NY Boston Fan

He's a thief

Quick quiz: Which guy would you rather have?

Player A has 33 starts, at 6.5 innings per start. He walks 3.3 batters per 9 innings, while striking out 9.2. Opponents bat .217 against him, and he has a 2.98 ERA.
Player B has 35 starts, at 7 innings per start. He walks 1.6 batters per 9 innings, while striking out 10.6. Opponents bat .197 against him, and he has a 2.60 ERA.

Made up your mind?

OK, what if I said player A won 18 games, while player B won 16.
OK, but now what if I said player A lost 4 games, while player B lost 14.

The voters chose based on those last 2 lines, and not on all the other factors. The fact is, Randy Johnson did all he could to help his team win, and it is not his fault if the rest of the team did not hold up their end of the bargain.

Here are the scores for the last 12 games in which Johnson was pegged with a loss:

4-1
1-0
6-2
3-2
8-3
3-1
4-1
4-0
2-0
2-1
4-1
4-2

Now, Randy Johnson is an awful hitter. But I still don't blame him that in 13 of his last 14 losses, his team could not even score 3 runs for him. Hell, in 8 of those his team couldn't even score 2 runs!

Randy Johnson was 13-2 in games when his team scored 3 runs or more this year. "Analysts" who think like Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver say that people focus on stats too much, and often the writers who vote on awards like these think differently than people who are into the writings of Bill James and his disciples. But in this case, the writers were obsessed with a stat when they voted for the Cy Young. Unfortunately, it was a stat over which pitchers can have minimal amount of control in many cases: losses.