Cy Young

[Guest Edgy DC]

Brandon Webb is your National League winner, with 103 points
Trevor Hoffman: 77 points
Chris Carpenter: 63 points
Roy Oswalt: 31 points
Carlos Zambrano: 6 points
Billy Wagner: 4 points
John Smoltz: 3 points
Takashi Saito: 1 point

Wagner, at one point anyway, was the leader on Rob Neyer's Cy Young prediction calculator.

[nymr83]

not that he necessarily deserved the award, but Josh Johnson gets no points?

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Good for Brandon Webb.

[metsmarathon]

the cy young predictor still has billy wagner as the top candidate.

points are attributed as follows:

wagner 156
carpenter 151
webb 147
hoffman 147
saito 138
zambrano 137
oswalt 137
smoltz 135
lowe 135
cordero 127

over in the AL, santana is predicted to win, much more convincingly, 192 to 177 over fellow twin joe nathan.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

I hope Wagner hadn't started measuring his drapes.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

The CYP is flawed.

[Frayed Knot]

	1st Place	2nd Place	3rd Place	Total
Webb(Arz)	15	7	7	103
Hoffman(SD)	12	3	8	77
Carpenter(StL)	2	16	5	63
Oswalt(Hou)	3	3	7	31
Zambrano(Chi)	0	1	3	6
Wagner(NYM)	0	1	1	4
Smoltz(Atl)	0	1	1	3
Saito(LA)	0	0	1	1

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

Nice to see a Met get votes, even as few as Wagner got.

When was the last time a Met pitcher got any Cy Young votes at all? Did Pedro get any last year? If not, I guess we have to go back to Leiter or Hampton. Or do we have to go back even further than that?

[Frayed Knot]

Leiter finished 6th getting 3 points (3 3rd place votes) in 1998 for his 17-6, 2.47 ERA, 1.15 WHiP, 176 K season
The winner that season ... Tom Glavine

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

Is that from memory, Knot, or were you able to look it up somewhere? I think that kind of info may be in my TSN Baseball Guides. That's something I've sometimes thought about for the UMDB, listing how Mets players fared in the voting for the three major offseason awards.

[Gwreck]

Johnny Dickshot wrote: The CYP is flawed.

Exactly. I think I put a more detailed post about this before but it relies WAY too much on number of saves.

[RealityChuck]

I doubt there's any algorithm that's any better. Sabermetrics is piss poor at predicting, and, like any fortune teller scam, only points out their handful of hits and forgets their hundreds of misses.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

That's funny because there's at least one believer in this very thread acknowleding a miss. As always, I'm flabbergasted at how willfully angry you appear about this: It's not a fortune-telling, it's barely even Sabermetrics. It's just a model. So what?

[Frayed Knot]

]Is that from memory, Knot, or were you able to look it up somewhere?

I'm no better than 50/50 to remember what I had for lunch.

Baseball-Reference.com has the voting results for each of the major awards. I just clicked on each year until I saw a Met.

[metsmarathon]

its not sabermetrics. its trying to put a formula together that approximates how VOTERS have voted in the past and, assuming those voters continue to vote consistently with similar criteria (that the formula need not account for), attempt, for entertainment purposes, who the most likely player to receive the most votes will be.

it doesn't try to predict who will win next year, who will be the better pitcher next year, or even who the best pitcher was this year. only who the voters of the past might have voted for this year.

its very much the same as if you looked at the schaeffer voting this year and tried to figure out what a player has to do to get a certain amount of points from us cranepoolers. how much does a save get a player? a home run? how much does grounding into a double play cost?

its not sabermetrics. its an attempt to replicate the outputs of a complex system through the use of a simplified mathematical framework built around a set of known inputs. modeling & simulation.

it can't tell you if billy wagner was more valuable to his team, or a better pitcher, only that, based on the way voters have voted in the past, he had a pretty good chance of walking away with the award.

or the predictor overvalues saves, and the most likely winner was carpenter. in fact, if i look only at the starters, it picked the winner in 04, 05, and half of 06. and i don't think its going to miss santana in the AL this year.

whatever your beef is with sabermetrics, or math in general, its misplaced here.

[metsmarathon]

basically, the algorithm, or any such award voting predictor, comes from teh follwing type of conversation...

"who do you think will win the cy young award this year?"
"i dunno. what kind of things do the voters typically look at?"
"well, wins and losses. earned runs, innings pitched. usually the voters look to players with shutouts, too. high strikeout totals are important too, but they don't really look at walks."
"relievers with high save totals will get some votes too. of course, there's also the standard 'played for a winner' schtick thrown in for good measure."
"but what's more important? lots of wins, or not a lot of losses? and how much does playing for a winner really count for?"
"well, lets try to figure that out..."

when, i guess, bill james and rob neyer did this whenever they did it, they found that, all things being equal, 24 strikeouts balance out playing for a winner, and a 20-8 record is the same as a 19-5 record. or thereabouts.

[metirish]

Santana wins the AL Cy Young ....got all 28 first-place votes for a perfect total of 140 points.

[Guest Edgy DC]

I'm going to guess Neyer's calculator got that one.

[Frayed Knot]

CY-a Como Va -- in a shutout.

	1st Place	2nd Place	3rd Place	Total
Santana(Minn)	28	0	0	140
CM Wang(NYY)	0	15	6	51
Halliday(Tor)	0	12	12	48
Rodriguez(LAA)	0	1	2	5
Nathan(Minn)	0	0	3	3
Rogers(Det)	0	0	3	3
Verlander(Det)	0	0	2	2