In writing for this website over the past year it has come to my attention that I have held on to a LOT of grudges in my 4 decades of Philly sports love. Just yesterday I rekindled a long dormant hatred for Sam Bradford. Then, about an hour after I published that article about Bradford, it came out that Clayton Kershaw was retiring and my rage for the 2011 Cy Young vote came boiling back to the surface. Kershaw not only beat Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee, but the vote wasn’t even close. 27 first place votes for Kershaw, 4 votes for Halladay and 1 vote for…Ian Kennedy? I’m not letting this go.
Stats
Let’s just get the raw stats out of the way upfront. It should be noted that Kershaw started one more game than Halladay and Lee.
| bWAR | Wins | Innings | ERA | CG | SHO | Ks | BBs | WHIP | FIP | xFIP | ERA+ | |
| Clayton Kershaw | 6.8 | 21 | 233.1 | 2.28 | 5 | 2 | 248 | 54 | .977 | 2.47 | 2.84 | 161 |
| Roy Halladay | 8.8 | 19 | 233.2 | 2.35 | 8 | 1 | 220 | 35 | 1.040 | 2.20 | 2.71 | 163 |
| Cliff Lee | 8.5 | 17 | 232.2 | 2.40 | 6 | 6 | 238 | 42 | 1.027 | 2.60 | 2.68 | 160 |
It is pretty crazy to see just how close all 3 were over the course of the season. There are still some outlier statistics though: Cliff Lee’s 6 shutouts,1 Halladay’s 2.20 FIP, Kershaw’s .977 WHIP despite 54 walks,2 and the significant WAR gap.
You may be wondering why I included FIP and xFIP. FIP filters out bad fielding and xFIP normalizes homeruns regardless of stadium. They are more “true pitching” statistics while the other stats take into account that baseball is very obviously a team game with subjective outcomes. For those who wanted to rely on just the stats for Kershaw, the real team independent stats favor the Phillies duo.
Does the Team Matter?
So many people bash WAR as a statistic because it sometimes tells a story that is very different from the one they watched. One thing it does though is take into account high leverage situations and the pitcher’s ability to navigate them. This is my caveat before bringing up that there are 3 ways to look at how team performance should be factored into the Cy Young voting process:
- Stats Only: You DO have to be lonely with statsonly dot com. This is the POV that you are what the back of your baseball card says you are. It doesn’t matter how your team performed, just how YOU performed.
- Playoff Team Means More: Why should a player get rewarded if nothing they did really mattered that year? Constantly pitching in a low-pressure environment without the weight of your teammates and your city on your shoulders everyday as you fight for a playoff spot is without a doubt easier. Think Paul Skenes pitching for the Pirates compared to Cristopher Sanchez pitching for the Phillies this year.
- Bad Roster Means Better Performance: Well, if a team is in a playoff race, it probably means that the entire roster is pretty good, right? Shouldn’t a pitcher get rewarded for sterling results despite a comparatively worse supporting staff? There is a higher level of difficulty. Think Steve Carlton’s 27 wins in 1972 compared to the Phillies’ 59 total. Yikes.
In 2011, the Phillies were very good and the Dodgers were average. The Phillies ran away with the league at 102-60 while the Dodgers finished 7.5 games back of the wild card and 11.5 games out of the division. Should this give the edge to Lee and Halladay? This completely biased Kershaw-hater says YES.
If you just look at the statistics though, you get a strange outcome. Kershaw had the better ERA, more Ks, and gave up less hits but he also had the roomier home field and walked a ton of guys. He had some better stats, but the metrics show that Lee and Halladay both “pitched” better under brighter lights. Halladay and Lee CRUSHED Kershaw in WAR. They were both over 25% better than him in terms of overall value to their team. All things being equal, which they were, Kershaw simply was not as important to his team’s success as the other two were to the Phillies.
Narrative
Kershaw had several things going for him outside of the box score in 2011. First, he was only 23 for the entirety of the season while Halladay and Lee were both 33. That 10-year age gap and youthful looking pitching made the two Phillies seem ancient in comparison. Despite similar results, Kershaw seemed like the better pitcher since he threw harder and just looked better doing it. Halladay was uber-serious on the mound while Lee looked like he couldn’t care less. Kershaw smiled and pumped his fist like any 23-year-old would. He aces the optics test hands down.
Part of being younger was that Kershaw wasn’t Kershaw yet. As he retires, we see him as the 3-time Cy Young winner and MVP that his resume now shows, but at the time he had only been a top prospect. He was full of promise but without the hardware. At the same time, Lee had his Cy Young and playoff moments at this point while Halladay had 2 awards, a perfect game, and a playoff no-hitter. They had done it all already. Hell, Halladay was literally the reigning Cy Young winner. Isn’t it more fun to give it to the kid for his first one? NO! Are you crazy?
Finally, there is the two-fold problem of vote splitting. How are you going to determine who is the best pitcher in the league when you don’t even know who is the best pitcher on the Phillies? In theory, voters who would go for the ace of the best team (like they did in the AL) and may have voted for one had it not been for the other meant that each only received about half the votes that they could have. I can understand that. Only, that’s not what happened. Instead, it looks like voters were unable to determine who of the Phillies to vote for, so they just cast their vote for Kershaw.
The Vote
I’m not homer enough to think Halladay and Lee both kicked Kershaw’s ass that year. They were all damn near the same and you could make a case for any of the 3. There are two things that still bother me though. First, Kershaw won in a landslide. With 32 voters, something like 12-10-10 makes sense, not 27-4-0. Looking down the line, Lee only finished 14 total points away from Ian Kennedy in 4th despite crushing him in every category except wins. Everyone was just so damn happy to give it to the kid instead of the two Phillies who also deserved it.
Second, if any voters gave their reasoning, they were talking out their ass. How can I just declare this? Because Justin Verlander won the AL Cy Young in the opposite way of Kershaw. Verlander won the MVP that year too because the Tigers finished with 95 wins, 15 ahead of 2nd place. He led the league in WAR, strikeouts, and wins, but statistically wasn’t very far from 2nd place Jared Weaver. Weaver’s Angels were about as good as Kershaw’s Dodgers. Verlander absolutely deserved it for leading his team the way he did, but how come the Phillies duo wasn’t given the same treatment? Superior WAR, superior team, blown out in voting? The same voters who gave Verlander his flowers refused to give them to Lee or Halladay for the same reasons.
In the End
If Halladay had won the Cy Young award that year, no one would have complained. There would not have been an outcry had the best pitcher of his generation won his 3rd award. Even Dodgers fans would have understood that the WAR gap and team record made the vote make sense. As for Lee, for some reason he was always seen as the #2 to Roy. As Phillies, they were the same for me. That year, he even had the ridiculous month of June where he was the best pitcher the world had ever seen.3 Him winning over Halladay would have felt weird but still justified by the numbers and that absurd month.
The extra sad and frustrating part of the vote was that this was it for Roy Halladay. A back injury during the final excruciating game against the Cardinals set him up to end his career on a low note. Lee still had 2 more solid years, and Kershaw had his whole career ahead of him, but Halladay was never the same. This one should have been his.
- It was almost 7. Lee was up 1-0 in a September game against the Marlins with 2 outs in the 9th but gave up a game tying HR to Jose Lopez. He went 9 but the Phillies won in 10. ↩︎
- Cole Hamels finished 5th in voting that year and finished 2nd in WHIP with a .986 ↩︎
- 5 starts, 42 innings, 1 ER (34.2 straight scoreless innings) ↩︎
Philly Front Office 
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