Tim Lincecum was voted the National League's Cy Young Award winner last week (actually, that's when the results came out, but whatever). Lincecum had, by all accounts, a really good season, leading the NL in strikeouts, complete games, and shutouts and placing second in categories like ERA and hits/9 innings. He was fourth in WHIP.
As you may be aware, there was some considerable hoopla surrounding the voting process, as various people believed that either Chris Carpenter or Adam Wainwright, both of St. Louis, should have won the award.
On Monday, Joe Mauer was announced as the AL MVP. The vote was unanimous, excepting one voter who listed Miguel Cabrera first on his ballot.*
The hoopla around that award's voting, and there was some of it, was that Mauer should have been unanimous.
*Mauer did come as close to unanimous as possible. He was listed second on that one ballot.
The pro-Carpenter people expressed disdain at the fact that people are relying on new-fangled stats, like FIP, to rate players. And that may well have been done.
But here's what I don't get. The people who didn't vote for Carpenter were not relying on some new-alphabet-soup kind of statistic. I mean, they might have been, but the reason you don't vote for Carpenter is simple. It's called Innings Pitched. He may have been somewhat more effective than Lincecum, but he pitched 32.2 fewer innings. That's pretty significant. And it's a rather good reason not to vote for the man.
I would have been less surprised if traditional baseball writers been annoyed with Mauer's inclusion than Carpenter's exclusion. Mark Teixeira led the AL in home runs, RBI and total bases. If the push would have been for him to win it would have been understandable, if wrong.
But blasting people for not voting for a man with less than 200 IP against pretty comparable competition is not really something that I get.
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