Today Bartolo Colon was named the 2005 American League Cy Young award winner. He won 21 games with a 3.48 ERA. Not too shabby, but I think Johan Santana should have won his second consecutive Cy Young award instead. Here's why.
Johan Santana had a better ERA than Bartolo Colon.
He had a better WHIP.
You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.
He had a better strikeout to walk ratio (K/BB).
Bartolo Colon did win one category besides wins and that was run support. The Angels gave Bartolo Colon 149 runs, while the Twins gave Johan Santana only 121 runs, a difference of 28. Furthermore, Johan Santana left the game with the lead 19 times and had the bullpen blow his lead 3 of those times. On the other hand Bartolo Colon never lost when leaving the game with the lead. Johan Santana also had 24 quality starts compared to Bartolo Colon's 21 quality starts.
So here's the list of things Johan Santana did better: ERA, WHIP, Strikeouts, Walks, Runs, Innings Pitched, Hits, Home Runs, Losses, Complete Games, Shutouts, Quality Starts, and Pitches thrown per inning. The Cy Young award is supposed to be given to the best pitcher in the league, not the pitcher with the best bullpen and offense. Johan Santana was clearly the best American League pitcher in 2005.
