Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X
Next in our quest for sense in the world of baseball award voting is the Cy Young award. The Cy Young started as a major-league-wide award and was not given out per league until 1967. Also, voting was by top candidate only. Therefore, if a pitcher was a unanimous pick, no other pitcher would get one single vote. Today the ballot has first, second, and third place votes. That's dwarfed by the ten selected on the MVP ballot, but it's eminently more fair than having Sandy Koufax sweep every vote for the award annually.
So how does the highly limited scope of the Cy Young award historically effect how well the final tally has related to reality (i.e., Win Shares)?
Here are the correlations for each decade (Pitching Win Shares greater than zero :
| Decade | To WS |
| 1950s | 24.85% |
| 1960s | 27.73% |
| 1970s | 42.65% |
| 1980s | 37.69% |
| 1990s | 39.26% |
| 2000s | 38.14% |
Well, that's not too reassuring is it? Perhaps we should limit the number of pitchers in the study since surely not every one will get some share of the Cy Young vote. I reran the numbers based on a minimum of 10 Win Shares. Here are the results:
| Decade | To WS (min. 10) |
| 1950s | 32.59% |
| 1960s | 41.32% |
| 1970s | 57.16% |
| 1980s | 54.78% |
| 1990s | 59.72% |
| 2000s | 63.34% |
Basically, the Cy Young vote has correlated to Win Shares as well as the MVP, but given that the ballot is that much more limited in the Cy Young vote, that's a pretty good accomplishment.
Next, intend to come up with a system of weighting the two awards based on the size of the ballot to compare them more thoroughly.
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