I suspect that what we're seeing right now in the American League is something we'll see in one or the other of the leagues almost every September for the next mess o' years: one pitcher has the most wins, one has been the best at preventing runs, and there's a heated debate (among, increasingly, fans of the team the wins guy pitches for on the one hand and almost everybody else in the world on the other) over which one deserves the Cy Young Award.
You can guess which side I come down on in the Felix-vs.-C.C. debate, and it's been covered more than adequately elsewhere (including last week's podcast), so I won't discuss it here; I'll just heartily endorse this, and this, and this.
What I do want to address is one line of argument the pro-Sabathia crowd keeps bringing up in this debate. You see it mostly in angry comments to articles like the ones I just linked to, but it's probably phrased most ably by courant.com's Dom Amore (who doesn't ultimately pick C.C., but uses this argument to take Felix out of the equation right away; the bolded emphasis is mine):
Pitching isn't like a golf tournament where the lowest aggregate score wins, it's Match Play - the job of a starting pitcher is to match the other guy on each given time out. This is why a great pitcher can win a ton of games for a bad team, like Steve Carlton in 1972, while others, no matter how talented, seem to find their way to .500 no matter what kind of team they're on, such as A.J. Burnett.
Sounds good, right? Well, not to me, and probably not to you either since you've found your way to this blog, but you can see why it would sound good to a lot of pretty smart people. Most serious baseball fans get the allusion right away: in 1972, the Philadelphia Phillies won just 59 games, and Carlton was credited with the "win" in nearly half of those victories, going 27-10 in his 41 starts. If he can win with a terrible team like that, why is it unfair to expect Felix Hernandez to win with the similarly terrible Mariners?
