Felix Hernandez – Cy Young Award Winner?
November 18, 2009 3 Comments
Maybe. Despite the award being a landslide, looking at Felix’ season visually (in the same way I did for Greinke earlier today) makes you wonder. His season is eerily similar to Greinke’s -5 months of pitching like a #1, and one month of pitching like a #3. Same level of sustained excellence. In fact, for the last 4 months of the season, he was better than Greinke.
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Kevin Dame is a writer and visual designer who brings sports information to life in new and meaningful ways. His work, which has been featured on espn.com, Fast Company, and the San Francisco Chronicle, can also be found at 
Hi, love the site, but in this case I’ll be the dork who points out that plain old ERA isn’t a really sound basis for a statement like “In fact, for the last 4 months of the season, he was better than Greinke.” In the second half, Grienke had 2.4 more strikeouts per 9 with fewer walks, the same # of HR, and he threw a shutout, unlike King Felix. Those are defense-independent measures that might be used to determine ‘better’.
Henry, great point about DIPS and how ERA really doesn’t give us the true picture of performance. Thus far, I’ve stuck with visualizing traditional measures. I’d like to get to a point, though, where I can bring in more of the newer sabermetric measures that tell an even more accurate story. Thanks for your thoughts!
You did leave out the october start which I combined with sept which breaks out those months to sept&oct 3-0 1.38 era / 6-0 1.51 era
Also Felix did face harder opponents with better offenses, I posted them on the espn board. I did plot out the era’s on a chart, here’s the link. http://i45.tinypic.com/2e3rc6w.gif
the lines are the logarithm function of their era’s. The red and pink is Felix blues are Zack.