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Runoff election

An obvious subplot to this afternoon's game is the pitching matchup of Josh Beckett and Chien-Ming Wang, each of whom is a candidate for the Cy Young Award.
As it happens, as part of the rotating voting process for each chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America, I have one of the two Boston chapter votes for the Cy Young this year; Jeff Goldberg of the Hartford Courant has the other.

While Wang and Beckett are two obvious candidates, they're not the only ones. Justin Verlander (17-5), C.C. Sabathia (17-7, 3.21), John Lackey (16 wins, 3.21), Fausto Carmon (16 wins, 3.20 ERA), Kelvim Escobar (17-7, 3.25) are all worthy, too.

It's likely that the award will be determined in the final two weeks. It will be interesting, too, if some of these pitchers take time off in the final week to 10 days to rest for the post-season, or keep pitching and enhance their Cy Young chances.

One other note: unless either Beckett or Wang get a win here today, and keep pitching, we may have our second straight season in which no one wins 20 games.
The NL wins leader going into today is San Diego's Jake Peavy, who has 17.

Posted by Sean McAdam  at 4:40 PM | Permalink