Friday, June 15, 2012

R.A. Dickey - Triple Crown Contender

Yesterday one of my readers pointed out that R.A. Dickey was potentially on pace to win the pitching Triple Crown. Obviously it is early to be talking about something like this but I thought it was worth exploring. Let's see where Dickey stands in the Triple Crown categories right now:

Player
Wins
Dickey
10
Lynn
10
Hamels
9
multiple pitchers
8

Dickey is tied for the NL lead in Wins right now with the Cardinals Lance Lynn, a very unlikely contender to continue on that pace but then again, so is Dickey. Nipping right on his heels is Cole Hamels followed by a 5 way tie for fourth featuring some of the best pitchers in the league including Gio Gonzalez, Stephen Strasburg and perfect game tossing Matt Cain. This is a tough category to predict as Wins are so influenced by non-pitching factors but if Dickey keeps up the level he has been at, the Wins should come.

Player
K
Strasburg
100
Cain
96
Hamels
92
Dickey
90
Gonzalez
89

Who ever thought we would be saying R.A. Dickey and strike out leader in the same sentence? Well we just might be. This is the category where the Dickster is farthest off but still very much in contention. He is behind only 10 K's and the way he has been pitching we can expect him to close the gap pretty quickly. For some context on the greatness of this feat: in 2010 Dickey had only 104 K's total, he is on pace to break that in his next two starts.

Player
ERA
Beachy
1.98
Cain
2.18
Dickey
2.20
Vogelsong
2.26
Dempster
2.31

This is one category I am very confident in. Ever since starting with the Mets Dickey has posted continually low ERA's and this season is no different. Brandon Beachy is running away with the category right now but his career numbers and projections do not suggest a player who is going to continue to have a sub 2 ERA or even a sub 2.5.

Finally let's take a look at one more indicator. Last year we had two pitching Triple Crown winners: Clayton Kershaw and Justin Verlander. Lets examine what their stats were on this date in 2011 in comparison to Dickey right now:

Player
Wins
K
ERA
Verlander
8
105
2.94
Kershaw
6
106
3.66
Dickey
10
90
2.20

At this time last year the two Triple Crown winners were behind Dickey in two categories. He has a slight lead in wins and fairly significant lead in ERA. Again he trails in strikeouts but remains within striking distance. These numbers pretty reliably show that R.A. Dickey is a contender for the NL Triple Crown. His biggest hurdle will be strike outs but recent games show he may have developed the K touch that will bring the crown home to Flushing.

1 comment:

  1. As of 6/18 9:30 PM, RA dickey has the lead in all 3 categories.

    His "triple crown reign" going foward will depend on Cain getting 7K's or less tonite or else he will lose the Strikeout crown.

    ReplyDelete