Trio Takes Cy Young Race Down to Wire

By mid-September, there is usually a favorite for most of the MLB regular season awards. Looking around this year, there are clear frontrunners in the races for the AL MVP (Joe Mauer), AL Cy Young (Zack Greinke), NL MVP (Albert Pujols). But, even with less than 3 1/2 weeks remaining in the regular season, the race for the National League Cy Young remains muddled.

Half a dozen pitchers could make an argument for the honor, but for now we'll focus on just three. They were determined by the Neyer/James Cy Young Predictor, which uses a variety of traditional statitics to take a stab at who will end up winning. The top three starters, according to the Predictor, are currently Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter of the Cardinals, and Tim Lincecum of the Giants.

After seven shutout innings in Milwaukee on Wednesday, Wainwright is probably the favorite. That not so much because of his performances -- which was good; he threw seven shutout innings -- but the result: his 18th win. His 18-7 record puts him two wins ahead of anyone else in baseball, and we all know how much of an effect a pitcher's win total has on the voting.

Even beyond that one notoriously overrated statistic, Wainwright is having a very strong year. In 205 innings, he's posted a 2.59 ERA while striking out 175 batters against only 60 walks. His home run rate of 0.7 per nine innings is excellent as well.

The problem is that one of his competitors, Tim Lincecum, has him beat in nearly every statistic except wins. The Giants righty has thrown five fewer innings, but in that time he's amassed a whopping 233 strikeouts, while walking just 55. His home run rate, 0.4 per nine innings, is one of the best in the league, and he beats Wainwright in ERA as well, at 2.34.

Those numbers are strong enough to give him the league lead in both Baseball Prospectus' Value Over Replacement Player (64.3) and FanGraphs' Wins Above Replacement (7.7, more than two wins above any other NL pitcher). The fact that Wanwright leads the league in wins because his teammates have scored a ridiculous 7.3 runs per game in his starts certainly doesn't trump Lincecum's superiority according to just about any other, more relevant metric.

Top NL Cy Young Candidates
Stat	Carpenter	Lincecum	Wainwright
W-L	16-3	13-5	18-7
ERA	2.16	2.34	2.59
K	129	233	175
BB	30	55	60
IP	166 2/3	200 1/3	205
WHIP	0.96	1.02	1.21
VORP	60.8	64.3	61.1
WAR	5.0	7.7	4.7
Sources: baseball-reference.com, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs.com

We haven't even gotten to the pitcher who has arguably been the most effective pitcher in the league on a per-inning basis: Chris Carpenter. In 24 starts Carpenter has an ERA of just 2.16, with a ridiculous 5.2:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. The latest gem on his resume was a complete game one-hitter in Milwaukee (rough week for the Brewers) on Monday night.

Those are pretty impressive numbers, save for the number of games started. Carpenter made only five starts over the season's first two months, and although he was brilliant in those 29 innings, allowing just two earned runs, the missed time has caused him to trail Lincecum, who threw 65 1/3 innings in April and May, all season.

While the ERA gap between the two is quite small, the innings gap, at 33 2/3, is not. For that reason, the deserving winner, if the season ended today, is clearly Lincecum, although the actual hardware would probably go to Wainwright.

Of course, there is still a good deal of regular season baseball left to be played, and Lincecum missed his last start with back spasms. If he misses any more time that may open up the door for one of the Cardinals starters to pass him in some of the advanced metrics. Unfortunately, if Wainwright reaches the vaunted 20-win mark (which is likely), the award is probably his to lose regardless of who actually deserves it.