I watched Bailey all year, and fwiw, I agree with Keith Law’s assessment that this is probably Bailey’s career year. Very quirky delivery, lot of shoulder stress, these are not good things.

On the other hand, his approach is one that a lot of pitchers, young and old, would do well to emulate:

- Work fast (or in his case, very fast)
- throw strikes
- retain composure

The guy was really no nonsense.

Now I’ll add something to make the metric oriented readers go insane. A part of Bailey’s success was due to the positive impact that Kurt Suzuki has on the team’s young pitchers, including Bailey.

Watching nearly all the A’s games you see the obvious affection and respect the pitchers have for Suzuki. When he talks they listen. And a big part of Bailey’s success came from pitching what Suzuki calls. No shake-offs fuels pitching pace. And that relentless pace of Bailey’s plus first strike percentage had a lot to do with his success, to say nothing of Suzuki’s ability to block pitches.

We’ll see how Bailey’s fares career wise. I think 2008 Joey Devine was better than 2009 Andrew Bailey. Devine will be returning from surgery this Spring. There could be an interesting battle for A’s closer in Arizona.

since the ROY is based off of results, i’d take Happ over coghlan and hanson and mccutchen.