Roy Halladay The Unanimous Pick As NL Cy Young

Award voting often leads to controversy. Voting is done by people, and people make for imperfect judges with inconsistent guidelines, with the end result sometimes being a disagreeable pick. People almost look forward to the end-of-season MLB awards as an opportunity to make fun of the voters for making predictably bad choices.

However, there’s voting, and then there’s voting that ends up with a unanimous first-place selection. Moments ago, Phillies ace Roy Halladay won the 2010 NL Cy Young Award by picking up 32 of 32 first-place votes. When something like that happens, one’s only conclusion is that the player was an obvious choice. And, sure enough, there’s not a soul who would complain about Halladay receiving the honor.

The results of the voting for the 2010 National League Cy Young Award are in, and, in what comes as little surprise, the winner is none other than Philadelphia Phillies ace Roy Halladay.

Halladay received all 32 first-place votes, making him the unanimous choice for the 13th time in NL history. St. Louis’ Adam Wainwright finished with 28 of 32 second-place votes, while Florida’s ERA leader Josh Johnson topped out with five third-place votes. The remainder of the second-place votes went to Colorado’s Ubaldo Jimenez.

If you ask our network of bloggers, though, there’s really no question. No question at all. We decided to poll our group of NL bloggers to see who they think would be the most deserving choice for the award. And the results are surprisingly - or, perhaps, unsurprisingly - unanimous. This is Roy Halladay’s league. The rest of the pitchers just live in it.

Note that this year’s voting is different from what it’s been in the past. Before, voters selected their top three candidates. In 2010, they will select their top five, with a 7/4/3/2/1 points system. This was instituted as a way to get more pitchers some ballot recognition.

Also likely to score him points are his league-leading 21 wins, his league-leading walk rate, and his league-leading strikeout-to-walk ratio. With a perfect game and a stellar reputation as a professional on top of everything else, it’s hard to see Halladay not coming away as the winner.

Likely to give Halladay a bit of competition will be Wainwright, Johnson, Lincecum, and Ubaldo Jimenez. It was Jimenez who looked like a lock when his ERA was 1.15 in the middle of June, but he came back down to Earth over the remainder of the summer, which all but knocked him out of consideration for the top spot.