We can start with the easy part which is figuring out the top two contenders are Chris Sale (the reason this article is appearing on this website) and Corey Kluber of the Indians. You could, should you want to do such a thing, make a case for Luis Severino of the Yankees, Justin Verlander of the Tigers/Astros or even our own Craig Kimbrel, but realistically none of those guys are likely to get any first place votes. Relievers don’t typically win the Cy Young in seasons when there is an outstanding and thus deserving starter unless they do something insane like not allowing a run all year. And even then, they usually don’t win. Kimbrel has been fantastic this season but he has given up 10 runs so, even with a strikeout percentage over 50 percent, it’s not happening for him. Verlander has been fantastic in the second half and had he put together two halves like like it he’d be among the frontrunners to win, but he didn’t, and in fact his first half was pretty mediocre. Throwing 104 innings of 4.73 ERA ball, even when you follow it up with excellence, isn’t going to get it done. So Kimbrel and Verlander are out. We’ll leave Severino in for now and move on to the next paragraph.

Let’s now take a step into the weeds for a moment and mention that defining “best” is, at best (see what I did there?) difficult, and at worst problematic and impossible. If you’re of the sabermetric sort, we could agree that Wins Above Replacement is the way to go, but then which one? There are three and they’re all calculated differently. On the other end of the spectrum there are pitcher wins, which to me are statistical garbage, but to others have varying relevance. This is why this kind of thing is never as clear cut as we’d like it to be. Sometimes there isn’t an answer to the question we ask, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend time trying to learn the answer. So here we are.

This is Baseball Prospectus so let’s start there. By WARP, Chris Sale is the leader by about a half win (8.09 WARP to 7.67 for Kluber). Severino is fourth in the AL with 5.45 behind the two above and the Rays’ Chris Archer. Archer has had a pretty impressive season but two things are holding him back from being a finalist here. His ERA is four point who cares that’s too high to win the Cy Young Award, and he’s 9-11. Pitcher wins are, as previously noted, statistical garbage, but a losing record is going to be a tough hurdle to overcome especially in comparison to his competition. But back to BP. So Sale has a half WARP lead over Kluber, but you could make a counter argument for Kluber which is this: Sale has thrown 18.1 more innings. That’s typically cited as a reason to vote for Sale, but with their WAR figures so close, it’s Kluber who has been more valuable on a per-inning basis.

So there’s that. But this actually gets more interesting as we move on to other forms of WAR. Over at FanGraphs they have Sale leading Kluber and Severino 8.2 to 6.9 and 5.6, respectively. So by their math, Sale has been worth over a win more than Kluber and at that point we get beyond the vagaries of the formulas and start to have a real difference in value. But then we get to Baseball Reference. They have Kluber ahead of Sale, 7.6 to 6.2, with Severino down at 5.2 so that tells us two things. First, Severino ain’t winning this so enough about of him. Second, huh? I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of how these stats are calculated, so instead, let’s do something that we probably shouldn’t do and add all the WAR numbers up. When you do that, Sale gets to 22.5 and Kluber gets to 22.2. With that little math mistake buried 800 words deep, let’s just say that the totality of the WAR numbers have Kluber and Sale as extremely close in value, too close to make any kind of decision on who is better.

So let’s go more mainstream and see if that helps. Both pitchers have 17 wins (as of this writing), both are striking out right around 35 percent of the hitters they face (Sale is at 36.3 percent, Kluber at 34.6 percent) and walking about five percent (Sale is at five percent, Kluber at 4.7 percent). Both have given up 20 homers, three wild pitches, and neither has balked. To this point it seems like a draw, but there are two separators. The first is Sale has 300 strikeouts (Kluber is at 252). Even if it did happen in this era of increased strikeouts, reaching 300 strikeouts is a serious and notable accomplishment. Unfortunately for Sale, that pretty neat accomplishment doesn’t necessarily mean he’s better than Kluber. Still, voters (to the extent we can know what they’ll do) might think it does. That is, if they can get over the second thing, which is the difference in ERA. Kluber’s ERA is 2.35 which leads the American League by a lot, 0.40 over the second place pitcher who happens to be Chris Sale.

It feels bizarre to pin the outcome of this on two starts after about 30 have already elapsed for each pitcher, but that’s how close it is. It’s close enough that two starts matter, one way or the other.

That’s a monumental advantage for Kluber. Voters will probably see it and vote for Kluber, but here’s the thing: by FIP it’s Sale who has the huge advantage, 2.19 to Kluber’s 2.46! But by DRA, it’s Kluber who is up, 2.00 to 2.12!

[head explodes]

Taking this all in as much as I can with an exploded head, it seems to me that while he’s been on the mound, Kluber has probably been the incrementally better pitcher. So the answer to all of this depends in part on how you value the extra 18.1 innings that Sale has thrown and in part on what we don’t yet know, namely what happens in the next two starts that each pitcher has before the season ends. It feels bizarre to pin the outcome of this on two starts after about 30 have already elapsed for each pitcher, but that’s how close it is. It’s close enough that two starts matter, one way or the other.

Kluber’s next two will be in Seattle on Sunday and at home against the Chicago White Sox, though the Indians might hold him out in preparation for the playoffs. Sale’s next two scheduled starts are at home against the Blue Jays and Astros, though like Kluber, Sale may not take the hill at all for the second one. So maybe it isn’t two starts at all, but one more start.

For now, if forced to vote, I’d pick Sale because of the extra innings he’s thrown, the lower FIP, and, I’ll admit, because I think the 300 Ks is pretty darn cool. I had hoped to finish this piece off by making a definitive statement. I had hoped to show who was really the better pitcher. But it’s close. It’s extremely close! It’s so close that there really isn’t a correct answer. At least not right now, and with likely only one or two starts remaining for each pitcher, probably forever.

Photo by Patrick McDermott – USA TODAY Sports

We are in the prime time of predictions, as evidenced by our ongoing Offseason Oracle series here at BP Boston. For the most part, we can assume a lot of these predictions will be wrong. That’s just how it goes. On the Red Sox front, there is a predictably sizable amount of speculation over the team’s aggressiveness, both in the trade market and free agency.

Among the candidates for major awards, of course, are Mookie Betts and Rick Porcello. We know now that Porcello was able to walk away with his award, but what about Mookie? Let’s dive in on the diminutive outfielder.

We know that Mookie is one of three AL finalists for MVP, along with Jose Altuve and Mike Trout. Betts has already taken home a Silver Slugger to go with a Gold Glove and approximately 58 other miscellaneous awards I didn’t know to exist. As the best AL player to play in the postseason, Betts has a very solid chance to win the award. Bob Nightengale at USA Today wrote this feature advocating for Mookie to win, and Bleacher Report published a long profile on the young outfielder as well. The trouble with the MVP award in the American League, as has been the case for a number of years, is that Mike Trout plays like Mickey Mantle, and does so for a bad team.

Trout, objectively and statistically, was better at baseball in 2016 than was Betts. Baseball Prospectus’ WARP pegged Mookie as about a seven-win player this season, to Trout’s 8.7. The Angels outfielder posted a .355 TAv, outpacing Betts’ .296. Trout had a major-league-best wRC+ of 171, and trailed only David Ortiz with a .991 OPS.

All of this is not to say that Mookie Betts should not win; I sincerely hope he does, and I happen to hold the analytically sacrilegious belief that players on teams that suck shouldn’t win MVP. The last thing I want to do is re-litigate the impossibly annoying debate of what the word “valuable” really means.

In the context of Betts as an MVP candidate, Alex Speier of the Globe wrote a piece Tuesday about what an extension for Betts would look like, and the merits to signing one with years of team control still remaining on his contract. Speier hazards the guess, with the input of league executives at the GM meetings in Arizona, that a deal could be in the ballpark of $150 million over seven or eight years. One easy comparison is the deal Trout got in 2014, worth $144 million over six years. I firmly lie in the it’s-not-my-money camp regarding early extensions: I’d be heartbroken to see Betts (or, for that matter, Xander Bogaerts) in another uniform if a deal can’t be worked out before free agency.

While not entirely related to awards and contracts, reading about the terrific start to Mookie’s career reminded me of the hype and excitement that followed Betts into Spring Training in 2015. Remember that? Shane Victorino compared him to Andrew McCutchen, and Ortiz was even more effusive in his praise, saying “he’s better than McCutchen at that time in McCutchen’s career. Go and double-check that.”

As an optimist and a Sox fan, I was excited but remained skeptical. Coming into 2015, Cutch had been a top-three finisher for NL MVP in three consecutive years. We were really comparing Mookie to that guy? Already? It turned out they were correct.

In McCutchen’s first four seasons at the big-league level, he totaled 18.8 bWAR. In more than 200 fewer games and with almost 1000 fewer plate appearances than McCutchen’s four campaigns, Betts has amassed 17.6 bWAR in just two-and-a-half seasons.

In McCutchen’s MVP season of 2013, he slashed .317/.404/.508 while belting 21 homers, driving in 84 and swiping 27 bags. Mookie’s line this season was .318/.363/.534 with 31 home runs, 113 RBIs and 26 steals. Mookie’s bWAR in 2016 was 9.6, while McCutchen’s in 2013 was 8.1.

Mookie Betts, at age 23, was better in 2016 than Andrew McCutchen has ever been.

Hopefully this provides some perspective regardless of who wins MVP later this week. Mookie Betts is an incredible baseball player, and in all likelihood will continue to be for a long time.

Quick Hits

Porcello, stacked up against Corey Kluber and Justin Verlander, was a finalist for AL Cy Young, and we found out lat night that he did indeed earn the honor. Neil Greenberg of the Washington Post correctly predicted that Porcello will win the award, but argued that Verlander was most deserving. He argues that Verlander was more dominant, leading the league in both strikeouts and strikeouts per nine, than was Porcello, despite Porcello’s league-leading 22 wins. It almost seems too obvious to point out that – here, I’ll do it in all caps – PITCHING WINS ARE NOT AN EFFECTIVE STATISTIC. A case could be made that Porcello deserved to win the award anyway, thanks in large part to his majestic 5.91 strikeout-to-walk ratio. What also worked in his favor, largely unfairly, is the fact that Boston made the postseason while Detroit did not.

Stan Grossfeld in the Globe wrote about the personal development of Michael Kopech. After a rough stretch that included a 50-game ban for a forbidden stimulant and then broke a bone in his pitching hand in an altercation with a teammate in March of 2016. Upon returning, Kopech torched the competition at Lowell and High-A Salem, posting a 4-1 record and 2.08 ERA and was named the Carolina League Player of the Month in August. You can read me fawn over Kopech’s fastball, performance and magnificent hair here.

Rob Bradford of WEEI.com reports that the Red Sox haven’t made the signing of Edwin Encarnacion a top priority, and argues that they might want to rethink the strategy. However, because Encarnacion declined the $17.2 million qualifying offer from the Jays, any other team that signs the slugger would have to forfeit their first-round pick next year. For the Sox, that would mean the 26th overall selection.

Photo by Winslow Towson/USA Today Sports Images

How will the Red Sox replace David Ortiz’s production?:

“Wheel of Fortune” is a living dinosaur at this point, but it remains the source of one of my favorite analogies. For years, the contestants negotiating the final puzzle got to choose five consonants and one vowel before having to 30 seconds to guess the answer; for years, they chose R, S, T, L, N and E a huge percentage of the time. Eventually, those six letters were automatically gifted to each contestant, who instead got to choose three consonants and another vowel on top of those.

Answering this question feels a little like choosing the final four letters. Every one of us in this thought exercise tackled the Edwin Encarnacion angle pretty early in our columns because it’s the simplest answer to the question. It’s also probably wrong, but understandably tempting. Replacing Ortiz’s 2016 offensive production seems unlikely, but if Encarnacion — or anyone — can provide 85 percent of it while playing the field, that could go a long way toward filling up the box score like Papi did. It did not escape me that this question asked specifically about replacing “David Ortiz’s production” rather than “replacing David Ortiz,” as the latter is obviously impossible, but insofar as Ortiz was larger than life, it’s tempting to look to someone like Encarnacion to fill the bill. It’s probably the wrong way to look.

If you take Dave Dombrowski at his word, though, per a recent Alex Speier piece, the Sox might look instead to improve incrementally across the board while waiting for Yoan Moncada, Sam Travis and even, yes, Pablo Sandoval to emerge/return, rather than making a splash on the Encarnacion-ian level, but Dombo could also just be negotiating through the press at this point. However it shakes out, the Sox’s strong core plus Moncada is a wonderful starting point. There’s not as much work to do as we might think. As Matthew Kory wrote, Carlos Beltran might be the perfect piece to complement the roster as-is, without forcing the Sox to break the bank, and apparently they covet him.

I also think Ben Carsley’s idea of a Todd Frazier trade makes a huge amount of sense, but I’ll add another name to the list: Miguel Cabrera. Maybe Dombo isn’t set up to work well with his former employer, but if he is, and could get the apparently extremely available Miggy in a package that kept Moncada in Boston, it would be a certified coup. Cabrera’s getting on in years, but he’s still friggin’ incredible, and Dombo knows it as well as anyone.

How will the Red Sox bolster the bullpen?:

Carsley’s proposed White Sox trade would also net the Sox Nate Jones, and while that seems perfectly reasonable, so do a lot of bullpen ideas that would be easier to pull off. The straightest-line plays would be for the Sox to sign Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen or Mark Melancon; my money would be on the latter, because it would be so much less of the Red Sox’s money.

I don’t see Brad Ziegler returning, but with Carson Smith waiting in the wings, I think Dombo continues to go the supplementary rather than foundational route in shoring up the ‘pen. Matt Collins, who thinks more about Red Sox relievers before noon on New Year’s Day than the rest of us do all year, says Neftali Feliz could be in the mix, and that sounds right. Chris Teeter thinks Brett Cecil could be a target, and given the Sox’s disproportionate dependence on Robbie Ross Jr. last year, another lefty would be a good addition, no matter how good Smith’s reverse splits have been.

Will the Red Sox add to the rotation? If so, how?:

I doubt it. They have David Price, Steven Wright, Rick Porcello, Drew Pomeranz, Clay Buchholz and Eduardo Rodriguez set to return. They technically don’t need another starter, but if they don’t break the bank for Encarnacion (or, you know, whoever), I, like everyone else, could see the appeal of re-signing a, or the, Rich Hill, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Of course, then there’s Chris Sale, Dombo’s white whale. Circumstantially, a Sale/Moncada et al. trade has never been likelier. The White Sox need help, Sale has been a pain in their butts, Moncada is a sure thing, Dombo likes trading prospects for bona fide superstars, and it’s not the middle of a productive season. Furthermore, Sale’s value might not be lower anytime soon — he wasn’t one of the three finalists for the AL Cy Young Award, even if he’s probably the AL starter you’d most likely pick in a win-or-go-home game. It’s all right there in front of us, but it just seems too obvious. I’m much more of Carsley’s opinion that Frazier would net a better return from the South Side in the short- and long-terms.

Will the Red Sox trade more elite prospects? If so, for what/who?:  

Even independent of a potential Sale deal, I’d say: Probably. It’s Dombo’s calling card, and he’s been given a fat stack of prospects with which to work. If not a White Sox, how about Paul Goldschmidt? That was Chris Teeter’s take, and why not? Goldy is pretty dope, and the Sox have newly minted front-office connections in Phoenix to exploit. I guess my fear on that account is that it would seem a bit *on the nose* for them to turn around and deal one of the 10 best players in baseball to their former employers, even if it might, in theory, benefit the D-Backs in the long-run. The optics are probably just too bad to make it a possibility about which I’d worry too much.

I’m in on Jake Devereaux’s Joey Votto-ought-to-be-available theory, but I fear Votto isn’t really going anywhere. Dealing Votto might be the rational move for a franchise stuck in a rut, but if the franchise was all that rational in their decision-making they wouldn’t have gotten stuck in that rut in the first place. Votto hit approximately 1.200 in the second half, which is so good it’s impossible, and it makes it harder to trade him for a franchise short on star power. Plus, I’d rather have Goldie anyway. I just don’t see that happening. 

Something will, though, and if it’s not Frazier I think it’s more likely to be a different good player in a crappy situation rather than a superstar we’ve thought of. If a move is likely, I think it would be for Frazier or Cabrera (or even Verlander, just to increase my chances of getting one right), and I think the prospects in any such deal would be good enough to trigger answering “yes” to this question. Even if the chances of such a deal are only like 1 in 3, .333 is pretty good in baseball, as we well know.

Miscellaneous thoughts

So much of this exercise feels less like trying to figure out what will happen than it does trying to stake out our turf for the future. Between the lot of us, we’ve staked out a lot of it, but much like the robots in Westworld that [SPOILER] literally can’t see a door in front of the if they’re programmed not to see it, we may just not have the privileges to see what’s really going on.  And, like those robots, the more I see that expands of my field of vision, the more secret doors that actually open, the more I’ll be coming online.

Biggest Acquisition: Miguel Cabrera
Biggest Departure: Jackie Bradley Jr. (via trade)
Biggest Surprise: The Sox don’t even kick the tires on Edwin

Lineup

Photo by Brett Davis/USA Today Sports Images