Yesterday's NL Cy Young result was bound to anger somebody in the greater St. Louis area. When I saw Lincecum won I knew the traditionalist baseball fans everywhere would throw a fit because a 15 win pitcher was able to win the award. To make matters worse the anti-sabermetric pitchforks were grabbed when it was learned that two writers -Keith Law of ESPN and Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus- left Chris Carpenter off their ballots completely.

The reaction has been pretty much what one could expect. Somehow people feel Carpenter lost the award because of these two non-votes. He wouldn't have. His 94 points would have become 96 with two third place votes. Wainwright's third place vote from law would have become a second place vote putting his total at 92 points. Neither of those is greater than 100 points which Lincecum would have had either way since both writers had him in first. So why are we freaking out about this again?

See it isn't the lack of vote that has all these people up in arms, it's the sabermetric rational. Between the Lincecum win and Grienke's blowout it looks like sabermetric thinking is becoming more and more accepted by writers who previously would have taken the easy road and voted for the pitcher with the highest win total. Scary numbers like FIP and WAR are becoming more accepted while the traditional wins and ERA aren't the end of the debate. This means scary times are ahead for those who choose to ignore advanced metrics.

Now not that either writer needs me to explain why they voted the way they did, but just for the heck of it lets look at how the advanced metrics and traditional stats rated each of the five pitchers who received votes.

I can tell you 1,000 reasons why pitchers wins don't matter, but I will start by conceding this. Had Wainwright won his 20th game there is no doubt in my mind he wins the Cy Young. That is the magic number that has teased people for a very long time. It's the number that keeps Carlos Zambrano from ever being accepted by his fans, the number that puts a gold star on any pitchers season. I have a hard time saying 20 wins doesn't matter, but after watching how guys like Grienke and Lincecum pitched this season I think we know sometimes there are just things a pitcher cannot control.

It's hard to point at ERA and hold it against Lincecum. Carpenter did have the lowest ERA in the NL at 2.24, but Lincecum was a close second at 2.48. The problem with ERA is that it isn't always in a pitchers control, that is why a lot of people use FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching). It eliminates factors like fielding and simply shows you how good the pitcher was at preventing runs based on his pitching. Carpenter's FIP was 2.78 which is still amazing, but wasn't on par with Lincecum. It also was about equal to Javier Vazquez who got the second place vote on Keith Law's ballot. Vazquez's FIP was 2.77 basically putting him on Carpenter's level. Adam Wainwright was hurt by FIP because at 3.11 it suggested that he was a bit lucky this season. If somebody makes their argument based on FIP it makes sense to put Vazquez above the Cardinals dynamic duo.

Carpenter was also hurt by not having the durability of Vazquez and Lincecum. His 192.2 IP wasn't as high as the 219.1 Vazquez posted or the 225.1 for Lincecum. Missing six weeks hurt his team in a way that the other guys didn't. In a race this close that gets held against a pitcher. It also puts down a players WAR, another scary stat that hurt Carpenter. Vazquez had a WAR of 6.6, Dan Haren was 6.1, while Carpenter "only" posted a 5.6. Wainwright was at 5.7 while Lincecum was far and away the leader at 8.2.

The more I look at the stats the more I think Vazquez probably should have gotten more votes rather than people getting up in arms over Carpenter not being named on two ballots. He was punished for being on a non-playoff team, despite the fact that he was more durable and equally as effective as Carpenter. There is no reason for people to freak out over this when, if anything, Vazquez got shortchanged.

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