2013 MLB Awards

With the events of September 29th, we finally reached the end of a long, culturally important phenomenon....the 2013 MLB regular season.  OK, so this year of baseball wasn't as awesome as Breaking Bad, but there were still a lot of great and captivating stories.  The Pirates shook of the rust and qualified for the postseason for the first time since the release of Jurassic Park.  The A's proved that last year wasn't a fluke by matching last year's win total.  The Red Sox completed their very quick rebuilding phase by locking up the best record in baseball just a year after cratering out.  We'll have the playoffs to complete the narratives of these and other teams, but when it comes to stories involving individuals, the MLB awards are one of the best ways to finish those chapters.

As I did last year and in 2010, I will list out my winners for 6 of the awards, along with the runners-up.  I choose not to write about manager of the year, because we just don't have a great idea of exactly what value managers provide.  Their impact is nearly impossible to isolate, so I generally just leave it alone.  The BBWAA generally just picks the managers from the most surprising teams, which is honestly as good or better than I could do, so I'll just go with whatever they pick.  One other things to note is that I don't usually follow the guidelines for ballot size (10 for MVP, 5 for Cy, 3 for Rookie) because this is my blog and I don't care.  As usual, if you don't agree with something, I look forward to your dissent in the comments.

Note: For more info on any of the stats within, see the Fangraphs Library.  I won't detail everything here, but I will say that FIP and xFIP try to strip out the effects of defenders and chance on a pitchers performance, wRC+ measures a hitters prowess relative to league averages, and WAR tries to measure a players complete value towards winning games.  None of these stats are perfect (although, wRC+ is close), but they're a good deal better than the regular stuff you see.

NL Rookie

1. Felix Hernandez, Jr.  Jose Fernandez - SP, Miami
2. Yasiel Puig - OF, LA Dodgers
3. Julio Teheran - SP, Atlanta
4. Shelby Miller - SP, St. Louis
5. Hyun-Jin Ryu - SP, LA Dodgers

These five players helped lead a very strong batch of new players in the NL this year.  This doesn't even count a bunch of players who provided some strong defense (AJ Pollock, Nolan Arenado), but I generally expect young players to be pretty great on that side of the ball, so those guys can't quite keep up with the top five.  I also left off a couple of great pitchers (Gerritt Cole, Tony Cingrani) that didn't throw as many innings as the others.  I generally don't let a lack of innings hurt pitchers in the rookie award, since they can't control when they're called up, but this was such a strong class that I didn't have room on my (technically unlimited) ballot.

Of these five, the top two separated themselves from the pack a bit.  It wasn't luck that Yasiel Puig's call-up coincided with the Dodgers ascendance to the top of their division.  Puig isn't the greatest defender nor baserunner, but his ability to hit just about anything to any part of the park makes him one of the most exciting young batters in the league.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, Jose Fernandez didn't help the Marlins avoid the 100 loss mark, but he did give their fans (and fans of awesome pitchers) something to watch on this otherwise awful team.  The tiebreaker between these two goes to Fernandez as he is two years younger than Puig, and had never played above A ball before this season.  Being able to do great things (2.19 ERA, 2.73 FIP) at that young of an age is rare, and should be rewarded.

NL Cy Young

1. Clayton Kershaw - LA Dodgers
2. Adam Wainwright - St. Louis
3. Matt Harvey - NY Mets
4. Cliff Lee - Philadelphia
5. Jose Fernandez - Miami

In spite of Clayton Kershaw's comical 1.83 ERA, this race is a lot closer than the mainstream media would have you believe.  For all the hubbub surrounding Kershaw, Adam Wainwright just had an excellent season as well.  In fact he was even better in some regards (Wainwright had a Cliff Lee-ian 3.7 BB%, which was just a millimeter behind Cliff Lee himself for the league lead).  Wainwright and Kershaw were 1-2 in the league in innings pitched as well, which is doubly impressive considering just how good they were by rate stats (2.38 FIP for Kerhsaw, 2.55 for Wainwright).  In the end, the main difference in their results was BABIP, where Kershaw ended up more than 50 points better than Wainwright.  While it's likely that most of this variation is due to chance, Kershaw has posted well below average BABIPs every year since 2009, so it's likely that his insane command is to thank for at least some of this "luck."  Since the race is so close, I'll let it come down to that and give my vote to Kershaw.

The next two guys on this list would have made for an awesome, interesting Cy Young race on their own, but are relegated to third and fourth because of the dynamic duo on top.  On a rate stat basis, Matt Harvey was even better than the top two (league-leading 2.00 FIP and 2.63 xFIP), but his elbow injury cost him a bunch of innings, and number of innings pitched counts.  I actually think that some of his peripherals understate his greatness, because some of those normalize HR/FB rate (namely, xFIP).  His low HR/FB rate of 4.7% may seem unsustainable, but research shows that fastballs over 95 mph are harder to hit out of the park.  Harvey led all qualified starters in baseball with an average fastball velocity of 95.8 mph, so it stands to reason that he owns some of his ridiculous homer prevention.  In all, this makes him an extremely strong #3.

One spot below Harvey, Cliff Lee had just a regular old Cliff Lee season*, finishing third in innings pitched while leading the league in BB% and striking out just under a batter per inning.  In the three years I have done this, Lee has now finished 1st, 2nd, and 4th.  You could say I really like him (which I do), but I would just respond that he is crazy awesome and leave it at that.

*I missed catching his start in Milwaukee by one day.  So close.

NL MVP

1. Andrew McCutchen - OF, Pittsburgh
2. Yadier Molina - C, St. Louis
3. Clayton Kershaw - SP, LA Dodgers
4. Adam Wainwright - SP, St. Louis
5. Matt Carpenter - 2B (and others), St. Louis
6. Joey Votto - 1B, Cincinnati
7. Paul Goldschmidt - 1B, Arizona
8. Carlos Gomez - OF, Milwaukee
9. Andrelton Simmons - SS, Atlanta
10. Jayson Werth - OF, Washington

The rookie and Cy decisions were pretty hard this season, but the MVP awards were quite easy.  McCutchen has both the numbers (NL-leading 8.1 fWAR, an insane .317/.404/.508 line from a centerfielder) and the narrative (leading the Pirates to the playoffs) to both win the award and justify it.  Enjoy your second straight Bogacz MVP, Andrew - you've earned it.

Behind him are a bunch of other great players who fell just short.  Yadier was great, and most modern metrics probably underrate his defensive and game-calling skills, which suggests that he might have been even more valuable than McCutchen.  Unfortunately, he missed a few too many games due to injury, so he falls short.  The pitchers at 3 and 4 both had amazing seasons (see the previous section), but they weren't quite the pantheon-level efforts that it takes to win an MVP.  The Votto-Goldschmidt pairing is interesting because of how similar their seasons were overall (157 wRC+ for both), but the different ways they went about it (Votto had a league best .436 OBP, while Goldschmidt had a league best .250 ISO).  Finally, Carlos Gomez had his breakout season that he's been teasing us with for a while now.  I don't know if I fully buy the extremes measures from the fielding metrics (+25 UZR, +38 DRS), but he's still probably the best defensive outfielder in the game, and he can hit a bit, too.

AL Rookie

1. Wil Myers - OF, Tampa Bay
2. Danny Farquhar - RP, Seattle
3. Sonny Gray - SP, Oakland
4. Jose Iglesias - SS, Boston/Detroit

The AL crop of rookies wasn't great this year, but that is understandable considering the mother lode of prospects that graduated last year.  Still, a couple players stood out enough to earn recognition.  Wil Myers didn't play a full season, because the Rays are necessarily shrewd with their prospects' service time, but his performance (wRC+ of 129) was almost certainly crucial to their postseason hopes.  Danny Farquhar started out with a high ERA, but luckily for him the Mariners saw through that, and he has pitched in high leverage situations ever since.  Sonny Gray only pitched 60 innings, but they were really great innings, and they give my A's a legitimate chance at having an ace-level pitchers for the postseason (Parker and Colon are good, but they aren't that good.  Brett Anderson is that good, but his body has become quite good at betraying him).  Finally, Jose Iglesias still probably doesn't have a future as a major league regular, but he was good enough this year to help a couple playoff teams stay afloat during injuries (Stephen Drew) and suspensions (Jhonny Peralta).

AL Cy Young

1. Felix Hernandez - SP, Seattle
2. Chris Sale - SP, Chicago White Sox
3. Max Scherzer - SP, Detroit
4. Yu Darvish - SP, Texas
5. Anibal Sanchez - SP, Detroit
6. James Shields - SP, Kansas City
7. David Price - SP, Tampa Bay

This one was tough.  There were a glut of really good pitchers this year, but none stood out enough to make this pick easy.  David Price came back from a brief DL stint and just decided to stop walking people. James Shields was huge for the Royals, leading the league in innings while making the Wil Myers trade not look completely terrible.  Anibal Sanchez might be the best pitcher in the AL (league leading 2.39 FIP), but he missed a month, which costs him dearly in a tight race like this.  Yu Darvish struck out everybody (league best 32.8% strikeouts), but his relatively pedestrian walk and home run rates kept him from running away with the award.

Even though all of those pitchers were great, it came down to the top three for me.  While Max Scherzer will win the award (and I'll be fine with that - he was awesome), a case can be made that the main difference between him and Chris Sale was related to schedule.  Most notably, Scherzer got to avoid pitching against his teammates who scored the second-most runs in baseball, while Sale didn't get to feast on the Sox, who scored the second-fewest runs.  Because of that, I'll move Sale above Scherzer, but he still doesn't get the top spot.

Instead, my fake Cy Young vote goes to Felix Hernandez, who had just as good of a season as he did when he won the award in 2010.  Felix led the AL in xFIP (2.66, just behind Harvey for best in MLB) in spite of the diminished speed on his fastball (91.3 mph, down from 94.4 in his Cy season).  The fact that Felix didn't show any decline in his results (his walk rate was actually a career best 5.6%) shows just how good King Felix is at the art of pitching.  And for that, he gets my vote.

AL MVP

1. Mike Trout - OF, LA Angels
2. Miguel Cabrera - 3B, Detroit
3. Josh Donaldson - 3B, Oakland
4. Ben Zobrist* - All Positions, Tampa Bay

*OK, I don't think Ben Zobrist is really the fourth most-valuable player in the AL (it's probably Longoria or Chris Davis), but I'm just in constant awe of how his game has no discernible flaws.  He isn't particularly amazing is any one area, but he's so good at all areas of that game that he can churn out 5 WAR seasons like they're easy.

You can read all about this race everywhere on the internet, so I won't go into depth here (after all, I did that last year).  Yes, Cabrera was an even better hitter than he was last year, but so was Trout, and his defense and baserunning still stand miles above Cabrera's.  Most of the arguments that put Cabrera over Trout involve odd mental gymnastics that make the concept of "valuable" something other than the definition of the word.*  In reality, "valuable" and "best" are effectively the same thing in this context, and should be treated as such.  For this individual award, who cares that the Angels were terrible?  Mike Trout was the best player in baseball for the second straight year.  For that, he should be the MVP.

*Many of these arguments also say that Cabrera was playing under more pressure since the Tigers were in a pennant race.  Putting aside the fact that the Tigers have been in good shape for a while (and putting aside that the concept of pressure is pretty questionable in the first place), we can question this by laughing at the contrapositive: Since the Angels weren't in the race, Trout was under little pressure to perform.  Are baseball writers seriously trying to say that being the only player pulling his weight on a colossal failure of a team is all fun and games?  I haven't played major league baseball before, but I'm thinking that Mike Trout faced a whole different, less glorious type of pressure to perform.

Ten Games

In the opening chapter of his fantastic book, Study Hall: College Football, Its Stats and Its Stories, Bill Connelly lists ten games that explain who he is as a college football fan.  It's a great list that shows both his passion for his team (Missouri) and why he is a fan of the sport in general.  He also enlists help from friends (like the Solid Verbal guys) to share their own lists, which of course, show much different trajectories.  In light of that exercise, I thought I would share my own list of games.  I believe it does a great job of highlighting all aspects of my fanhood, from the Huskers to the Irish to all of the other teams.  Here they are in chronological order:

#1: January 1, 1994 - Florida State 18, Nebraska 16

In spite of its pre-eminence in Nebraska, football was not the first sport I started watching.  Blame Michael Jordan.  That said, I was still only 9 when I became a fan, so its not exactly like I was dawdling.  On the professional side, I caught a few upsets involving the Buccaneers, which started me down that interesting road.  On the college side, my allegiance was much more pre-ordained due to geography.  Luckily for me, Nebraska was about to enter a ridiculous five-year stretch where they would go 60-3 with three national titles.

I had caught at least parts of a few Nebraska games earlier in the season.  I watched some of the Colorado game (which I believe to be my first college football watching experience), and got legitimately excited for the game against Oklahoma.  However, as best as I can remember, this was the first game in which I was fully immersed in my Nebraska fanhood.  My parents and I watched as the Blackshirt defense mostly shut down Heisman winner Charlie Ward.  Unfortunately, that wasn't enough, as some (possibly) bad calls and some poor kicks would ultimately doom Tom Osborne's bid to win his first title.  The game may not have ended the way I wanted it to, but a young Husker fan had been born.  Over the next two years, Nebraska would take care of their "unfinished business" in the best way possible for me.  In spite of the positive impact on me of this tight loss to FSU, nothing quite gets an impressionable kid to root for you more than winning every game.

Runner-up: I was really tempted to go with ND-FSU for the first game, but decided against it.  Until recently, college football had tended to be more of a regional sport, so what better of a game to show how college football became what it is today than the first one to host College Gameday.  Also, since this is a personal list, I must note that it was probably the second or third game I ever watched.  That said, there's enough other ND games on this list, so I thought I'd go with Nebraska-FSU.

Fun note: Nebraska and Florida State played 8 times in 14 seasons, culminating in this game.  They haven't played since.


#2: January 2, 1996 - Nebraska 62, Florida 24

I don't feel like I need to say much about this one.  Nebraska dominated the much hyped Gators in every facet of the game en route to their second straight title (fourth overall).  After the game, 72nd and Dodge was filled with people celebrating one of the best teams of all time, and certainly one of the top three I've ever seen.  It was good to be a Cornhusker fan.

Oh, and this happened:




#3: August 24, 1996 - BYU 41, Texas A&M 37

If you've scanned the list of games, and are just coming back to read the capsules, you're probably confused as to why this game is on the list.  As far as you know, I've never been a BYU fan, and there wasn't anything extraordinarily amazing about this game.  Rather, what makes this game notable is how it represents my transition from a Nebraska-centric homer to a fan of the whole game of college football.

Of course, this wasn't the first non-Nebraska game I watched.  In addition to the aforementioned ND-FSU "Game of the Century," I managed to catch a lot of other games those first few years.  For example, I watched several games involving the amazing 1995 Northwestern team that made the Rose Bowl.  Overall though, I would say that 1996 was the year when I became a full-fledged college football junkie, in large part because of just how great the first game of the season was.

Coming into the season, Texas A&M was ranked #13, which made BYU the underdog for this game.  However, the Steve Sarkisian-led Cougars were more than ready for the task as they won a back and forth game with a 45-yard touchdown pass in the final minute.  BYU would go on to win a super-sized WAC conference full of feisty teams with a 14-1 record*.  The strength of BYU in this game would help propel me to pay attention to a lot of those feisty teams.  I remember regularly staying up as late as I could to watch the end of some very random Thursday night games between teams like San Diego State and Wyoming.  And thus the junkie was born.

*That record is still unique in FCS football to this day.  BYU played their regular 11 games, plus the now-defunct Kickoff Classic, at Hawaii, the WAC title game, and a bowl in order to get to 15 games.  This record will likely be matched yearly now that we have the playoff system in place.


#4: November 23, 2001 - Colorado 62, Nebraska 36

The three Nebraska games on this list combine to form quite the dramatic arc.  With the FSU game, we saw the closest shot at a title in 20 years evade the Huskers at the last second, which set up the team to seek vengeance in the following years.  With the Florida game, we saw a national power at the height of its peak turn in one of the greatest performances of all time.  And with this game, we saw the unofficial end of Nebraska's run of dominance.  The Huskers had seen a lot of success in Frank Solich's first four years (largely because Eric Crouch was awesome), but that fateful day in Boulder would mark the end of that.  The Huskers would go just 16-10 for the rest of Solich's tenure, and then fade into relative obscurity under the terrible Bill Callahan.

About the game itself, it was notable mainly for how shocking it was to see Nebraska play this poorly.  There weren't any major warnings for this performance: Nebraska entered the game #2 in the country, and had only given up more than 21 points once (to Mike Leach, of course).  Colorado had a fantastic stable of running backs, but this was really the high point of the season for them.  They would go on to avenge a previous 41-7 defeat by squeaking by Texas in the Big 12 title game, and followed that with a loss to Oregon by three scores in the Fiesta Bowl.  Regardless of what came after, the win that may have been the Buffaloes' best ever made every Nebraska fan feel like this:




#5: September 6, 2003 - Notre Dame 29, Washington State 26 (OT)

The cratering out of Nebraska was most certainly disappointing, but on the positive side, it did clear out just enough room in my heart for me to start rooting for my new team.  I began classes at Notre Dame in the fall of 2003, and the game against the Cougars would be my first in the student section.  In fact, this was the first college game I had attended at all.  Expectations were reasonable, but still high following Ty Willingham's miraculous debut season.  While the season wouldn't go according to plan, the Irish would keep hope alive for one week at least with a fantastic comeback victory over a decent Washington State team.  A combination of a thrilling game, learning all of the cheers associated with Notre Dame fandom, and teaching Rahul (the kid from India across the hall from me) about the sport* made this game a truly unique experience that started me down the bumpy road that is rooting for the Irish.

*He was skeptical at first, but then he really ended up enjoying it.  In turn, he would try to teach us cricket later on.  That didn't go as well.

#6: October 15, 2005 - USC 34, Notre Dame 31

Since I became a fan, Notre Dame hasn't had the same kind of triumphant wins that Nebraska had in the 90s and early aughts.  Our victory over Oklahoma in Norman last year was a thing to behold, and numerous upsets of Michigan are always nice, but there's never been that moment where one can say that this team is the best there is.  The closest we've come to such a win in the last decade (in my eyes, at least) was the culmination of the biggest spectacle I've ever witnessed firsthand.

The week leading up to the USC game my Junior year was nuts.  Pretty much every celebrity was rumored to be attending, most notably Bon Jovi (because ND kids can't get enough Bon Jovi).  The pep rally was a super-sized version held in the stadium, complete with multiple football alums and a Trojan horse.  To top it all, Gameday was coming to campus for the first time in five years, so of course I had to go there.  I left my dorm around 6 AM and was able to get a spot roughly in the middle of the crowd.  The experience of Gameday live was OK.  At the time, it was basically impossible to follow along with what was happening, so we mostly just cheered whenever the camera started moving*

*I hung around the fringes of the set for a bit at the Stanford game last year, and it is much, much better now.

And then came the game, which was even crazier than all of the buildup.  In a testament to ridiculous gamesmanship, ND had let the grass grow extra long to slow USC's speed, while Pete Carroll chose not to use replay.  Once the game started, Brady Quinn and Matt Leinart both played like the amazing future pros that they would become (whoops).  Reggie Bush had one of his best games en route to winning the Heisman.  And finally, a crazy fourth quarter was capped by the Bush Push, and more egregiously a forward fumble that probably should have counted as a pass.  As we sulked back to the dining hall for our post-game meal, we hung our heads in defeat.  In the back of my mind though, I was thinking about how this would probably be the best game I would ever see in person.


#7: January 4, 2006 - Texas 41, USC 38

I have two points to make about this game, so here they are:

Point 1:
I like watching sporting events at home because it's where I'm most comfortable, and there are usually minimal distractions.  That said, games like this are best enjoyed in the company of others.  As we would often do, my friends and I met up at Olson's house to watch this game in the comfort of his basement.  Olson's family didn't have the fanciest basement, nor the most spacious one.  However, it was by far the coziest place to meet up and spend the evening.  As much as I remember the game for the contest itself, I also remember it as one of the many good times I had at 523 Crestridge.

Point 2:
Somewhere between the crazy OSU-Miami title game and this one, I turned into someone who roots for favorites a lot more than I first did.  When I was younger, I mostly wanted as many ranked teams to lose as often as possible, just so I could do crazy things with my rankings.  I still take up the underdog cause quite often to this day, but when it comes to playoffs and title games, I generally like to see the best teams succeed.  This meant I was the only person in the room rooting for the Trojans to prevail.  USC was a little annoying as ESPN had been lavishing praises upon them all season long, but I could still appreciate how historically good they had been over the past four seasons.  Furthermore, they were riding a 34 game winning streak that had the chance of growing to 46 games (one shy of the record) by the time the next contest with the Irish rolled around.  Notre Dame has already ended the longest ever winning streaks in both basketball and football, so that would have been another opportunity to add to our streak-busting reputation.  In the end, I wasn't exactly disappointed when Texas prevailed (mostly because of how awesome Vince Young was that night), but for history's sake I still wish the Trojans would have won.


#8: December 1, 2007 - Pittsburgh 13, West Virginia 9

If 1996 was the year that I first exhibited signs of being a maniacal college football fan, then 2007 was the year that my diagnosis was confirmed.  I had just graduated college, so instead of spending half of my Saturdays in Notre Dame Stadium, I could now spend them plopped in front of the TV taking everything in.  As fate would have it, this just happened to be the best season of college football I've ever seen.

The season started out tame, with LSU steamrolling everyone and relatively few upsets dotting the landscape*.  But once October rolled around, there was nothing but pure insanity for the next two months.  Stanford beat USC despite being 41(!) point underdogs.  Upstart programs like Cal and South Florida briefly resided in the seemingly cursed #2 spot before taking harsh tumbles.  LSU played every game close as though it was contractually obligated to do so, barely beating Auburn and Florida, and losing to Arkansas and Kentucky in overtime.  Illinois beat undefeated #1 Ohio State in Columbus largely because they only allowed the Buckeyes three offensive snaps in the fourth quarter.  Hawaii managed to go 12-0 in spite of the fact that they weren't particularly good.  Kansas and Missouri faced off as they always used to do; only this time, they were both ranked in the top three.  In the nation.  Yeah.

*There was this upset in the first week, so it wasn't all by the book.

After all of this, we arrived upon the final evening of the regular season.  Two teams without national titles to their names sat in the top two spots in the BCS standings: Missouri and West Virginia.  The Chase Daniel-led Tigers would lose to Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game that night, but this wasn't much of a shock as they weren't even favored.  What was a shock - nay, one of the biggest shocks ever in the sport - was that a 4-7 Pitt team coached by a likely lame duck Dave Wannstedt would beat one of the best teams in the nation (with everything to play for, mind you) on the road as a four touchdown underdog.  Pitt played the game smartly, stopping West Virginia at the 2 on their first drive, and then handing the ball to Lesean McCoy 38 times for 148 yards to control the clock.  They controlled the game so well than West Virginia only ran four plays in the third quarter.  They also got lucky in that Pat White missed part of the game and didn't play that well while he was healthy.

As a result of this game, power programs Ohio State and LSU faced off in the title game, with the Tigers demolishing the Buckeyes.  Without the Mountaineers loss college football would probably look very different now.  To wit:

- LSU wouldn't have played in the title game, and the SEC's "dynasty" is ended at one title.
- Rich Rodriguez would have been unlikely to leave for Michigan.  Les Miles probably goes to Ann Arbor instead.
- The winningest program in college football without a title would have gotten a really good chance to win one, since Ohio State wasn't particularly great that year.
- With a potential recent title in hand, the Big East would have strengthened their standing in football and perhaps not fallen apart as it did.

In the end, this game ends up on the list not only because it was an awesome representative of the craziest college football season ever.  It also makes it because of how much of a microcosm of the whole sport the game was.  Every single game has massive importance, because each of them has the chance to make or break a season, career, or even a whole program.  That, in a nutshell, is why it's still my favorite sport.


#9: September 3, 2011 - South Florida 23, Notre Dame 20

Like many of my compatriots probably feel, my history of Notre Dame fanhood is comprised of a great deal of pain.  The past decade of Irish football has seem some great highs, but those moments have been equaled and, quite frankly, surpassed by all of the lows.  The 3-9 2007 season was probably the lowest point, but no single game was quite as painful as this one.  In spite of outgaining the Bulls by a 2 to 1 ratio, the Irish would be unable to climb out of a 16-0 halftime deficit, which was largely created by some bad turnover luck.  To make matters worse, it took about 7 hours to complete this game because of two lengthy lightning/storm delays.  As my first game back on campus as a grad student at the beginning of a season with raised expectations, it was quite the disappointing result.

However, there was a silver lining to this whole experience.  As part of the recovery process from this loss I took to the internet, where many of the stathounds showed that ND lost this game largely because of bad turnover luck (this didn't provide a lot of comfort, but it kept my hopes up for the rest of the season).  I was already well-versed in the Sabermetric movement in baseball, but had lagged behind in my knowledge of advanced football stats, in part because they're a lot further behind.  Over the course of that season, I began to read Football Outsiders and Advanced NFL Stats a good deal more, and started to dig into an area that has really helped to increase my understanding of the game and what truly creates winning teams.  As a result, I think I think I'm an even better fan of college football now.


#10: October 13, 2012 - Notre Dame 20, Stanford 13 (OT)

Of all the games on the list, I think that this one best represents the full experience of college football fandom.  One, this was a tremendous game between two great teams that came down to the end.  Two, College Gameday was there, which helped raise the excitement level for the game.  Three, the ending was controversial, which led to weeks and weeks of debate (which all college football fans love implicitly).  And finally, the game was a great excuse to have a weekend in my old college town spending time with a bunch of friends. 

Despite the awesomeness of the game itself, college football at its core is about maintaining ones ties to the past.  This manifests itself in the game's continuous callbacks to previous years (ie. I've seen the Flutie play about a thousand times by now), but also in the tradition of tailgating.  It's nice to know that no matter what's happening with my life, and no matter how good ND actually is at football, there will always be a game or two every year that I can go back to and spend some time with my friends at the place where most of us met.

Another Post About CFB Ratings

I've always wanted to write a bit of a manifesto about college football rankings and ratings systems, but I really haven't ever had the impetus to follow through.  However, a series of tweets yesterday from prominent football writer Pat Forde inspired me to put a few of my thoughts into words.  There's are a lot of differing opinions on what the rankings should reflect, and there are a lot of misunderstandings about what the various ratings systems represent.  Forde and those who responded to him give me the perfect set-up to organize my thoughts.  Here they are:

The nature of rankings

May need to swear off Sagarin Ratings. Just compared preseason to new ratings. Stanford went from 88.82 to 90.49 without playing. ...
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) September 5, 2013

This was the first tweet from Forde on the matter.  This isn't the most ridiculous thought of the series (partially because it raises a legitimate question about the face validity of the system), but it's a good place to start.  Pundits often complain when an idle team moves up in the human polls as well, so it's a familiar argument that deserves a response.

Perhaps the most fundamental thing to remember about rankings systems is that the ordinal number next to your name has no inherent value by itself .  You earn that ranking simply by being better than all of the teams below you, and worse than all the teams above you.  Thus, moving up in the rankings doesn't necessarily mean you've gotten better; it can just as easily mean the teams around you have gotten worse.  I know that Forde quoted the rating number, and not the ordinal ranking, but the same point still stands.  The rating number only means something relative to the other teams rating numbers, so the argument is basically the same.

To illustrate this, let's look at the four teams that fell below Stanford (who went from 7th to 3rd) and why they did so.  Stanford leapt a team that lost (Georgia) and a team that was not particularly impressive against a mediocre opponent (Texas A&M vs. Rice).  It makes sense to see them climb over those teams, even thought Georgia's loss was strong.  You can also see the arguments against the other two teams the Cardinal jumped as Oregon played a nobody and LSU only won by 10.  Those are less satisfying arguments, but when we're dealing with small margins between the top teams, it doesn't take much to move the needle.  In the end, all of those teams are so close, that they will all probably switch spots next week.  Which brings me to my next point:


It's one game

Washington is four spots behind Boise after pole-axing the Bus by 32 points. Clemson behind Georgia.
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) September 5, 2013

This is probably the most obvious point, but I will still make it:  Teams have only played one game.  Weird things happen in single game samples, like Boise losing by 32 to a team that they had just beaten in a bowl last season.  Of course, this doesn't mean that we should ignore what happened last weekend.  Just the opposite, we should weigh that very heavily in our evaluations of teams since it's likely the most relevant information.  However, it's still just one game with a lot of unknowns.  Perhaps Washington is better than Boise, but given our prior assumption that Boise was better, how much of that are we willing to discount based on a single result?  Some are willing to discard it entirely (which anyone is free to do if they want), but that's just not the best way to evaluate the relative quality of football teams.

One other thing about this is that Forde only states the current positions of the teams.  He doesn't show how much the ratings have changed from the first week.  Since Sagarin uses a prior in his ratings for roughly the first half of the season, it's clear that the preseason weighting will have some effect.  I think that Forde's tweet overstates that effect a bit.  For the two examples he gives:

Georgia - preseason rank of 5 with an 89.55 rating - week 1 rank of 5 with an 89.66 rating*
Clemson - preseason rank of 16 with an 83.55 rating - week 1 rank of 11 with an 85.12 rating

Boise - preseason rank of 15 with an 83.71 rating - week 1 rank of 22 with an 81.31 rating
Washington - preseason rank of 40 with a 76.79 rating - week 1 rank of 26 with an 80.57 rating.

*I'm using the composite rating for now, since that is what Forde quoted in his first tweet.  I will talk about why I don't like that later.

In the case of UGA-Clemson, we see a slight bump for Clemson, and a stand still for Georgia.  This makes sense as Georgia lost on the road to a very good team by three points.  I can't see making up the entire difference of 11 ranking spots because of a one-score game that most would agree was quite even.

In the case of Boise-UW, this exercise shows us the large swing that we would expect from such a lopsided result as Boise is now 21 spots closer to the Huskies in the rankings.  However, it's not quite enough to overcome the massive gulf between the teams in preseason expectations.  While most human voters (me included) have Washington above Boise, I can see the merit in not reacting too crazily to one result.


There's going to be outliers

@YahooForde My personal (biased) favorite was #UofL at 27 and #KState at #28. UK was also 15 spots better than WKU, too.
— Steve Bittenbender (@freelancehack) September 5, 2013

A few people replied to Forde with their own discrepancies.  While I appreciate the usage of the comma before "too" in this tweet, cherry picking the odd ducks in a set of results is still not the best way to go in life.  There are two reasons for this.  One, advanced models are likely to be considering different factors in different ways, and thus will inherently give you some results you wouldn't have thought of.  Of course, this is a feature and not a bug, because why else would you design such a system if not to further enlighten yourself.  As Bill James famously said*, a good metric will confirm your beliefs 80% of the time, and surprise you 20% of the time.

*This attribution might be an urban legend.  The best I could find in a quick search was this, which is promising since it's from SABR, but not great since it just off-handedly mentions it.  Oh well, it's a good quote anyway.

The second argument against cherry picking is that everyone, including those who make the models, knows full well that they are not perfect.  While we've gotten really good at determining what leads to winning teams, we still have just a fraction of the data that it would take to definitively assign value judgments to teams.  There is a very good chance that some of these discrepancies are legitimately wrong.  While it would be tempting to go in and "fix" all of these issues, there are a lot of problems with that.  Ken Pomeroy goes into great detail about this in his response to those that decried Wisconsin being #2 a couple of years ago.  The basic summary is that if you went and made one change, then you'd probably have to make another and another, until you got to the point where the final product is worse than what you initially had.  These systems are generally designed to provide the most accurate results for the full population of the teams at hand.  This means that some of them will fall through the cracks. 

In the end, it's entirely possible that Louisville is a really great team that all of the computers are underrating.  But, since it's possible that they aren't that good, and since they are just one output out of 125, ratings systems shouldn't change just to smooth out the outliers.


Understand how the ratings work before criticizing them

From his earlier and later tweets, it's clear that Forde understands that there is a preseason weighting that goes into Sagarin's ratings.  He argues against this, but I am afraid that Bayesian statistics are here to stay.  What he doesn't seem to understand (to his detriment) is that he isn't using the best measure available to him from Sagarin's ratings.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, the numbers that Forde quotes come from the left-most composite rating from Sagarin's site.  While this rating system is likely good, I'm not sure what value it provides, if any, over the right-most "Pure Points" predictor.  On his ratings page, Sagarin says:

"In ELO-CHESS, only winning and losing matters; the score margin is of no consequence,
which makes it very "politically correct".  However it is less accurate in its predictions for
upcoming games than is the PURE POINTS, in which the score margin is the only thing that matters....The overall RATING is a synthesis of the two diametrical opposites, ELO-CHESS and PURE POINTS (PREDICTOR)."

The "Elo-Chess" rating that Sagarin mentions is what he submits to the BCS.  As I've mentioned before, this is the neutered ranking that the BCS encouraged in the early 2000s to remove the motivation to run up the score (boy did that not work).  By removing margin of victory, which is the best simple way to evaluate teams, ratings such as the Elo-Chess don't seem to have any real value.  A team can win a bunch of close, flukish games (hello 2012 Florida) and get the same level of reward as those that are more dominant, and thus better.

Anyway, this ties back to Forde because he uses the composite rating which includes the icky Elo-Chess rating.*  If he would use the more accurate predictor rating, then a funny thing happens to his Boise-UW example: Instead of being four spots behind Boise, Washington is now 3 spots ahead of them (23rd to 26th).  If Forde would look at the better set of ratings, then he might feel that they are a touch more reasonable that he perceives them to be.

*This is partially Sagarin's fault since the composite rating is the most prominently displayed metric on his ratings page.  I do wonder if perhaps the composite rating is a more complicated synthesis than it seems, and is maybe the best judge of which teams are the best, but Sagarin doesn't seem to write much about his systems, so I am not sure.


Understanding the differing goals between different rating systems and why those are important

Fact is, there shouldn't be a preseason computer rating. Data from previous seasons shouldn't impact this season.
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) September 5, 2013

Bravo RT @KevinPauga @YahooForde The #KPI, everybody started at 0 last week. No preconceived anything http://t.co/t5v6TiTbye and @KPIsports
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) September 5, 2013

The first tweet above continues the thought I had a few paragraphs ago.  If you're going to make a good prediction system using limited data, then a Bayesian mindset is pretty much necessary.  If a computer rating didn't have a preseason weighting, then it would look something like the rankings linked to in the second tweet.  Those ratings have a five-way tie for first between Arizona, Duke, Tennessee, Georgia Tech, and San Jose State.  Those may all be good teams this season, but they are clearly not anything resembling an actual top five.  They also don't appear to be the teams that have accomplished the most, as we don't see early season stalwarts such as LSU or Washington in the top five.  This seems to be more of an efficiency metric, that likely has little predictive value.

That said, I do agree with Forde that the final determination of who plays in the title game should rest only on what happened this season.  In a lot of ways, this kind of mimics the basic idea of the American Dream.  That is, no matter what happened before, you still have a chance to be the best if you give your best effort and play well.  Of course, we all know that both life and football are not that simple, and that teams that were terrible last year are unlikely to succeed at the highest level this year.  But still, there's always hope.*

*I might have stolen this thought from "How Football Explains America."

Since we're together on that basic point, this disagreement boils down to something else.  We have the same goal (ranking the best teams in the proper order), but different ways of going about it.  An article I found with the Google (by another author) best sums up what I think Forde is trying to get at:

"BCS berths aren't awarded on the basis of hypothetical future results, or guesses at perceived strengths. They're awarded on the basis of achievement, on wins and losses and conference championships. Including margin-of-victory may make the BCS computer rankings "more accurate" when it comes to selecting which teams are playing the best football, but it would make them less accurate when it comes to answering the question the BCS rankings are trying to answer: which teams are most deserving ."

This quote ties in not only to this post, but also to the post where I decried "deserverism."  In this paragraph, and in Forde's tweets, the writers seem to make a distinction between the best and the most deserving.  Judging by the arguments they make, the reason for this is clear.  Both I and them wish to get the best teams into the championship game.  Writers like them look for the simple answer whether it be a pair of undefeated teams, or a one-loss team from one of the best conferences.  Their definition of "deserve" seems to be something that allows them to sleep easy at night.  In doing this, they shun the complexity inherent to a sport where 125 teams play 12 or 13 games against varying levels of opponents in different conditions with different stakes on the line.  While they seem to dislike complexity, I embrace it.  I want to see the best teams rewarded for being the best, whether or not they have an immaculate record.  Reality is complicated and there are rarely black and white answers.*  If we want to be honest with ourselves, then we have to face that fact, and do the hard work to truly answer the question of who is best.  Thankfully people like Jeff Sagarin, the folks at Football Outsides, and others have taken up the monumental task of sorting out the sport that is probably the least sort-out-able.  Those such measures help enlighten me to things I may have missed, and with some open-mindedness, I would like to think that the mainstream thought will eventually embrace this as well.

*Except for USC vs. Texas in 2005.  That was perfect.

In the meantime, I think a middle ground is more than reasonable.  Human polls are ridiculously flawed, but at the same time there are things that humans can discern that computer models can't easily take in.  Understanding the context behind a game can often give us a much better picture of what happened than a box score.  For example, in my last post I ragged on Louisville for only beating awful Southern Miss by 4 last year.  While that does look terrible on the surface, the fact that it was played in a monsoon could explain some of the Cardinals perceived underperfomance.  In the end, college football has a gloriously short season that makes it nearly impossible to definitively say who is the best.  Because of this, it can sometimes be best to embrace the random and celebrate a miraculously undefeated team even if they aren't the best.*  I fully support this idea as long as its balanced with reason and understanding of what we do know about quantitative team performance.  We're clearly not there yet, but with more discussions like this, I think we can achieve a balance that makes college football better than ever.

*No idea who I'm talking about there.  None at all.