Posted by Craig Brown on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 7:15 pm

For the second consecutive Cy Young award, the electorate seemingly ignored the Win stat and threw their support behind Tim Lincecum, who won all of 15 games for the San Francisco Giants.

The knee jerk reaction will be that the BBWAA got this one correct.  I’m not so sure.

It was a tight vote between Lincecum and Cardinal teammates Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright, and the internets exploded in joy when it was announced the diminutive Giant took home his second consecutive trophy.  I suspect (and hope) that was before people were able to check out how the writers voted.  The breakdown was interesting:

Lincecum wins although he didn’t have the most first place votes and the closeness of the voting suggests there were only three pitchers in the National League worthy of consideration.  It’s worth noting that Lincecum and Wainwright were the only two who were named on all 32 ballots.  The “rogue” Vazquez and Haren votes came at the expense of Carpenter.

With all this in mind, let’s look at some of the key stats of the five who earned votes.  Keep in mind that Haren and Vazquez – because of their low totals – clearly don’t deserve serious consideration.  Presented in alphabetical order, I bolded the statistical leaders of the five:

Looking at the above table, I feel it’s clear Lincecum was the best pitcher in the league while Wainwright was the fourth or fifth best of this group.  Yet, he gained a plurality of the first place votes – likely because of his win total.  This is progress?  I don’t think so.

Looking at the statistics presented in the table, it seems to me that Haren and Vazquez deserved much greater consideration than they received.  I’m not saying they should have won, however I think a case could be made that they were among the top three National League pitchers in 2009.

(For the record, if I had a ballot, it would have gone like this:

1 – Lincecum
2 – Vazquez
3 – Carpenter

Their WHIPs are so awesomely close, but I’m a sucker for strikeouts… And WAR.  Carpenter’s time away doesn’t really count against him in my opinion – he threw over 190 innings.  If Haren had been able to get his FIP under 3.00, I would have been inclined to place him third.)

So despite the win for Lincecum, don’t be fooled into believing things have changed.  As Rob Neyer points out, remove the ballot of Keith Law (who voted for Vazquez) and Will Carroll (who cast for Haren) and the award would have gone to Carpenter.  There are still plenty of people out there who put a huge stock into wins for a pitcher, but the new boys – with their unique take – were able to nudge the vote in the right direction.

The BBWAA caught a break.