Running on empty…
November 13, 2007It’s Cy Young for CC
November 13, 2007
C.C. Sabathia Takes Home AL’s Top Pitcher Award
Cleveland Indians’ starting pitcher C.C. Sabathia has won the American League Cy Young Award. The Cy Young marks the third major award taken home by the Tribe this offseason, following the Executive of the Year Award (Mark Shapiro) and the American League Gold Glove Award (Grady Sizemore). This is just the second Cy Young to ever be won by an Indians’ pitcher, the first since Gaylord Perry won it back in 1972.
There were some questions about Grady Sizemore’s merits in winning the Gold Glove award, but there will be few who will gripe about C.C.’s award. The big lefty had simply a dominating regular season this year, going 19-7 with a 3.21 ERA. He struck out 209 batters while walking only 37 in 241 innings pitched. He had 4 complete games and 1 shutout. His WHIP was 1.14. He was selected to his third All-Star game. All in all, this was the best year in an already solid career for C.C., as he posted career bests in Wins, ERA, innings pitched, strikeouts, walks, WHIP, and number of starts.
The other candidates for the award were Josh Beckett of the Red Sox (20-7, 3.27 ERA, 194 strikeouts, 40 walks, 200.7 innings pitched) and John Lackey of the Angels (19-9, 3.01 ERA, 179 strikeouts, 52 walks, 224.0 innings pitched). Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why C.C. was given the nod. Mainly, you can look at strikeouts to walks and innings pitched. As Rick at Halftime Adjustments predicted earlier in the day,
“What might push the vote toward C.C. is the number of innings he pitched. Ironically, that may have hurt the big guy in the postseason, but should win him the award for the year.”
And it appears that’s exactly what happened. Again, congrats are in order for a member of the Cleveland Indians family. Congrats to C.C. on an award much deserved, and here’s to hoping Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti, along with the Dolan family, can figure out something creative to keep the big fella in Cleveland for the rest of his career so we can see a couple more of these Cy Youngs in the future.
9 Comments
Congrats on scooping ESPN.com on this story. Keep this up and we’ll have to call you “The Clevelandwide Leader”…oh and Congrats to CC too!
Haha, thanks. To be fair, though, I had the story already written earlier in the day, and I was just waiting for it to be official. I guess I hit ‘submit’ faster than the folks at ESPN.com did! 🙂
Yeah, I debated writing the story earlier, but didn’t have time. Nice find on the picture.
What I’ll be interested to see his how this impacts how much money he demands…obvioulsy we need to hope for the home team discount.
Check out Rick’s site, Halftime Adjustments (http://halftimeadjustments.com/). He talks about that briefly. Basically, we all know CC is going to demand a lot of money. My personal belief is the issue will not be the money, but the number of years.
By the way, I meant to say he’s going to ‘command’ a lot of money, not ‘demand’. My mistake. Although he also may demand it as well. We’ll see.
Command. Demand. What’s the difference. Btw, nice subscribe feature.
It’s like the difference between active and passive marketing. When you command something, it means your actions dictate compensation, when you demand something, it’s your words that are dictating compensation.
Hey Rock, I have a couple of questions for you, do you think you could send me a contact email? rick@halftimeadjustments.com