Woo-hoo, Indeed.

During the press conference yesterday, when Tim Lincecum was asked what he said when he learned of his newly acquired CYA, Lincecum said he dropped a few “Woo-hoos!” and that was that. You’ve got to enjoy this guy. At the presser he was dressed in a army-styled jacket with a beanie. He looked like a 24-year-old but he pitched well beyond his years this season.

I know that watching ESPN can be hazardous to your sanity, but I had it on in the background last night while I was putting together dinner — a clam chowder, perfect for these cold East Coast nights — and I noticed that PTI was on the tube. There was a time when I watched PTI or Around the Horn semi-interested because there was nothing else on TV around 5PM but those days are gone. I generally get home from work too late for the show now and I’ve got better things to do. But, back to the show in question, PTI was on and the topic landed on the NL CYA. Tony Kornheiser wasn’t on the show for whatever reason but his stand-in was Rick Reily, who’s an idiot in his own right. So, the topic of the CYA comes around and Michael Wilbon was utterly amazed that Lincecum was the ’08 CYA Winner. On his ballot (paraphrasing)  “Lincecum was the 5th best pitcher”. Lincecum v. Santana was debatable but the moment you try to tell me that Brad Lidge was more valuable than Tim Lincecum is the minute you should stop talking. Forever. I know that MSM shows like PTI are just loud, talking heads, but seriously, come on. I think they even made a dig at the BBWAA and how everyone tries to outdo each other with statistics in baseball. Pffft, nerds. Reily, unsurprisingly, agreed with Wilbon and rambled off something that I couldn’t remember because I had already tuned them out.

Sportswriters in general glorify ignorance. The dumber the statement, the better. I get it. You can’t sell your product if you don’t make waves or feign anger and shock every 2 minutes, but it makes ESPN unwatchable. I think right after the segment, or maybe even during, they had Peter Gammons on and he gave the Lincecum CYA a thumbs up. Gams referred to Lincecum as something of a Pedro Martinez and said he did deserve the award. Gams holdin’ it down. I’m hoping that after the appearance, Gams went back to shredding out white-hot brain melting guitar licks.

I thought it would be interesting to include a table of some of my favorite pitching statistics to see where Tim Lincecum ranked among them in the National League.

Out of the 7 listed statistics, Lincecum takes 1st place for 5 of them. I thought it was amazing that Lincecum’s K% was +4 points over the next nearest starting pitcher. CC Sabathia — who pitched 400 less PA’s than Lincecum in the NL — finished behind Tim with a K% of 24.81. Lincecum pitched more innings in the NL and struck out more hitters. Sabathia did finish first in tRA+ but again, he pitched less overall innings in the NL than Lincecum did, taking away some from his overall value.

You’ve got to feel a little for Sabathia, he pitched out of his mind in the NL but I can’t justify giving him an award for coming to a weaker league and pitching great for half a season. He had an amazing year, no doubt, but I think the BBWAA was right on ranking him 5th. I’m sure he’ll be handsomely rewarded for his work in the NL this year in the offseason.

WPA stands for Win Probability Added and it can be found on the excellent FanGraphs website. It’s an interesting stat as it attempts to compensate for situation, meaning that when a player excels in tight situations, he’ll be credited with doing so. Lincecum’s 4.59 wins added was tops in the NL among starters. Johan Santana was 2nd with a WPA of 4.08. A note for my WPA rankings, I only used starters because closers, who tend to pitch in high leveraged situations, can get a boost from their work role, and in turn, get boosted in the WPA scores. That’s why I’ve also included WPA/LI in my table, which is the WPA score with the leverage index removed. In this statistic, Tim was edged out by Santana who had a WPA/LI of 3.53, meaning that he was worth +3.5 wins over your average pitcher in the NL. Tim’s score of 3.49 is so close, that it’s almost a tie between them. If you remove the leverage score from WPA, Lidge scores a 1.62 in this statistic. Meaning that Lincecum was worth slightly more than twice the value of Brad Lidge.

Tim also edged out Santana in ERA+, his score of 164 squeaks past Santana’s 163. Tim’s FIP — Fielding Independent Pitching — was 2.59 and he was the only pitcher in the NL with a FIP of less than 3.00. Dan Haren was 2nd to Tim with a FIP of 3.01. It’s a glut of statistics to look at, but I think they do a good job of providing a framework for Lincecum’s ’08 season, which was by all accounts, a CYA worthy season.

The last thing I wanted to include in this post was a break down of K’s per game by Lincecum over the season. Check out this plot.

I’ve added a blue trend line to indicate his overall strikeout trend throughout the season. I’ve also excluded Tim’s first appearance of the year in Los Angeles out of the bullpen.

Tim added nearly 8 points to his K% between the 1st and 2nd half, indicated by the rise in the trend line. His BB% increased slightly, by .7 points, but nothing overly significant. Lincecum, without further strides in control, is probably an 8-10 BB% pitcher per season. What I found fascinating about this plot was that Lincecum improved in the 2nd half by K%. Even if it is in a smaller sample size, a K% of 33 is amazing.

My hope is that Lincecum’s success under his increased, to say the very least, workload will not be carte blanche for the Giants to keep pushing him to the limit. He’s an amazing pitcher and watching him start in ’08 was one of the major bright points on this Giants team. He deserves the CYA and I hope it’s the first of many. For all the rotational depth that the Giants think they might have, if you subtract Lincecum from the rotation, the team will be set back not in months, but years.