Pedro Poser

Dave Paisley

Pedro Martinez -- clear-cut Cy Young winner or not? The debate continues to rage among baseball fans, whether stathead or diehard Luddite. The AL Cy Young race is clealry a puzzler this year. There's no doubt that if just about anyone interested in baseball had to pick a pitcher they wanted first on their team or to pitch one critical must-win game, Pedro would be the guy (certainly in the AL.) But that pesky 20 win thing keeps rearing its ugly head. With a win on Tuesday, Martinez inched up to 18 wins, but still lags 20 game winner David Wells by a couple and will likely not pitch again this season.

But really, how difficult is it to make this call? Even for stat-phobic fans and BBWAA voters, this shouldn't even be a close call. The following table shows primarily triple-crown stats for the top 13 contenders for the AL Cy Young award. To make life simple, I've awarded (as usual) 100 points to the leader in each category - wins, strikeouts and ERA and a proportional number to other candidates.

Out of a possible maximum of 300 points, Pedro scores 290, losing only 10 points to Wells for the 2 fewer wins. Other than that, Martinez wipes the floor with the competition, despite pitching in fewer games.

Let's look at those comparisons in more detail. With 18 wins, Pedro is bested only by Wells (20), Pettitte (19) and Hudson (19). Hudson is a dark horse candidate himself, for reasons I'll get to later. In strikeouts, Pedro's nearest competitors are Mike Mussina (81 behind) and Bartolo Colon (82).

The ERA race is even more unbalanced, with Roger Clemens the nearest realistic competitor at twice the ERA. There are only five other candidates with ERAs under 4.00, which is either a sad commentary on the state of pitching today, or an indication that offense has got totally out of hand. Or both.

Of course, in the deficit in the win column isn't exactly within Pedro's control, either. He pitches for what has been a woefully inadequate offensive team, especially for a so-called playoff contender. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that Martinez has averaged a mere 4.73 runs of offensive support per nine innings? That ranks 31st out of 40 eligible starting pitchers in the league. David Wells, on the other hand, has been getting 6.22 runs (12th in the league), which obviously makes 20 wins easier to get. Not that Wells hasn't been a great pitcher this year (as he has been many times in the past, too), it's just that he isn't better than Pedro. If you want to give him the Cy Young, you'd have to reserve 30% of it for Carlos Delgado.

If you really want to consider how run support helps a Cy Young candidate, see Tim Hudson's ERA of 4.40? Well, you too can win 19 games with that ERA if you get 7.50 runs of support per game (2nd in the league behind the other dark horse 19-game winner, Andy Pettitte, with 7.66 runs of support.)

After Martinez, Wells and Hudson, three Cleveland pitchers (Colon, Burba and Finley) all rank right up there. With 15 or 16 wins these guys aren't going to get serious consideration, but they've all been about as good as Hudson and Pettitte -- better if you ignore wins for a second. Chuck Finley's numbers are interesting. Until recently he was a mere 12-11 and people were saying what a disappointment he's been. And despite the recent win surge, they'd be right. With his ninth-best run support of 6.28 per game, he should be doing a lot better in the win column than he is.

Moving down the list, there is some sentiment for picking Roger Clemens, who is having a nice year. 13 wins, however, certainly won't cut it, but Roger has been a victim of poor run support, too, with a mere 5.44 (but sure, it would have looked great in the '60s).

Skipping down a bit, there's a name on the list that is very interesting. Labeled a disappointment, and heading into free agency, Mike Mussina's numbers look horrible -- if you only look at W-L record. How on Earth is he 10-15 with a 3.85 ERA, you might ask. And the answer is right in those run support numbers. With a mere 3.46 runs of support, Mussina ranks dead last in the league. Of course, he pitches for the Orioles, which isn't a good sign, but his ERA and strikeout numbers would put him third on this list.

So here's an alert for all you GMs and concerned fans - sign this guy! Excellent pitching won't come any cheaper than this. And if by some dire piece of misfortune he should happen to re-sign with the Orioles, he'll deserve every lousy season like this that he gets.

So, to sum up, is there any earthly reason why Pedro shouldn't win the Cy Young? The only one I haven't mentioned is that he won't make the playoffs. But neither will David Wells. Which brings me back to Tim Hudson and Andy Pettitte. With 19 wins each so far and one more opportunity to get to 20, they could sneak up on the award if Martinez and Wells split enough votes and there's a sizeable faction that believes that the award should go to a playoff-bound player. Would it be a travesty? Sure it would, but no worse than either time Juan Gonzalez won the MVP.

Dave Paisley is better known as the inventor of the rosin bag. Discuss the finer points of dryness at drdjp@strikethree.com.

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