When Good Posts Go Bad: ERA+ and the CYA

The other night while writing about the signing of Brad Thompson I started thinking about Tim Lincecum and Zack Greinke winning the Cy Young Awards in their respective leagues.

More specifically I started wondering how many times the leaders in ERA+ from both the AL and NL won the CYAs.  I sat down tonight to start putting together the list, and quickly came to the realization that my good post had gone bad.

Zack Greinke led the AL in ERA+ by a wide margin over Felix Hernandez.  205 to 174 if you were wondering.  The fly in my post’s ointment of course was that Chris Carpenter, and not Tim Lincecum, led the NL in ERA+ this season.  Again if you are wondering it was 183 to 176.

I thought I would push on and run with the idea anyway.  So I looked at 2008 and there Tim Lincecum and Cliff Lee won the CYAs and led the leagues in ERA+.  It also happened in 2006 with Brandon Webb and Johan Santana.

Thus my post idea was pretty much DOA.  I was hoping that Lincecum and Greinke had pulled off something unusual but Lincecum didn’t even meet the criteria and 2 of the 3 previous years it did happen.  I don’t know why I thought it would be an unusual feat.  I guess it just highlights how little faith I have in in the Baseball Writers Association of America when it comes to getting things right.

Speaking of getting things right, thanks to this, I now know which spelling of Domonic Brown’s name is correct.

With that, I shall take my leave for the night.  I’ll be back tomorrow with something, hopefully, more relevant.

(Wally Fish is Kings of Kauffman’s lead blogger.  Subscribe to his RSS feed and add him onTwitter to follow him daily.)