Sabermetric analysis Magnum Start Value looks at the 2008 season for John Danks, Gavin Floyd on the South Side.
As many of you know, the White Sox and their fans have endured what is soon to be a nine-year playoff drought. To paint a better picture of the franchises struggles you would have to go back to 2008 in order to see their last appearance in October, which embarrassingly enough is in the last decade. Only four other teams can make such a dubious claim, and none of them reside in as large of a market as Chicago (Miami, San Diego, Seattle, and Colorado).
Since I brought up the postseason dry spell, you might be wondering why. There is a simple reason for it, and for those who do not remember the seasons John Danks and Gavin Floyd had in 2008 they were remarkable. Now, since those two starters helped pitch the Sox to a division title, I thought it would make sense to look at their seasons through the lens of Magnum Start Value (MSV).
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Before I delve any further into potential data, there is something that needs to be added from an analytical standpoint. For those who read the Cy Young article, you might recall a new statistic titled Yearly Magnum Percentage (YMP). The purpose of YMP is to evaluate the overall percentage of a pitchers’ Magnum Starts throughout the course of his season without calculating his MSV score. Seem simple?
Here is where it is going to become a bit more complex. Another point I made in the previous article was that YMP would be broken down into multiple categories sometime down the road. Now since MSV’s formula is broken down into three outcomes, they will serve as the focal point of each classification.