But I digress. Let me explain why, if the season ended today, I would pick Jaime Garcia for Rookie of the Year, over Posey. (By the way, I don’t have an NL ROY vote. I have an NL Cy Young vote.)

The first time a BBWAA annual awards ballot found its way into my hands was 1998. I had NL Rookie of the Year, and the candidates were Todd Helton and Kerry Wood. They were pretty much equally deserving, but I came to the conclusion at the time that breaking into the big leagues as a pitcher was tougher than doing it as a hitter.

If you look around at a lot of great pitchers, guys who are Hall of Famers, you see that plenty of them were only mediocre as rookies. Quickly: Roger Clemens 9-4, 4.32; Greg Maddux, 6-14, 5.61; Tim Lincecum, 7-5, 4.00.

It’s just common sense, from watching baseball, to conclude that pitching is more difficult than hitting. That’s why good young pitchers are like gold. That’s why the Giants would never, as we’ve seen, trade any of their good young pitchers for hitters. Same goes for the A’s.

Garcia is 13-6 with a 2.35 ERA. That puts him right between Ubaldo Jimenez (2.69) and Adam Wainwright (2.30) in ERA. Posey is hitting .329 with an .876 OPS. He has 10 homers and 54 RBIs. Double the homer and RBI numbers, since Posey has played in just 82 games, and his numbers would look pretty impressive.

That’s thing, though. He hasn’t played the whole season, and that is another factor that goes in Garcia’s favor.

Garcia has been in the big leagues all season, and Posey just came up at the end of May. Posey isn’t even going to get enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title. (For the record, I’m not philosophically opposed to giving the award to someone who misses part of the season if his numbers are far ahead of the competition. I voted for Ryan Braun as ROY in 2007. He still had 492 plate appearances and, if I recall, had the highest slugging percentage ever for a rookie.)

Is it Posey’s fault that he wasn’t up on opening day? Not really. Although it’s not fair to penalize him for games he didn’t play, I also can’t give him credit for games he didn’t play. I can’t just assume that he’d have done the same thing for five months as he’s done for three, especially when comparing him to a guy who actually has done it for five months.

Now, all of that said, the season is not over. There is a month to go, and Posey could get even hotter and/or Garcia could go in the tank. I don’t believe that the ROY race should be impacted by the teams’ finish in the standings, but some voters may take that into consideration.

Oh, and Jason Heyward also deserves a look. His overall numbers are pretty close to Posey, and he’s been in the majors all season.

By the way, what does it say that Facebook now has a part in the Hall of Fame selection process?

“Lincecum is done. I think he’s finished. He used to sit at 92, 93 [mph with his fastball] and then hop it up to 96, 97. Now, he sits at 89, 90 and when he reaches back, it’s 96, 97. And the problem is, his offspeed stuff isn’t effective enough to compensate.”

That’s pretty harsh. The people I talk to seem to have some concerns about Lincecum, but no one has gone that far. Anyway, there ya go.

Also, I’ll be on Chronicle Live tonight. I am scheduled to do a little hit from AT&T Park between 5 and 5:15.

I am still skeptical about all the fuss made over his velocity, because I think his velocity started dipping a few years ago, and that was by design. Look at his final game of 2009. His average fastball was 89 mph. He gave up two runs in seven innings.

I think, as Adam LaRoche said in my story, the problem is his command. He’s leaving balls all over the place. Why? I have no idea. If I did, I wouldn’t be working for FanHouse. I’d be working for the Giants.

(Ironic, if you recall a little spat between me and Cameron, or more specifically, between me and Cameron’s followers, from last year. Anyway, now I work at FanHouse and FanGraphs is one of our partners, so we’re all friends.)

Back to the point, I have often argued that FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) got too much play when it came to Cy Young discussion. It was my reasoning for suggesting that Chris Carpenter deserved the Cy Young over Tim Lincecum last year, and I got into it a little more this year. Well, Trevor Cahill is shaping up to be this year’s Carpenter, a guy who gets a lot of outs, but gets no respect from the sabermetric community because he’s not racking up enough strikeouts. They say he’s just lucky.

Cameron’s piece today describes what I’ve been trying to say, but maybe it will carry more weight will all of the saber guys I’ve been fighting against because it comes from one of their own:

But FIP was not designed to give us a better insight into what actually happened, but, instead, what is likely to happen in the future. FIP is part of the collection of metrics that do a good job of predicting what will happen in the future by focusing on things that are under a player’s control. FIP was never designed to be a backward-looking metric designed to tell us what actually did happen. And there’s a decent argument to be made that the Cy Young award should be awarded based on what did happen, not on what should have happened or what will happen in the future.

What I try to tell people when I have this argument — and I have it a lot — is that I don’t think the Cy Young is about figuring out who is the best pitcher, it’s about figuring out who pitched the best.

In the past.

While I agree that things like defense are beyond a pitcher’s control, I refuse to believe that a pitcher has no impact on the way a ball is put in play. It just doesn’t make any sense. I’ve spent too much time talking to pitchers and listening to them talk about keeping hitters off balance, taking the sting out of the bat, etc. If you make good pitches, you will get more outs, even on balls in play.

So if I’m evaluating how well a guy pitched — not predicting  how well he will pitch — I think it’s perfectly appropriate to give a pitcher some credit for his outs on balls in play.

Anyway, now I feel like I’ve come to a good place where I have a handle on what I’m doing. I believe, as I’ve written several times before, that the Cy Young is not the Best Pitcher, and it’s not the Most Valuable Pitcher. It’s the Pitcher Who Pitched the Best. The two best ways to measure how effective a pitcher was, in my opinion, are his ERA and his opponents on-base percentage. After all, the job of a pitcher, when you boil it down to its essence, is to get outs and prevent runs.

So, here’s who the leaders are right now among AL starters.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who is on both of these lists is a Cy Young candidate, and anyone who is missing from one or the other has a lot of catching up to do. The only four guys who appear on both lists are Cliff Lee, Trevor Cahill, Jered Weaver and Felix Hernandez.

I think Lee is probably the leading candidate right now because his numbers are right there and he’s got the buzz. Felix Hernandez also ought to get some serious consideration. You also can’t discount CC Sabathia and David Price. They each appear on only one of these lists, but they are aces of good teams (which doesn’t count, to me) and they have a lot of W’s.

All that said, you can make a case that Cahill has been the best at the two most important jobs — getting outs and preventing runs — and he ought to win the Cy Young.

Of course, he won’t, but it’s fun to talk about.

By the way, Cy Young ballots go five-deep starting this year, so Cahill ought to get some recognition. Also, I have an NL Cy Young vote this year, so my opinion in this particular race doesn’t count.

Anyway, here’s the show.

Enjoy