Allow us to introduce Charlie Goldsmith. He writes about the Reds and Bengals for The Cincinnati Enquirer.

He is the person responsible for giving Zack Wheeler a 5th place Cy Young vote:

That was Wheeler’s only fifth place vote, and it’s absolute nonsense. There is no way Zack Wheeler was the fifth best pitcher in the National League. He finished second place in the voting with 12 first place votes and nine second place votes. 17 of the 5th place votes went to eventual fifth place finisher Brandon Woodruff.

On no planet was Woodruff better than Wheeler this year. But in going through that Twitter thread, Goldsmith explains his reasoning like this:

“I put less stock into innings pitched if you’re close to the top of the leaderboard. Woodruff was harder to hit, had a better strikeout rate and in my evaluation was a better pitcher this year. Wheeler is also very good!”

Brandon Woodruff pitched 179 innings with a 2.56 ERA. Wheeler pitched 213 innings with a 2.78 ERA. The SO/9 and BB/9 numbers are essentially the same. Totally negligible in difference. It’s basically the same argument we were having between Wheeler and Corbin Burnes, where the latter just logged less volume and played on the better team with the better bullpen. Even if the Cy Young was just about raw numbers (it’s not), Woodruff didn’t do anything that was amazingly better than what Wheeler did. The other writers agree! –

A brief Googling reveals that Goldsmith graduated from college in 2020, so he’s been a professional baseball writer for a grand total of 1.5 years. He’s a Northwestern guy who went to the prestigious Medill School of Journalism, which is annoying. There are cool Medill folks out there, but plenty of snobs as well. “I went to Northwestern! Look at me, I’m a great journalist!” Nobody cares.

Mr. Goldsmith is basically just a kid. I’m old enough to remember when you had to do a few years of shit hours in some place like Binghamton before you got a real newspaper job. Now these kids are coming out of college and going straight to major markets. And voting Zach Wheeler 5th in the Cy Young. That’s crazy!