TOWER GROVE -- The Baseball Writers Association of America ballots for the 2010 awards went out this week, scattered to the inboxes of beat writers around the league. There are four different ballots, and each ballot goes to two different writers in each city or to a few at-large voters.
The ballots are due before the first pitch of the postseason.
Into my inbox this week came the 2010 Cy Young Award ballot, and this season it comes with a twist -- really, an improvement. Having learned a lesson from last year's vote, the ballot has been expanded. Instead of voting on the top three candidates for the award, this season the 32 writers with a NL Cy Young Award ballot will list the top five choices. That all but erases the chance that one vote this season will earn Adam Wainwright $21 million.
Not that it's likely to matter.
A quick refresher (courtesy of this cache'd Bird Land blog entry from November):
If Wainwright finishes the 2011 season healthy - i.e., not on the disabled list with an arm injury - then the option vests if he has pitched a total of 400 innings in the previous two years or finished in the top five of Cy Young voting in the previous two seasons.
Consider that for a moment in light of what happened (with the voting last season).
If Wainwright finishes in the top five of the award in either the 2010 or 2011 season and he finishes the 2011 season healthy, a $21-million option vests for him and the Cardinals. We saw yesterday two voters make two votes that put two pitchers in the top five. That was it. One vote and a healthy arm could equal $21 million.
It's important to note that the option is actually a two-year option, which must be exercised at the same time. And Wainwright does have two bites at that top-five apple. But, it seems he isn't going to need anything more than healthy in 2011 to trigger it.
After seven shutout innings of work Wednesday, Wainwright plunged his ERA down to 1.99. Quietly, the righthander has positioned himself to take a run at the pitching "Triple Crown" in the season's final six-plus weeks. Consider:
Tied for first in wins, 17 (Ubaldo Jimenez, 17)
2nd in ERA, 1.99 (Josh Johnson, 1.97)
3rd in strikeouts, 158 (Roy Halladay, 168)
In the wake of his third-place finish in Cy Young voting last season, Wainwright borrowed from Bull Durham and said: "Strikeouts are fascist." Asked about that comment earlier this season at the time he led the NL in strikeouts, Wainwright reset his footing. Ks are fascist unless they're personally beneficial. That clearly is going to be the most difficult jewel of the Triple Crown for Wainwright to win, and it's not lost on the righthander that last year some voters felt winner Tim Lincecum was "more dominant" -- and therefore, more deserving -- of the Cy Young because he had more strikeouts.
Last year's Cy Young vote, specifically in the NL, turned into a referendum on new stats, dusty stats and stats that would cause Deep Blue to blow a hard drive.
Some writers plunged into the alphabet soup to rationalize their top three picks for the NL Cy Young. Others sided with the traditional -- Triple Crown -- numbers. Most sought a hybrid, a blend of stats and reporting to choose between three legit candidates.
From that group of voters, Wainwright, who led the NL in wins, got the most first-place votes. Yet, he finished third in the voting. There were many reasons given, and certainly the Cardinals had ample ammunition for their complaints. (Aside: It was Chris Carpenter, remember, that was left off of two ballots.) Wainwright was tops in the NL in wins and innings pitched, but he ranked behind three other pitchers in both ERA (2.63) and strikeouts (212). Dig into the fancier stats, and Wainwright ranked sixth in defensive-independent ERA (3.22) and he really plunged when it came to batting average against on balls in play.
Lincecum's .276 BIPA (this the "against" number for a hitter's BABIP) was 26th in the league. Not exactly world-beating, but then the stat is a slippery one when defining a pitcher, and its value in this discussion or its relationship to ERA, etc., is elusive. It's often used to erase "luck" from the equation, but the more I looked at the rankings the more it seemed it erased a lot of context, too. After all, Wainwright's was fourth on his own team. Forty-eight pitchers had a lower BIPA than Wainwright's .290, including Carpenter (.256), Joel Pineiro (.278) and Kyle Lohse (.283).
Where am I going with all of this?
Wainwright has surgically erased all such equivocations from this season. Pick a stat. Imagine a stat. Heck, invent a stat. The righty is tops in wins. His K/9 of 8.06 is 16th. His BIPA? It's .241 and it's seventh in the NL among pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched this season. Wainwright also has a 203 ERA+. This is similar to the OPS+ that ranks a hitters OPS against the average and sets it on a scale hinged around 100. Above 100 is, well, above average. Here are the top ERA+ for starters since 2001:
Roger Clemens, 2005 ... 226
Rich Harden, 2008 ... 212
Josh Johnson, 2010 ... 211
Zack Greinke, 2009 ... 205
Adam Wainwright, 2010 ... 203
And so on and so on.
Each season, toward the end of the year, we take a stab at the NL MVP race by looking at aggregate rankings. The idea is to take a snapshot of what hitter ranks the highest in a variety of offensive categories. It puts home run and RBI totals on the same plain as OPS and runs created. It helps capture what hitter is, in the words of a college recruiter I once interviewed with, "not only well-rounded, but well-lopsided."
In the wake of Wainwright's move on the pitching Triple Crown and in the context of last year's Cy Young vote, I wanted to apply the same process to pitching. It needs some work, but if you take the three "Triple Crown" stats and add in a few deeper stats it does offer a distilled look at the Cy Young race as of Aug. 12, 2010.
Nine pitchers popped up repeatedly in at least several of the six stats that I looked at. Those six stats: Wins (hold the groans), ERA, strikeouts (fascist!), defensive-independent ERA, WHIP and, because it's my blog, Gibbys*.
* This is the Quality Start Plus stat that we've been trying to track this season. It adds an inning to the accepted Quality Start definition, requiring a pitcher to go at least seven innings and allowing no more than three earned runs. For why this stat is helpful, look no further than Ubaldo Jimenez. He and Wainwright have more wins than Gibbys.
Pitchers are "scored" based on their rank within the NL in each of the six stats. Any rank higher than the top 20 is assigned a point value of 21, just for the sake of keeping the scores from ballooning unreasonably.
And here is what the aggregate rankings look like (NL rankings in parentheses):
PITCHER ... Wins ... ERA ... Ks ... Gibs ... DIPs ... WHIP
Wainwright ... 17 (1t) ...1.99 (2) ... 158 (3) ... 16 (2) ... 2.98 (4) ... 0.97 (1)
Carpenter ... 13 (4t) ... 2.89 (10) ... 136 (12) ... 15 (3) ... 3.83 (28) ... 1.16 (11)
J. Johnson ... 10 (14t) ... 1.97 (1) ... 156 (4) ... 12 (9t) ... 2.44 (1) ... 1.01 (3)
Hudson ... 13 (4t) ... 2.24 (3) ... 83 (42) ... 13 (5t) ... 4.15 (37) ... 1.10 (7)
Jimenez ... 17 (1t) ... 2.55 (6) ... 143 (9) ... 14 (4) ... 3.25 (7) ... 1.11 (8)
Halladay ... 14 (3) ... 2.34 (4) ... 168 (1) ... 17 (1) ... 2.80 (3) ... 1.03 (4)
Latos ... 12 (6t) ... 2.36 (5) ... 125 (16) ... 6 (30t) ... 3.35 (10) ... 0.99 (2)
Gallardo ... 11 (9t) ... 2.86 (9) ... 149 (6t) ... 6 (30t) ... 2.79 (2) ... 1.28 (27)
Lincecum ... 11 (9t) ... 3.41 (19) ... 163 (2) ... 13 (5t) ... 3.30 (8) ... 1.30 (29)
***
When you tally those rankings to get a sense of what pitcher ranks the highest across the board, there are only two with scores less than 30. There are only four with scores less than 50, and most are gathered in that 60 zone.
Wainwright has the lowest, and Philadelphia Phillies ace Roy Halladay on on his heels.
1. Wainwright, STL ... 11.5
2. Halladay, PHI ... 16.0
3. Jimenez, COL ... 35.5
4. Johnson, FLA ... 36.5
5. Latos, SD ... 61.0
6. Carpenter, STL ... 61.5
7. Hudson, ATL ... 63.0
8. Lincecum, SF ... 67.5
9. Gallardo, MIL ... 70.5
All of this means that Wainwright has expanded his Cy Young candidacy to cover other columns on the back of his baseball card or at his Baseball-Reference.com page. He has the universal resume to go with the increasing profile -- check the All-Star Game -- and the strength of being an "incumbent" on the ballot. It probably won't take the extra lines on this year's Cy Young ballot to get Wainwright the votes he needs to trigger that option.
Heck, he might just win the thing.
Go ahead, give me your ballot -- top five -- as it stands right now. And if you've got some suggestions to expand the stat field above, let me know. I'll take another stab at this later in the year.
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