For all the guff the voters of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America take, they’re generally not so bad at giving the Cy Young Award to the right pitcher. From time to time, they make the wrong pick – Barry Zito’s 2002 award belonged to Pedro Martinez, for instance, and Roger Clemens heisted Randy Johnson’s plaque last year – but even when they get it wrong, they don’t stray into the nether-regions of logic exhibited by their MVP voting, which far too often is treated as a bonus prize for the league RBI leader. (See George Bell in 1987, Juan Gonzalez in 1998, etc.)

This year, the electorate got it wrong not just once but twice. What’s more, both picks were indefensibly bad and obviously wrong. This has never happened before. The BBWAA has made history.

Of this year’s results, the choice of Anaheim’s Bartolo Colon over Minnesota’s Johan Santana and the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera for the AL Cy Young was simply inexplicable. Colon won simply because he was the only 20-game winner in the circuit.

The arguments needed to make the case here are not complex. Everyone would agree, I think, that in deciding between two pitchers, you’d want the one who’s both more durable and more effective. In this case, that’s Santana. His ERA was three-quarters of a run better. He pitched more innings, struck 81 more batters, and allowed 35 fewer hits. He also allowed the opposition a .250 on-base average, lower than the batting average Colon allowed.

Rivera, as I’ve argued in this space, was Santana’s equal, as his 1.38 ERA and the importance of the innings he pitched cancel out Santana’s innings edge. Pick one or the other and you can’t go wrong. The BBWAA, hypnotized by Colon’s 21-8 record, did. It’s absurd.

Equally ridiculous was Chris Carpenter’s win in the National League yesterday.This was clearly a case where Carpenter had the award won entering September; nothing anyone else did could have wrested it from him, and nothing he did (like, say, running up a 5.73 September ERA that drove his season ERA up from 2.29 to 2.83) could have cost him the award.

Carpenter was one of the very best pitchers in the league,but really no better or worse than Florida’s Dontrelle Willis, the Mets’ Pedro Martinez, or Houston’s Roy Oswalt. Two Houston pitchers, Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite, were clearly better. One of them should have won the prize.

The argument for Clemens is obvious. His ERA of 1.87 was an entire run better than Carpenter’s mark. It doesn’t matter that Carpenter pitched 30 1/3 more innings; had Clemens pitched an extra 30 1/3 innings and given up 31 runs in them, his ERA would still have bested Carpenter’s. Nor does Carpenter’s superior record impress; he may have won eight more games than Clemens, but Clemens either lost or got no decisions in 15 different games in which he gave up two or fewer runs, something that obviously can’t be held against him.

Even if we for whatever reason decide to toss Clemens out the window because he went 13-8, there’s still Pettite, who went 17-9. The former Yankee’s 2.39 ERA was a half-run better than Carpenter’s, and the man was nails down the stretch, going 8-2 with a 2.06 ERA in the last two months for a team that made the playoffs on the last day of the season.

The problem with these awards isn’t just that they’re stupid, although they are. (The only season that saw two awards nearly this wrong was 1984,when Rick Sutcliffe inexplicably won the NL Cy Young over Dwight Gooden despite pitching 68 fewer innings with a higher ERA, and Willie Hernandez won in the AL while the league’s best pitcher, Dave Stieb, got one third-place vote.) It’s that they encourage a wrong-headed, reactionary, and discredited view of what pitching excellence is all about.

It seems harmless enough, if a bit goofy, to argue that Carpenter deserves the Cy Young because he’s a winner; isn’t the corollary of that claim, though, that Roger Clemens, possibly the greatest pitcher in history, was somehow a loser this season, because he wasn’t able to get the job done? Sorting pitchers into winners and losers, those who have the right stuff and those who don’t, based on their won-loss records is a way of positing that actual, on-field results – things like giving up fewer runs per inning while pitching more innings – don’t really matter.

Oddly, that’s what statistically-minded writers and executives, the sort of people most likely to see Colon’s win as absurd on its face, are often accused of. I’m not much of a believer in a culture war in baseball, but the sort of magical thinking that allows someone to think that Bartolo Colon is better than Johan Santana because one had Vladimir Guerrero on his team and the other didn’t deserves, if not war, all the ridicule that can be heaped on it.

tmarchman@nysun.com