The complete Cy Young case for Corbin Burnes
And a eulogy (kinda) for the 2021 Minnesota Twins.
Happy Tuesday, fellow rich people.
The Brewers clinched the NL Central on Sunday at home, in case you hadn’t heard. I was in attendance. It was fun. (The Twins, well, let’s just say they haven’t quite clinched yet and leave it at that).
Division championships in basketball are quite literally meaningless. In football, they don’t really carry all that much weight, either. But in baseball, oh yes, they matter. You play six months’ worth of games, grinding through losing streaks, injuries, slumps and everything of the like. Even when you feel like the season is almost over, you look at the schedule and see 40 games remaining. Suddenly, a five-game lead doesn’t seem so big anymore.
That’s why you celebrate division championships. Making the playoffs is no easy task in baseball, a sport where so much can go so wrong over the course of 162 games; just ask the Padres. Getting to the dance at the end of the season is a big deal. It’s not like in the NBA, where a a 40-42 team can waltz its way into the No. 8 seed and have no chance against the top seed. Mediocre teams don’t make the playoffs in baseball (let’s ignore 2020, okay). If your season doesn’t end at 162 games, you have a real chance to win it all.
The Brewers winning the division twice in four years and making the playoffs in each of those four seasons (no longer ignoring 2020 anymore) is a big deal. Sure, the team hopes that they have more champagne celebrations to come, but this is the golden era of Milwaukee baseball. That’s pretty cool.
Let’s converse.
The case for Corbin
~Curt
As an entity, the Baseball Writers Association of America has gotten significantly better at award voting in the last decade. Gone are the days where it was not all that hard to argue that the voting contingent butchered the voting and butchered it badly.
The 2021 awards seem likely to follow that recent pattern. NL MVP seems to be a three-horse race of young studs at the top of the WAR leaderboards. Shohei Ohtani and Vlad Guerrero Jr. will likely split all of the first-place votes in the AL and rightfully so. Robbie Ray will probably win the AL Cy Young, though Gerrit Cole might mess around and snag some votes away from him.
The NL Cy Young, though? Who knows what will happen. There are a bevy of pitchers who have established strong cases to win the award. Corbin Burnes. Max Scherzer. Walker Buehler. Zack Wheeler. What makes the race compelling is not only that each of the above four pitchers has a case to be made for the award, but that each has a unique case.
Because this is a Brewers (and Twins) newsletter, let’s lay out the complete case for one Corbin Brian Burnes.
Before digging into Burnes’ numbers, I’ll go over what, in the eye of the (fake) voteholder, my top criteria for picking a Cy Young winner are.
Ability to strike batters out and avoid walks. These are the most “controllable” outcomes for a pitcher. No outcome, process-wise, is better than a strikeout. There’s a reason K-BB% is among the most predictive stats of run prevention.
Run prevention. Not allowing runs is obviously the name of the game for pitchers, so I wouldn’t blame someone for basing their vote based predominantly off ERA or RA. But also….I would. There can be a lot of noise in run totals and it’s harder to assess a pitcher’s “true” runs against value due to factors such as defense and batted ball luck.
Availability. Making more starts is better than making fewer. Going deeper in games (while remaining effective) is better than not.
Avoiding hard contact. A certain beloved Brewers color commentator likes to assert that “exit velocity is overrated.” I don’t think he’s entirely wrong, but consistently inducing soft contact is better than allowing lots of barrels. The level to which pitchers control what happens after the ball leaves their hand is limited (and why this is down a bit on my list), but they do have some say in the matter. Not giving up homers and forcing teams to beat you with soft contact is always preferred.
Pile up Ks and avoid walks
Few have been better than Burnes in the area of pitching where the pitcher has the greatest level of control over the outcome. And not just this season, but in the history of baseball.
This is where Burnes’ case is the strongest. Burnes’ 30.4 K-BB% is the seventh-best in baseball history. He struck out 60 batters without issuing a walk to begin the season, setting an all-time record. Take out those 60 consecutive punchouts and he still has the ninth-best K-BB% mark in all of baseball this year (and higher than Walker Buehler). Burnes has 13 starts of at least nine strikeouts and zero or one walks this year--the seventh most all-time in a single season and only four fewer than the Brewers career franchise record. His eight starts with at least nine Ks and no walks is tied for the most ever.
The limitations of FIP as a stat have been discussed plenty on this here newsletter, as well as in the general baseball community for years, but it’s nonetheless impossible to argue against what it evaluates. If you strike batters out and avoid walks and homers allowed, your FIP will be excellent. And Corbin Burnes’ FIP is excellent. How excellent? His absurdly-low FIP of 1.56 is the second-best single season mark in baseball history.
Burnes is having one of the greatest process-based seasons in big league history. How about the results?
Run prevention
It’s tough to argue with a 2.29 ERA that is just .01 points behind Scherzer for the league lead. It’s even tougher to argue with his MLB-best 185 ERA+, which accounts for the fact that Burnes pitches at American Family Field whereas Scherzer split time at much more pitcher-friendly Dodger Stadium and Nationals Park.
Burnes’ high-point ERA was 2.62 after a start at Coors Field in June.
There isn’t much ERA flukiness behind the curtain, either. Burnes sports a runs against per nine innings of 2.40. Only two of his runs against have been deemed to be “unearned.”
Availability
This is the part of the equation where Cy Young discussions become the most interesting. If it were simply about evaluating which pitcher has been the best on a per-inning basis, there would typically be little debate. But when factoring in innings pitched, a whole lot of gray area enters the frame.
Burnes is only 27th in the majors in innings pitched with 165. Availability may be Wheeler’s best argument (MLB-best 206 IP) while Buehler marries an innings load (195.2) with run prevention (2.58 ERA). Scherzer has also thrown more innings than Burnes, but only nine more. Burnes’ relative lack of innings pitched hurts his case. That is a matter of fact.
But there is also a part of me that feels if we look back in 25 years at the Cy Young voting and saw that the award wasn’t given to a guy who had historically good peripherals and the results to match them in favor of a guy who threw a few more innings...it won’t be a great look.
I think it’s also relevant to look at why Burnes has been on the mound less than some of his peers. The Brewers have employed a six-man rotation for much of the season, relying on their depth to help keep their top arms fresh coming off a 60-game season in 2020. Burnes has only missed time for being put on the COVID IL (likely for testing positive; also likely due to not getting the vaccine). Had the Brewers gone with a five-man rotation like most of the rest of baseball, Burnes would be looking at an additional three-to-four starts and 18-to-25 innings this year.
It’s understandable to include the innings pitched caveat in the Cy Young discussion, but I think it’s also important to include that Burnes shouldn’t be knocked for his team having the depth to be able to use six starters.
Avoiding hard contact
So Burnes has been the best in the controllable facets of pitching, arguably the best at run prevention and not so elite in terms of racking up innings. In what is a close race due to those three factors, I believe that a closer look at the batted ball profiles of the top candidates gives Burnes the edge.
Starting with the face value stats, Burnes has a .308 batting average on balls in play and 76.5% left-on-base percentage. Scherzer has the benefit of a .237 BABIP and 85.9% LOB%; Buehler .247 and 80.4%.
Okay, but could that simply be a byproduct of Burnes giving up harder contact when batters do get the bat on his pitches? After all, there’s a track record for that. We’re only two years removed from the Corbin Burnes Airlines experience.
Answer: a big, fat nooooooope.
Actually, few have been better at inducing weak contact than Burnes.
The only two starters in baseball with a lower average exit velocity against are Wheeler and Ryan Yarbrough. Burnes has the second-lowest hard-hit rate among qualified NL starters. He has only allowed six homers.
Burnes has been elite at limiting extra-base hits, with only 26 allowed. And, yet, the underlying numbers indicate that, even in an area where he is head-and-shoulders above just about every other pitcher, he has still been bit by bad luck.
Below are the pitchers with the lowest expected slugging percentages on extra-base hits.
Burnes has the lowest xSLG on such hits in all of baseball. And it’s not even close.
Scherzer, meanwhile, has the eighth-highest xSLG on extra-base hits allowed.
The anecdotal evidence backs these numbers up. It seems that, in nearly every start, Burnes is getting burned in some way, shape or form by a handful of 70 mph exit velo worm burners.
So Burnes is still at the top of the league in run prevention despite being bit by tons of bad luck? That’s Cy Young material right there.
The takeaway
I haven’t come to a conclusion on who would get my vote if I had one. I keep coming back to Burnes and Scherzer as my top choices simply because they have been the dominant pitchers in my top two categories of importance.
From there, it essentially comes down to this question: do Scherzer’s greater innings total outweigh Burnes’ historic strikeout-to-walk season and worse overall luck?
My answer? Because it’s less than 10 innings, no.
Corbin Burnes for Cy Young.
The Twins and streaking
~Jake
I’ve been thinking a lot about streaking recently. Not the kind the Cardinals are doing—I’m ready to be done thinking about that. (Early side note: the Cardinals had to win 16 games in a row just to have the same record as the Seattle Mariners. Think on that.)
No, what I’ve been thinking about is the act of helicoptering on a big league field, you know, just stripping down to my birth robe and running for dear life.
I figure I could make it a good 30 seconds or so before my bones are crushed by a security guard trying to relive their linebacking glory days. I figure picking the right entry point is key. You have to stay away from the dirt, or else I imagine raspberries in the worst of areas. Th next key is acceleration; I’d have to train for this, I think. Finally, the flair: I’d play dead. I’d pretend to give up. “OK, big security man, you caught me.” They would ease up, knowing that I knew I was had.
But it would be a ruse! Just the intermission before my second, fleeting act. I’d dash away for another handful of seconds to get to my half-minute mark, then belly slide through the outfield. It wouldn’t feel great, but I figure better than getting tackled.
I should be clear: I’m not ever going to do this. Especially now that my secret is out. My plan is spoiled. There’s now written evidence of my plan, which would make it premeditated streaking, which surely is worse than spontaneous streaking in the eyes of the law. I just mean to say I’ve thought about it. Clearly.
Ultimately the act of streaking is a futile one, and it’s that futility that is the linking agent between streaking and the MInnesota Twins season.
I bet you were really wondering how this would tie back to baseball, weren’t you?
The season is mercifully almost over for the Twins, so I’ve been thinking of ways to recap the year. It’s fun to make a case for a possible award winner or think about how to manage an upcoming series to clinch a playoff spot. That just isn’t part of the cards this year for Minnesota, though. We all know it’s been a bad season. I could go on about how exactly they were bad, and maybe I will in the offseason. Right now, though, it’s enough to just say they were bad throughout. Bad from top to bottom, really. Bad compared to our expectations, bad compared to even an average ballclub.
I think the worst part of all, though, is the futility of the season. There are plenty of bad teams in baseball. The Diamondbacks and Orioles are going to lose 110 games this year. Pittsburgh and Texas are going to lose 100. All those teams are more or less trying to be bad, though. Baltimore has arguably the top farm system in baseball and Pittsburgh isn’t too far behind. Arizona’s farm system is Raysian in its depth and Texas...well, Texas has a new ballpark.
The Twins aren’t building towards something. This was supposed to be the finished product. Supplemented by some upcoming minor leaguers, sure, but the foundation was here. We aren’t waiting on a new wave of talent to take over the team like Toronto did a couple of years ago or Houston before that. Jose Berrios, Nelson Cruz, Max Kepler, Byron Buxton, Jorge Polanco, Miguel Sano, Josh Donaldson, Mitch Garver, Kenta Maeda—they were all here. This was a win-now team.
In a down year, you’re supposed to take positives from the year and try to build on that. What happened this year felt like a demolition not just of this year but the future, too. How can we feel good about a team that will return most of the same lineup and will likely miss their best pitcher for most of the season?
Some prospects are coming, like Jordan Balazovic, Austin Martin and Royce Lewis, while others, like Joe Ryan, are already here. Some guys will bounce back and some guys won’t be injured. But some guys will get worse and some guys will get injured! That’s just how these things work.
The Twins will almost certainly be better next year but will they be 20 wins better? Even if they swing that drastically, they’d still barely be a playoff team. That would be a huge improvement, of course, but still not exactly hitting our lofty expectations.
Whatever, we don’t have to figure this out right now. This big dumb season is almost over. It felt pointless and like a waste of time for so many people. Just like streaking. Exactly the same.