In their book, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers, co-authors Rob Neyer of ESPN and the legendary Bill James developed a formula that predicts who will win the Cy Young Award. Rob Neyer tracks how current pitchers numbers stack up through the current season at the Cy Young Predictor site on ESPN.

I thought I’d use the Neyer/James formula to evaluate the how the Big Ten Hurlers are doing. Perhaps it will project the winner of the Big Ten’s Pitcher of the Year. Of course, having decided to use the Neyer/James approach (with modifications of my own), I needed a name for it – B10 Pitcher of the Year Prediction just didn’t have the right ring to it. So why not the “Jim Abbott Predictor”? Can anyone come up with a better player to represent Big Ten pitching excellence? In fact, maybe the award should be called the Jim Abbott Award?

Needless to say, Michigan’s Chris Fetter would appear to be far and away the best pitcher in the league according to the “Abbott” criteria. His 2-3 game lead in wins over the rest of the conference gives him a big leg up on the award.

And props to PSU’s own Drew O’Neil for getting on the list despite not having a win. I’m going to have to do some research and come up with a good measurement for relievers only.

I used the same formula that Neyer/James used with one exception. They include points for leading the team to a title and prorate them during the season. I have excluded those points, although I do recognize that being on a championship team will often lead to additional votes in balloting for honors like this.

Specifically, the formula that I used is:

Abbott Points = ((5*IP/9)-ER) + (SO/12) + (SV*2.5) + Shutouts + ((W*6)-(L*2))

Anyone for a “Dave Winfield Predictor”?

First list of interest is Wins:

Closely related to wins is winning percentage:

One of the most well known measures – ERA:

Not quite as well known but a key stat anyway is opponent’s batting average:

Strikeouts per nine innings:

Strikeout to walk ratio:

Walks plus hits per inning pitched, a key sabermetric measurement:

I’m going to spare embarrassing the team by listing the bottom ten in each of the six categories that I put up in my top ten list post. Suffice it to say that there are multiple PSU guys in every bottom list.

However, there is one in particular that I do want to show – the RBI list.

There were eight Penn State players that met the three plate appearance criteria. Fully HALF of them are in the bottom ten RBI list. This isn’t meant to point fingers just at those four players because it’s hard to get an RBI if your teammates aren’t going to get on base for you. It takes a team effort to be this bad at driving in runs.

First the old standby: Batting average

The second most popular hitting stat: Slugging percentage

Now the most universally recognized sabermetrics stat: OPS (On Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage)

And lastly, another highly regarded sabermetrics stat: Runs Created

In my book, OPS and Runs Created are the two most important measures to use in evaluating a player’s offensive performance. However, I do recognize the popularity of two other measures, home runs and RBI, so I’m including them here for sake of completeness.

Earlier this week, Brian at Big Ten Hardball, asked and answered the question “who are your top five candidates for Player of the Year?”. Using the data above as supporting evidence, I give you my picks:

• Nate Recknagel, Michigan
• Josh Phegley, Indiana
• Mike Kalina, Northwestern
• Jake Goebbert, Northwestern

and I’m going to cop out and not name a fifth. Brian doesn’t agree with me on Kalina, but considering how he’s flirting with a .500 batting average, I have to put him on my list.