Cy Young opinions.

I caught a snippet from Sportscenter today and some commenter was discussing the Tim Lincecum NL Cy Young. He was asked if being on the same team hurt Carpenter and Wainwright's chances and his response seemed to be "it doesn't make a difference to me" but he said that some people might have a problem with it. Here's the problem: he said some people may consider it and said "Well it's the argument that Carpenter didn't lead his own team in wins and Wainwright didn't lead his own team in ERA."

I think the argument against someone that they didn't lead their own team in something is dumb but it is amazing that he picked the two common pitcher stats that I care the least about.

100%

The season is now over and we can look back at the years various players had and evaluate how well they did. Remember this post? Well now we get to see how accurate it is to predict things less than one-fifth of the way through the season.

C - Yadier Molina
.293/.366/.383, .273 EqA, 6.3 WAR

1B - Albert Pujols
.327/.443/.658, .362 EqA, 12.2 WAR

2B - Felipe Lopez*
.320/.407/.448, .304 EqA, 2.4 WAR

*MIL numbers; Brandon Phillips had a higher WAR (3.0) but Lopez did this in only 66 G in Milwaukee, adding in his ARI stats would lower his rate stats but increase his WAR total

SS- Miguel Tejada
.313/.340/.455, .279 EqA, 5.3 WAR

3B - Andy LaRoche
.258/.330/.401, .260 EqA, 2.7 WAR

OF - Andrew McCutchen
.286/.365/.471, .297 EqA, 5.5 WAR

OF - Ryan Braun
.320/.386/.551, .323 EqA, 6.9 WAR

OF - Mike Cameron
.250/.342/.452, .281 EqA, 5.0 WAR

P - Chris Carpenter
192.2 IP, 1.01 WHIP, 0.33 HR/9, 6.73 K/9

Notes: 3B was a tough one. LaRoche won it out on strong defense and a full season. Ramirez had much better offensive rates but played a half a season due to injury and below average defense.

In the outfield Michael Bourn was close with a higher WAR than Cameron but they both play great defense and Cameron has way more power.

Overall among the ten positions four stayed the same (or 40%). More than the 19.1% of the season played the previous go around but it shows that one-fifth of a season is not a reliable indicator of the season as a whole.

No 20-game Winners? YES!

It isn't simple schadenfreude that makes me so happy that both Adam Wainwright and C.C. Sabathia failed to collect their 20th wins last night. What really has me excited is the effect that C.C.'s loss and Wainwright's no decision could have on the Cy Young races; with no 20-game winner this year, voters will (hopefully) be more likely to delve beyond the wins column in selecting their candidates.

Now I don't mean to suggest that Sabathia and Wainwright don't deserve CYA votes. They absolutely do. But they shouldn't be getting many, if any, first place votes.

Let's start with Sabathia and the AL. The baseball worlds (all of them, from the traditional media outlets to the amateur blogroll) were abuzz with talk of Zach Greinke's amazing start. Then the wins started drying up, and fewer voices were raised in support of Zach. This isn't to say that Greinke supporters abandoned the cause, but a lot of the early hubbub was gone (particularly in traditional media) because the wins column wasn't 8-0 anymore. Why not? Because Greinke pitches for the Kansas City Royals.

Sabathia, on the other hand, led the American League in wins thanks in part to a Yankees offense that scored a shade under 6 runs per Sabathia start (versus 3.7 for Greinke in KC). Craig Brown over at the Hardball Times has created an excellent breakdown of the top Cy Young candidates in the AL. Although Brown leaves the question of who to choose somewhat open-ended (he is, however, a Greinke supporter, as am I), Sabathia's case really takes a hit when subjected to Brown's analysis. The only major statistical category in which Sabathia leads the pack is wins. Greinke, meanwhile, destroys the field in ERA, ERA+, PRC, and WAR, is tied for the lead in SHO, pitched in eight games in which his team gave him no more than 1 run of support, and had four wins blown by his bullpen.

Sabathia had a great year. Greinke, and arguably Halladay, Verlander, and King Felix, had a better one.

Meanwhile, on the NL side, Wainwright's 19 wins are the result of a fantastic year (and a potent offense), to be sure. But Adam Wainwright, as good as he was in '09, was not even the best starting pitcher on his own team.

Let's look at two seasons:

Season 1: 1.007 WHIP, 2.24 ERA, 186 ERA+, 192.2 IP, 144/38 K/BB, 7 HR, 3 CG, 1 SHO, 5.7 WAR

Season 2: 1.210 WHIP, 2.63 ERA, 159 ERA+, 233.0 IP, 212/66 K/BB, 17 HR, 1 CG, 0 SHO, 5.8 WAR

Season 1 is tops in WHIP, ERA, ERA+, K/BB ratio, BB, HR allowed, HR/9, BB/9, H/9, CG, and SHO. Season 2 leads in IP, K, and K/9, and has a slight edge in WAR.

Season 1 belongs to Chris Carpenter. Season 2 is Adam Wainwright's.

There are certainly arguments to be made for Wainwright over Carpenter: Wainwright ate up more innings, which kept spot starters and lesser bullpen arms off the mound. And 212 punch outs is pretty sexy. But Carpenter leads the Cardinals rotation in so many other important statistical categories while, importantly, not yielding much in the way of WAR to his teammate, that Wainwright is far from a slam dunk (and more likely a doink! in my book).

And the argument gets more complicated:

Carpenter: 1.007 WHIP, 2.24 ERA, 186 ERA+, 192.2 IP, 144/38 K/BB, 7 HR, 3 CG, 1 SHO, 5.7 WAR

Wainwright: 1.210 WHIP, 2.63 ERA, 159 ERA+, 233.0 IP, 212/66 K/BB, 17 HR, 1 CG, 0 SHO, 5.8 WAR

Lincecum: 1.047 WHIP, 2.48 ERA, 173 ERA+, 225.1 IP, 261/68 K/BB, 10 HR, 4 CG, 2 SHO, 8.3 WAR

Tim Lincecum put up another monster year in 2009 (even better than his 2008 campaign, in fact), further complicating things for voters. The leaderboard now?

Carpenter: WHIP, ERA, ERA+, BB, BB/9, HR, HR/9
Lincecum: K, K/9, K/BB, CG, SHO, WAR
Wainwright: IP

Wainwright's case gets even shakier, as both Carpenter and Lincecum have had ridiculous years. Wainwright, like Sabathia, was excellent in '09. But like Sabathia, he wasn't tops in his league. And thanks to last night, the door has been opened for deserving candidates to avoid the 20-win elephant in the voting booth when the Cy Young winners are determined later this month.

Comparing Cardinals Aces

About a month ago, I compared Cubs aces from the last half century using pitcher WAR after a graphical tribute to Greg Maddux and Fergie Jenkins yielded some interesting results. At the time, I ran the numbers for the entire NL Central with the intention of turning the results into the NL Central Stage post whence spawned all lesser NL Central Stage posts. But compiling everything into one uberpost proved daunting at best, and so I went small and stuck to my Cubbies.

Nevertheless, I had all this data on my harddrive, so I thought, "Why not revisit my original data and break it all into manageable chunks in order to circumvent my own laziness?"

Having successfully outsmarted myself, I can now present to you round two of my team-by-team ace analysis: the St. Louis Cardinals.

When it comes to Cardinals pitchers of the past half century, there's Bob Gibson and then there's everyone else. But for the sake of argument, I wanted to plot Gibson against some other Cards aces. The trouble was, there really haven't been many between Bob Gibson's time and now. I settled on Matt Morris and Chris Carpenter, two recent pitchers who put together (in Morris's case) a string of good years or (in Carpenter's) a couple dominating years on the hill for the Redbirds. To put things in perspective, I added Bob Forsch, a solid but hardly dominant hurler from the 70's and 80's (pretty much immediately post-Gibson), to the mix, then graphed all four pitchers' career WARs with St. Louis. The results were illuminating, to say the least:

The next graph is of the same dataset, but organized in descending order:

Clearly, my "Bob Gibson and everyone else" instinct was spot on, at least with pitcher WAR as my graphical guiding star. But I honestly didn't expect Gibson to so completely dominate the other pitchers on this list. Obviously, Gibson's peak years were absolutely absurd. (1968: 304.2 IP, 1.12 ERA, 258 ERA+, 0.853 WHIP, 268/62 K/BB? That's inhuman, even in the Year of the Pitcher.) But I really expected Carpenter's 2005 Cy Young season to hold up to the competition better than it did. By WAR, Carpenter's best season would only have been Gibson's ninth best (and almost a win and a half back from the eight spot!).

But what really shocked me was how much perspective Forsch really added to the Cardinals ace conversation. Forsch, a consistently average to above-average starter, was probably the second most valuable Cardinals pitcher of the last half century (career-wise, that is) despite having only one truly excellent year.

Carpenter has a shot at bridging the gap if he can stay healthy. In six starts this year, he's pitched like a demigod. His line so far? 38.0 IP, 0.71 ERA, 598 ERA+, 0.632 WHIP, and 31/5 K/BB. But Carpenter hasn't pitched a full season since 2006, and though he's only 34 and locked up by the Cards until 2011, there's a huge difference between a 34-year-old pitcher and a 34-year-old pitcher with a history of serious injury. And even if Carpenter can outpace the forgetable (but, and I can't emphasize this enough, valuable) Forsch, there's no catching Gibson.

Interestingly, the Cards have had their fair share of dominant relievers over the decades. Bruce Sutter, Lee Smith, Todd Worrell, and Jason Isringhausen all spent time as kings of the Cardinal bullpen. But when it comes to starters...

(wait for it)

...there was Bob Gibson. And then there was everyone else.