Quote Originally Posted by gut View Post
Speaking of Scherzer, its nuts to think about how he'll finish no higher than 4th in the NL CY Young voting, after going 14-12 with a 2.79 ERA, a 0.918 WHIP, and 276/34 K/BB in 228 IP. Oh and 2 no-hitters. But he's still CLEARLY behind the other big 3, if not others.

Just as recently as 2006, Brandon Webb won the award after going 16-8 with a 3.10 ERA, 178/50 in 235 innings.
Scherzer was on one of my fantasy teams, so I watched him closely. He was brilliant in the first half, and looked like he would be the main competition for Greinke to win the Cy this year.

He was very mediocre in the 2nd half. His no-hitter at the end left people with the impression that he was dominant all year, because they remembered his great first half, and of course the no-hitter was the last thing you saw from him.

Not to say that numbers like 2.79/0.918 and 276/34 are bad, because they are obviously excellent. However, there's a reason he was 14-12, and it wasn't just lack of run support. He just wasn't one of those guys where you could automatically expect a win during the second half of the season.

Can't really compare him to Webb because that was still during the steroid era. (And boy did Webb really fall off after that!)

Kershaw and Arrieta were both fucking amazing in the 2nd half. Even I was starting to doubt Kershaw as he just couldn't get it together consistently in the first half, and then he went on a run in the second half which made last year's Cy Young/MVP season look like dogshit. Arrieta was similar, but Kershaw was even more dominant.

The award is probably going to Greinke because of his 1.66 ERA and 19-3 record. He definitely was the pitcher who was most consistently good the entire year. But I can tell you that Greinke's amazing numbers were also part luck and part keeping composure, and less related to dominance. That is, whenever he got in a jam, he kept complete composure and kept getting out of it, and then would return to pitch well again. He just never got bombed. At the same time, he's basically a 7 inning pitcher, and you're not going to see a lot of those high-strikeout, super-dominant games out of him like you do from guys like Kershaw.

Greinke is the equivalent of a poker player who absolutely never tilts. Kershaw does have a bit of a tilt problem. That's why he melted down in the playoffs the past 2 years. He lets his emotions get to him, while Greinke can somehow shrug off anything that happens and get back to pitching normally. Early in the year, I would watch the Dodgers make some awful, boneheaded error which would put him down 3-0 in the 1st inning. He didn't look pissed at all, and just shut everyone down the rest of the game, and the Dodgers came back and won.

Anyway, I do get your point. There was some really excellent pitching in the NL this year.