BBA Announces Goose Gossage and Walter Johnson Award Winners for Starting and Relief Pitchers

Yesterday, the Baseball Bloggers Alliance announced this year's Goose Gossage and Walter Johnson awards recipients (you can see the official posts by clicking on the names above).  The Gossage and Johnson awards recognize the best relief pitcher and best starting pitcher, respectively, for the 2012 season from each league as voted upon by BBA members (baseball bloggers) across the country.

The official FBJ ballot can be seen here.

AL Goose Gossage Award Winner - Fernando Rodney

NL Goose Gossage Award Winner - Craig Kimbrel

No surprises here.  Rodney and Kimbrel were the runaway winners, earning more than 85% of the BBA votes.  Both pitchers were awesome this season and I suspect there will be more hardware to come for Rodney and Kimbrel (in the form of a Rolaids Relief Award).  

AL Walter Johnson Award Winner - Justin Verlander

NL Walter Johnson Award Winner - R.A. Dickey

Our picks for the Johnson Awards were David Price and R.A. Dickey.  Verlander, the reigning AL Cy Young and MVP award winner, was certainly worthy of the award - JV was the runner up on our ballot - but we went with Price based on a few reasons.  Price bested Verlander in wins, ERA and W/L% (2/3 of the pitcher's triple crown) while Verlander ended the season with more strikeouts, more innings pitched and a better adjusted ERA+.  Price's best month saw him go 3-0 with a 1.78 ERA (Verlander's best, he went 5-1 with a 1.93 ERA).  Price's second best month - 2-1 with a 2.12 ERA (Verlander, 2-1 with a 2.41 ERA).  Price's worst month he went 5-1 with a 3.29 ERA (Verlander, 1-0 with a 3.53 ERA).  His second worst month, 2-2 with a 2.75 ERA (JV, 3-2 with a 2.98 ERA).  So Price's two best months were better than Verlander's two best months and his two worst months were better than Verlander's two worst months.  Price also only had one month with more than one loss (May - when he went 2-2 with a 2.75 ERA) and an .800 win percentage speaks volumes about how tough he was to beat this season.  This is an advanced metrics (WAR, ERA+, FIP/xFIP, SIERA), versus traditional statistics (W, ERA, K) debate and in this case the advanced metrics may have slightly favored JV over Price but not enough to really determine who was better so we picked Price based on the fact he won 2/3 of the pitcher's triple crown categories.  You could argue for Verlander based on the fact that the Tigers made it to the World Series but I'd counter that by saying that the Tigers were a much better team than the Rays and that Verlander didn't exactly light it up on the big stage.