Vida Blue won the Cy Young Award in 1971, and the Most Valuable Player Award, too. Wilbur Wood, a fat knuckleball pitcher with the charisma of a weekend bass fisherman, might have been better.

Wood earned more Win Shares than Blue, and more Win Shares per 200 innings. By contrast, Bill’s Season Scores method is in sync with the Cy Young results:

The Season Scores method considers the things most people think about when they think about pitching – wins, winning percentage, ERA, complete games, etc. – what we might call conventional measures,  as opposed to the sorts of things you look at in sabermetrics. I wanted to synthesize both approaches, not mathematically but analytically, to try to figure out which guy really had the better season. The conventional approach shows a huge advantage for Blue, the sabermetric method a slight advantage for Wood.

Starting with the conventional stats, Blue has the advantage in every major category:

·        Blue's ERA was 1.81, Wood's 1.92.

·        Blue won 24 games, Wood 22.

·        Blue lost only 8 games, Wood 13.

·        Blue completed 24 games, Wood 22.

·        Blue threw 8 shutouts, Wood 7.

·        Blue finished second in the league in strikeouts, Wood fifth.

·        Blue was first in walk and hits allowed per game, Wood second.

·        Blue's strikeout to walk ratio was second, Wood's was third. 

·        Blue had the most strikeouts per game. Wood didn’t make the top ten. 

Blue has all those edges, but they’re small ones. If you compare Blue’s numbers to Wood’s, unadjusted for any context, they’re very close except for wins and winning percentage:

Contextually, the differences between Wood and Blue were minor. Same league, same year, but they pitched in different parks. I used the context neutralizer at Baseball-Reference.com to drop them both into a neutral park … and with average run support from their teammates here’s what we see: 

Now they are essentially the same pitcher, even in wins and losses. In a nutshell, the change in wins and losses created by this conversion formula shows the difference between playing for a winner and playing for a loser.

Unlike Blue, Wood didn’t get much help from his offense or his defense.

Blue Got More Help From His Hitters

Wood got less help from White Sox batters than Blue got from the A’s. Wood not only got less help than Blue got, he got less help than the other pitchers on the White Sox staff. When Wood pitched, the Sox scored 3.70 runs per game, but for the other four main starters they scored 3.95.

The A’s, as you know, had a good offense in 1971. They scored the third-most runs per game in the American League. They didn’t hit as well when Blue pitched, but they still scored 3.95 runs in his starts.

The difference in run support is greater than the difference in park effect, but it’s still a relatively modest difference. The real difference was the defense they had behind them.

Blue Got More Help From His Fielders

I mentioned the change in Wood’s won-loss record, but look at the change in his rate of unearned runs, too. It dropped from 25% in real life to 12% in the neutral environment. That’s because of the assumptions in the Baseball-Reference formula. It assumes there was an average defense behind the pitcher.

But the defense behind Wood was far from average. Purely in terms of turning batted balls into outs, Wood’s White Sox were the worst in the American League. Blue’s A’s were the best.

Blame it on the Batters, the Fielders, and the Knuckleball

Wood’s reliance on the knuckleball caused two kinds of problems, one cosmetic and one for his fielders. Bill explained the cosmetic problem in the New Historical Abstract. In Bill’s view, as I understand it, the knuckleball kept Wood from winning the Cy Young Award because

·        Winning teams like power pitchers, and

·        don’t like knuckleball pitchers;

·        Therefore, knuckleball pitchers have to catch on with losing teams.

·        The Cy Young is usually given to pitchers who win the most games, and

·        Pitchers on losing teams don’t win enough games to win the Cy Young Award.

There’s a functional problem too. Knuckleballs put additional pressure on the defense because they often lead to passed balls. Passed balls are counted the same as errors when figuring earned (and unearned) runs. This shows up in the number of runs a knuckleball pitcher allows, but not his Earned Run Average.

Over the course of his career, a typical pitcher will see around 10% of his total runs allowed be unearned runs. A knuckleball pitcher’s percentage will be a few points higher than that.

You’d expect Wood to give up a higher rate of unearned runs than Blue, and he did: 25% for Wood, 14% for Blue. Wood bears some responsibility for all those unearned runs.

Not all of it, though. 25% is an extremely high percentage, even for a knuckleballer. In Wood’s case, from 1972 to the end of his career his average unearned runs per year was only 11%. In 1971, Wood’s passed balls led to only 8 unearned runs out of his total of 24. The White Sox defense gets most of the blame for all of those unearned runs.

The Cy Young Voters Got it Right

Wood might have been the better pitcher in 1971. By sabermetric methods, it’s still a very close call; too close, in my mind, to overcome the blowout we see with conventional methods.

Gut reaction. You have to choose one of them to start the 7^th game of the World Series in 1971, would you take Blue or Wood? Blue, and you’d have no hesitation about it, Win Shares be damned. Wood was good, but Blue really was better.