In the Spirit of Cy Young
Well, technically the Cy Young award is supposed to go to the best pitcher in the league but since it's named after the one and only (and last) 500-game winner, Cy Young, then perhaps it is about which pitcher emulates the late, great Mr. Young.
So I looked up Young's career stats on B-R and found the ballpark range of what to weight more importantly. For instance, wins really matter and so do innings pitched, but strikeouts are worth about the same--Young struck out 200 only twice, and while he led the league twice he had about 150 each time (he pitched about 50 games, too, so it wasn't lack of oppurtunity). And so comparing everything, I weighted some of the statistics and put in my points system to check if I was wrong about the NL.
The verdict: biggest discrepancy was 11 points between Haren and Wainwright...and I'm not sure why. Wainwright had the innings and the CGs, he had the most wins. But Haren, who won the least games was 11 points higher? He did have an awfully good WHIP, but still...
I still haven't measured the discrepancy between the nominees in each category, because if I went back to 2007 Jake Peavy, who was loads better than everyone in both ERA and K, might not have won. So it isn't perfect. I'd give Wainwright a couple of extra points for getting 2 more wins than Carpenter.
But be that as it may, it would still not make him go into third place.
Carpenter was 3.5 points ahead of Lincecum, possibly because their statistics were similar in most things. Not W or K, but ERA and HBP, for example. THere are only 2 places where one gets 5 points and the other gets 1--and they're reversed and weighted the same.
But in emulation of Cy Young, Haren was 2 points behind Lincecum. Both are strikeout pitchers with similar WHIPs, but that's where it ends--Haren's SO/BB rate (not counted, though SO and BB are categories of their own) was a lot better than Lincecum's.
So, because curiosity killed the cat (or investigative computer nerd, your choice) I had to find out who the true winner of last year's Cy Young was. I couldn't really count Lidge because he was a reliever, and of course one has to take Sabathia's placement in the raw-numbers (ER, BB, etc) with a bit of salt, but I added up the vote-getters last year and it turned into pretty much the same situation: the first three were largely ahead of the other two.
Based on raw score alone, CC Sabathia (Mr. all-or-nothing got 1 or 5 points on everything) won, beating out Johan Santana by 5. Santana placed 3 points ahead of Lincecum, who was 13 points ahead of Brandon Webb. Webb was 6 points ahead of Ryan Dempster, who bottomed out the list. In the emulation-weighted test, Santana had 113 points and was ahead of Sabathia by 5. Sabathia beat out Lincecum by 10.5, and he beat out Webb by 5.5. Dempster fell far behind and only collected 56 points total.
Trying out weighted on the AL, Justin Verlander sweeps away with the victory, 10 points ahead of everyone else. His 108.5 points were hardly the most raw, but he got first or second in key categories such as wins. Greinke places second at 98.5, Halladay is 2 points behind. 4.5 points behind them is Hernadez, and Sabathia is also a bottom feeder, but his 74.0 points are certainly more respectable than Dempster's 56.
The verdict? If you successfully emulate Cy Young better than anyone in your league, your chances of winning don't neccessarily go up.
