There is, of course, a middle ground. While Felix Hernandez fell many wins behind CC Sabathia, the former outshone the latter in several other statistical categories, such as IP, WHIP, and Ks. I have a favorite "meta" stat that seems to be wildly accurate in synthesizing all of this data. It's called WAR. That stands for Wins Above Replacement. I've mentioned it before and, again, I shan't derive the equation, but, basically, it represents the number of additional wins that any player contributes to his team above and beyond those of a AAAA (think Jeremy Sowers, ouch) player. To evidence my contention, the top 62 all-time in WAR are either in the Hall of Fame or definitely will be (think Clemens or Pujols). Of the top 100, 95 fall into these categories, 2 more will likely get in someday via the veterans committee (Whitaker, Grich) and 1 is Pete Rose. The long and short of it is that, historically, WAR is pretty damn accurate in defining the best players (#1 is Babe Ruth).
Felix Hernandez was #1 among AL pitchers in WAR this year, as was Zack Greinke in 2009, Cliff Lee in 2008 and CC Sabathia in 2007. In fact the only time since 2002 that the best in WAR did not win the AL Cy Young was 2005 when Bartolo Colon took it over Johan Santana based on Bart's 21 wins. That vote was widely disparaged then and widely referenced today as the genesis of the current outlook on pitching supremacy. Still, as previously mentioned, this statistic is not omniscient, is imperfect and should not be the only metric to evaluate a player. The easiest example of this is this years NL Cy Young vote. Roy Halladay won with the 2nd best WAR, while Ubaldo Jimenez finished a distant 3rd despite a better WAR. The watchword here is consistency. In the 2nd half Ubaldo was a pedestrian 4-7 with a 3.80 ERA. His ERA in July was 6.04. Granted 15-1 and a 2.20 before the break is pretty damn impressive. Hell, on June 7th Jimenez was 11-1 with an 0.93! Halladay, on the other hand, never went less than 5 2/3 and pitched at least 7 innings in a remarkable 29 of 33 starts. He walked 30 in 250 2/3 innings and his ERA was between 1.80 and 2.53 from May onward. Regardless of the nearly un-hittable stretch that Jimenez put together early in the season, they play 162 games. If the winner had been picked at the break, no doubt that it would have been Ubaldo, but Doc showed up from April to October and was clearly the superior overall performer.
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Cheers.
