Catching up with...

- Melo never "felt slighted" by George Karl as we suggested he might and the Nuggets didn't fire their coach as we predicted. Our logic was borne out to be reasonable, however. ESPN's E-Ticket, which rarely dissapoints, most recently featured Chauncey Billups, or rather the journey of Chauncey Billups. Within Chauncey's story and specifically his impact on the Nuggets, are telling details of where Denver's season might've ended up without him. Karl, for one, openly acknowldges his fragile position,

"I just don't think I would've survived. I would've quit or they would've fired me... There was a posse of people in Denver that were tired of George Karl."

Before Chauncey, the Nuggets' play was erratic, "dysfunctional" Billups says. Billups came in to Denver and took the reins. J.R. Smith and Melo both praise him as a mentor, and the team's brass echos the same: "The Nuggets are grateful to have him, and team camaraderie skies through the roof."

- Michael Phelps' superficial PR-driven suspension ended last week. His response? "I had no idea."

- Last month the NYT profiled Roy Halladay, our pick for last year's AL Cy Young. it was good to see him get some much deserved attention - in the words of Raul Ibanez, "If he was in New York or Boston, fans would know more about him." The Times focused mostly on the same things as us - Roy Halladay, the throwback workhorse. This was their best:

"The movement on Halladay’s pitches can be seen in numbers compiled by the Inside Edge scouting service. Batters swung and missed at only 15 percent of his strikes, about the major league average. But they made solid contact only 7 percent of the time, one of the better rates in the league — the pitches looked good, but they flitted from the bat barrel at the last second."

- And on a sad note, Nick Adenhart, one of the Angels from the failed Cabrera trade that we followed all season, passed away. After just barely missing out on a spot in the roatation and struggling through a season in the minors last year, Adenhart won himself a starting spot this spring. He started the third game of the season and left after six innings and a 3-0 lead. He died that night at the hands of a drunken driver.

-Agent Easy

No One Goes Nine Anymore: The Case for Roy Halladay

Cliff Lee, the comeback kid, has been getting press all year long and his Cy Young has long been a foregone conclusion, but now that the season is actually coming to a close he is no longer alone in the Cy Young conversation. We give you, Roy Halladay.

Their numbers, with their respective league ranks in parentheses (a big asterisk)*:

Cliff Lee
22 Wins (1), 2.54 ERA (1), 1.11 WHIP (3), 170 Ks (9), 223.1IP (2), 4 CGs (2)

Roy Halladay
20 Wins (2), 2.78 ERA (2), 1.05 WHIP (1), 206 Ks (3), 246 IP (1), 9 CGs (1)

If we go a step further, and use Bill James' favorite pitching tool, Halladay's SO-BB ratio is 5.29 to Lee's 5.00. Going more Jamesian still, Lee has the higher ERA+, sitting at a league-leading 174. The discrepancy is Halladay's pitcher's park and Lee's hitter's park. A 174 ERA+ would be the highest in the AL in five years, but let's not unfairly penalize Halladay while praising Lee, because his splits bear out that he was unaffected by his supposed home field advantage.

The talk in the NL CY Young race has been about the bullpens, specifically how many wins they've cost Santana and Lincecum. The flip side of that argument, that everyone so conveniently ignores in this age of pitch counts, is that if Santana or Lincecum had the fortitude to regularly go 9 innings, there wouldn't be any whining about bullpens.

This is what the AL Cy Young comes down to. Lee's and Halladay's stat lines are quite similar. Either would be a defensible winner, but the tie breaker should be, has to be, those nine Complete Games staring back at you.

Appropriately, last night, Halladay finished his season with yet another complete game, and it is significant that he now has more than twice that of his nearest competitor, that he is the only pitcher in the league that regularly gives his bullpen a rest, that he gives his entire team a boost of confidence. And no, we do not mean the confidence of "the stopper," no, it's more than that; it's the kind of confidence that the Mets' players, for example, do not get to experience when Santana takes the mound, because they know that once his pitch count starts to approach triple digits he'll be out of the game shortly and thus their bullpen-driven anxiety can never quite subside. And yes, that's why Halladay is carrying that ugly looking "11" in the loss column, because, if you want to get into the numbers of it, he leads the league with 5 "tough losses," defined as losses in Quality Starts.

This is no knock on Lee, because 4 CGs is nothing to sneeze at; it would've lead the NL last year. This is in praise of Roy, of Doc Halladay.

Lee has his own tiebreaker working for him, and that's his story, and since it's writers doing the voting, perhaps that will be the tiebreaker they choose to consider. Or maybe convention will dictate that it's preferable for the Cy Young to have a sexy win-loss record and they'll never even get to the point of considering Doc, but the case can be made, and perhaps they should.



*Yes, Lee could make one more start on Sunday, but for now it's uncertain.

-Agent Easy