Oh, Ron, this makes me sad.

Of COURSE best stats = best pitcher. That’s different from saying best arbitrarily selected single stat = best player, like in your example (Sandoval has the best OPS and is therefore the best 3B). Taken altogether, the stats show—at least to me—that Lincecum was a better pitcher than Carpenter. And you can make a strong case that Vazquez and Haren were better than Carpenter, too.

Not that Ron is all wrong, but his objectivity seems to be lacking.

I’m a BIG Tim Lincecum fan, but I would have been OK with Chris Carpenter’s winning the award.  Not happy, but not feeling that anything unfair had happened.

But while Wainwright had a marvelous season, aside from wins, he just didn’t stack up close to Lincecum and Carpenter, who seemed to be clearly the leaders.

Aside from wins, there just weren’t many important areas in which Carpenter—and Lincecum in particular—weren’t either the leader or right near the top.

To give the award to Wainwright simply because he won more games would be to deny that wins is a team stat over which the starting pitcher has some control, but usually less than half.

And I say that knowing that if the Cardinals’ bullpen had held all Adam’s wins, he would have won 25 (!) games.

If one looks at the overall picture, though, it seems to me it would be hard not to vote for either Lincecum or Carpenter.  Wainwright was a very solid third—but a fairly distant one IMO.

Most of those who voted for Adam—who got one more first-place vote than Tim and three more than his teammate—seem to me to be primarily the old-fashioned (and I might even add uninformed or less analytical) voters who overvaule a team statistic when measuring an individual pitcher.