in a trade is a disagreement. Team X thinks that Player Package A is superior to Player Package B, while Team Y thinks that B is superior to A. So they swap, and everyone's happy. Perforce, this involves either teams disagreeing on the "absolute" values, so to speak, of the players involved or teams giving different "relative" values to different types of player. The impending negotiations between the Mets and the Blue Jays regarding R.A. Dickey are a marvelous case study.

The Extremely Odd Career Path of R.A. Dickey

Perusing R.A. Dickey's baseball-reference.com page a few minutes ago, I noticed the massive oddness in his "similar players" section. The baseball-reference similarity scores judge players based on their career totals, and does not distinguish timing, although one can deduce timing from the changes in "most similar players at age X" over time. But because Dickey's career had such an odd path, the "most similar players" aren't remotely like him. Specifically, over the last three years, during his age 35, 36, and 37 seasons, Dickey posted 12.1 bWAR, while having accumulated only 0.2 bWAR during his entire prior career. That's weird!

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!

R.A. Dickey and Median vs. Mean

The other day I saw an analysis of the various National League 2012 Cy Young Award contenders by average game score (excluding Craig Kimbrel, who being a relief pitcher doesn't get game scores). Game Score, by the way, is a metric devised by Bill James to evaluate the quality of a starting pitcher's performance on a given night, where 50 is average and up is good. (Over 100 is technically possible, and under 0 may be as well, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it.) Now, since this was a Mets fan site on which I saw this analysis, I wasn't surprised to see that R.A. Dickey came out on top by it. Good for him, and in my opinion he deserves to win the award. But I'd like to delve a little further into the data and look at median Game Score, and then possibly some other variations as well.

R.A. Dickey is Good, Continued

Here are the pitchers who, according to baseball-reference.com, have accumulated more wins above replacement in 2010 and 2011 combined than R.A. Dickey of the Mets: Roy Halladay, Clayton Kershaw, Cole Hamels, Ubaldo Jimenez, Josh Johnson, Tim Hudson, Tim Lincecum, and Ian Kennedy. Those guys are aces, as is Matt Cain, right behind Dickey, and Cliff Lee, right behind Cain, who's only been in the NL one of those two years. Chris Carpenter, the Cardinals' ace, pitched 80 more innings than Dickey but accumulated 1.4 fewer wins than Dickey. R.A. Dickey is, in other words, an ace. And the Mets will hopefully have another, even better ace, Johan Santana, in their rotation next year. Santana/Dickey is, in other words, a nasty top of the rotation. Not quite Halladay-Lee-Hamels nasty, but pretty nasty. Meanwhile, Mike Pelfrey was worth 4 WAR in these two years, and Dillon Gee worth 2.3 in just over one year. Jonathan Niese was just worth 1 WAR in these two years, but there are reasons to think he'll improve. We could be looking at a rotation next year worth ~16 WAR, which is just 7 wins worse than the Phillies' historically-good rotation. That ain't bad.

R.A. Dickey is Good

I've sometimes been of the opinion that the Mets should try to get a #2-style starting pitcher for next year. I'm reconsidering that opinion, because I think they already have one: R.A. Dickey. In 376 innings with the Mets prior to today's game, his ERA is 3.11, for a 122 adjusted ERA. That's good. He's been worth 7.8 wins above replacement in just under two seasons in his revitalized knuckeballer stage. A full season of Johan Santana at his real best is about 6 wins, by comparison, so Dickey's 4-win seasons are only a little bit below that. And, of course, he retired the first 15 Phillies today, taking his no-hit bid through 6.1 innings. Santana, Dickey, Niese, Gee, Pelfrey: actually, I think those guys (if Santana's healthy and effective) are all average to above-average at their position in the rotation. No need to change things up, especially if those dollars can be better spent on Mr. Reyes.