NL Cy Young, What Voters Should Look At!!!!

Tim Lincecum was recently announced as the back to back winner of the NL Cy Young Award. 

You would think that this would be the top headline, but instead, making the headlines is blogger Keith Law and his insistence that his ballot was correct and everyone else's was wrong.  His claims are through statistical analysis on its own, that there is no answer that is more correct than his. 

I am taking this as an opportunity to display how I think people should evaluate candidates for the award.  While many voters look at wins, innings, strikeouts, and whether or not a player's team is good or not, I think the most important category should actually be....

Losses. 

If you want to measure the "value a pitcher brings to their team", measure how many losses a team realizes that can be attributed directly to the performance of the starting pitcher because in most instances, was outpitched by their counterpart on any given day.

Sure you can argue that the team offense is terrible, the defense stinks, etc.., but when it comes down to it at the end of the day, a starting pitchers job is to pitch better than the other guy and keep their team in the game and in my opinion, losses are the best measure.

This measure will also increase the likelihood of having a Cy Young winner from a winning team, which is important for some people who claim this needs to be necessary.

Pitcher          Losses  Starts  % lost   Rank
Carpenter         4         28     14.28%    1
Wainwright       8         34     23.5%      3
Vazquez           10       32     31.25%    5
Lincecum          7         32     21.875%  2
Haren               10       33     30.30%    4

To pigggyback, the secondary stat that would support losses, in my opinion, would be strikeouts. This removes defense or ballpark from any equation. I don't want to look at just pure number of K's, but rather K's per 9 innings.

Pitcher          K's       Inning's     K/9      Rank
Carpenter     144        192.2      6.72       5
Wainwright   212        233.0      8.18       4
Vazquez       238        219.1      9.77       2
Lincecum     261        225.1      10.42      1
Haren          223        229.1       8.75       3

So, weighting losses twice as heavily as K's (so loss rank x 0.667 + K rank x 0.333 = weighted average rank with lowest being winner) and understanding that I am just some Joe Schmoe that does not have a background in extensive statistical analysis, I would've casted my ballot as follows:

1. Lincecum 1.987
2. Carpenter 2.332
3. Wainwright 3.333
4. Haren 3.667
5. Vazquez 4.001

Enjoy!
 
Cruddy

Click here for a comparison of the five pitchers analyzed above.  Thanks!