Viva El Birdos, a St. Louis Cardinals community

Guess what? There are three in the modern era, and none of them won the Cy Young (or an equivalent "best pitcher" award), including Pedro and Clemens. Cause for concern, or just a fluke? Greg Maddux won in 1994 with only 16 wins, but his ERA+ was 271 that year.

I thought this was something a bit more positive that we could all enjoy. Yes, it is connected with my latest Driveline article on pitcher valuation, but I figure if I add a little extra sugar on top for my Royals Review Peeps (tm), it doesn't count as spam. Anyway, you can learn more about how I value pitchers by reading the article (there's a bit more sugar at the end for Royals fans in the section on tRA). While I haven't incorporated park factors into my database yet, since replacement level is derived from league average, and runs --> wins conversion is custom for each year in my database, it is pretty well adjusted to era. "fe2WAR" is just the dumb name I came up with for averaging FIP-RAR and ERA-WAR, which I then convert to wins. I like Zack, but as you can see, perhaps the Saberhagen comparisons are a bit premature... some pretty incredible seasons in there. Much more to discuss there, I imagine. Note that this is just starting pitchers -- I have a way to incorporate leverage, but it isn't straightforward in terms of mixing leveraged and un-leveraged value in my system, at least not yet. But if we did count it for relievers, I'm pretty sure that at least one or two of Quisenberry's awesome seasons would be in there. But I'll save that for another time. I'm also going to revisit this using BaseRuns-based pitching stats, but that will come later. Enjoy, disagree, discuss!