Please don't vote for Zach Britton for Cy Young
Every so often, there comes this push to give the Cy Young to a closer, because either we’re all bored, or no starter or two is clearly the favorite, or both. It seems we’ve come to that time again, as there is a growing movement to give the American League Cy Young to Baltimore Orioles closer Zach Britton.
There are certainly some glittering numbers for Britton. He’s 42-for-42 in saves, the 0.62 ERA; these are things that become hard to ignore. Except we’re supposed to have moved on from looking at these kinds of things, at least exclusively. And if you dig a little deeper, there isn’t an argument for Britton that holds up.
Because I’m nothing if not a midfield destroyer (mixed sports metaphor warning), let me see if I can’t tear these apart a bit.
One, the saves. We’ve come to realize that the ‘save’ is a somewhat empty stat. While the three outs that end the game do come with a tinge more feeling than the other 24, they’re still just three outs. And the rest of the team has had to do the work to put one in position to get a save. Looking at Britton’s 42 saves for the Orioles, only eight of them have preserved a one-run lead.
So in 34 of those opportunities, he’s had something of a net. Not that he hasn’t been doing his job in a most dominant fashion, it’s just that his job isn’t even all that special.
And if we have to have a reliever being nominated for this award, you could easily say that Britton hasn’t even been the best reliever in the American League. Dellin Betances is striking out 43.6 percent of the hitters he sees. His 1.48 FIP is a half-run better than Britton’s 2.06. But only recently have his outs come in the ninth inning, after the trades of Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman.
But were the outs he was getting mostly in the sixth and seventh innings any less valuable than the three Britton has been collecting in the ninth? They’re still outs. To boot, Miller’s and Chapman’s WHIP are lower than Britton’s. Chapman wouldn’t be getting Cy Young heat if he hadn’t been traded, and Miller certainly isn’t pitching all over the innings map for the Indians.
If we’re going by strict value, Britton doesn’t even lead his own team in WAR, according to Baseball Reference. That would go to Kevin Gausman and Chris Tillman, and only Tillman is even in the top-10 in that category among pitchers in the American League.
There’s also an urge to compare him to Dennis Eckersley’s 1992 season, where he won the Cy Young and MVP. Just because we made a mistake once doesn’t mean we should do so again. Because, if we knew then what we know now, would we have been handing Roger Clemens’s Cy to Eck?
No, of course we wouldn’t, because we’d see Clemens’s 2.54 FIP, 1.07 WHIP, his league-leading K/BB rate and gotten over ourselves. Back then, writers will still coming to terms with this new-fangled one-inning closer thing. The novelty of it at the time certainly played a role.
Britton has been excellent, and his stuff is truly breathtaking to watch. But there isn’t any aspect of his job that someone else isn’t doing better. Don’t get cute here.
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