But first, some traditional stats used in the Cy Young evaluation:
Pitcher Wins ERA SO
Peavy 19 2.54 240
Webb 18 3.01 194
Penny 16 3.03 135
Oswalt 14 3.18 154
Hudson 16 3.33 132
Smoltz 14 3.11 197
Harang 16 3.73 218
Hamels 15 3.39 177
Cain 7 3.65 163
Lilly 15 3.83 174
Zambrano 18 3.95 177
Francis 17 4.22 165
Maine 15 3.91 180
O.Perez 15 3.56 174
What's clear from this list is that Peavy will be hard to beat. If you lead the league in wins, ERA and strikeouts, you are going to win the award. Of course, raw stats don't take into account park factors, and wins don't take into account run support. Based on the above, though, I'm going to eliminate the very unlucky Matt Cain. By BP's numbers, Cain was the most unlucky pitcher in baseball. His 7 wins should have been 14.
Harang, Hamels, Francis and Perez were among the 10 luckiest pitchers in the league, but I'll let them stay because they are high on a couple of leaderboards, and two of them will be a factor in the playoffs.
Pitcher VORP WARP WS
Peavy 77.0 10.6 23
Webb 66.1 8.7 22
Penny 61.7 7.9 21
Oswalt 59.8 8.1 18
Hudson 59.7 8.2 19
Smoltz 56.7 6.9 16
Harang 53.8 7.0 17
Hamels 48.8 6.1 15
Lilly 46.7 5.7 14
Zambrano 43.5 7.2 16
Francis 42.7 5.5 14
Maine 33.3 5.2 11
O.Perez 24.0 3.9 11
Guess there's no surprise that Peavy wins all these categories too. He's my Cy Young.
That doesn't make for very interesting analysis, though, so I need to choose positions two through five to make this interesting.
Webb seems to be the clear #2. Not a bad follow-up performance for a Cy Young year last year.
Penny is probably #3. He's a little behind Oswalt and Hudson in WARP, but significantly ahead of them in VORP and WS.
#4 goes to Tim Hudson, who easily had his best year as a Brave and has regained "ace" status.
Oswalt gets the fifth spot, buried in Houston. You could make the argument he had a better year than Hudson, but when we are talking about finishing 4th and 5th, it doesn't really matter. The edge goes to Hudson for keeping his team in contention.
Final thought: I should not have included Oliver Perez on this list. When I typed the list before looking at the leaderboards, he wasn't on it. However, it was impossible to ignore a guy who is 9th in ERA, 10th in wins, 10th in strikeouts and 2d in strikeouts per 9 innings. The raw stats were deceiving, as VORP, WARP and WS show him to be clearly inferior. He probably should have been something like 11-10 with a 4.50 ERA, but got lucky.
