Forget “poor” Josh Beckett. If anyone got overlooked in American League Cy Young voting, it was the Los Angeles Angels’ John Lackey, not the Boston Red Sox’s Beckett.
Sure, if you factor in the regular season and the postseason, Beckett was the best pitcher in the majors in 2007 — a combined 24-7 with a 3.00 earned-run average. It’s no accident his team won the World Series.
But the Cy Young Award, like the other awards the Baseball Writers Association of America hands out, is about getting your team into the playoffs, not carrying them once they’re there. They are regular-season awards, and as such, Beckett should not have been better than third in the tight, four-pitcher race involving C.C. Sabathia (the winner by a nose), Fausto Carmona, Lackey and Beckett.
This was a fascinating vote, in large part because only one victory separated the four of them (Beckett had 20, the other three 19).
I have no problem with Sabathia winning, but Lackey would have gotten my vote if I had been voting. He led the AL with a 3.01 ERA. Carmona was second at 3.06, followed by Sabathia in fifth at 3.21 and Beckett in sixth at 3.27. No stat better tells the story for pitchers than ERA.
For the sake of argument, I put together a simple formula to compare the top four Cy Young vote-getters. It ranks them among each other in victories, losses, ERA, innings and strikeouts. Because I think ERA is the most important, I’ve given it twice the weight. That formula gives Sabathia a slight edge over Lackey and a significant edge over Beckett and Carmona, who would be tied for third.
If you weighed ERA three times as heavily as the other four stats, you would have a tie between Sabathia and Lackey, with Beckett dropping to a clear fourth.
Sabathia’s edge over the other guys comes down to leading the league innings and strikeouts. That achievement may have contributed to the Indians not going to the World Series, as Sabathia and Carmona clearly wore down during the championship series against Boston. Beckett looked the freshest of the Cy Young contenders in October — no wonder; he barely threw 200 innings during the regular season, the lowest total.
Cy Young comparison
How American League Cy Young winner C.C. Sabathia (CS) of Cleveland stacks up against Boston’s Josh Beckett (JB) and Los Angeles’ John Lackey (JL):
%% CATEGORY CS JB JL
Starts 34 30 33
Record 19-7 20-7 19-9
ERA 3.21 3.27 3.01
Innings 241.0 200.2 224.0
Hits allowed 238 189 219
Walks 37 40 52
Strikeouts 209 194 179
HR allowed 20 17 18
Opp. BA .259 .245 .254
Salary (millions) 8.75 6.66 5.83
%%
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