Oakland’s Mark Mulder is right now the closest thing to a consensus pick for the American League Cy Young Award. His 17-4 record gives him the lead in wins and a gaudy .810 winning percentage. He is, no doubt, having an excellent year, but his win total hardly tells the story of his season.

Since May, Mulder’s record is 15-2. In May he went 4-0, with a 3.00 ERA; in June, he went 4-0 with a 2.74 ERA; in July, he went 4-1 with a 5.11 ERA.This month, he’s 3-1 with a 5.00 ERA.

One hardly needs be Branch Rickey to note that a win-loss record that doesn’t automatically correspond to the job a pitcher is doing at preventing runs. It’s far more sensible to judge Mulder by two other statistics. His ERA, at 3.72, is nearly a run higher than that of the league leader, his teammate Tim Hudson. His run support, at 6.96 runs per game, is the second-best in the league, behind Boston’s Derek Lowe.

Mulder is an excellent pitcher having a fine season, but it’s not even clear if he’s having one of the five best seasons in the league, and he certainly isn’t having the best. Minnesota’s Johan Santana is.

Yankees fans who saw Santana dissect their team last week will know why. On June 3, Santana’s ERA was at 5.51, and the pitcher who had been widely heralded as the best breakout candidate in the league was instead looking like the biggest disappointment.

Since then, he’s showed why he deserves the Pedro Martinez comparisons he’s been hearing for the last three years. In his last 15 starts he’s allowed three runs once, no runs twice, and either one or two runs 12 times. In August, a month during which he’s faced the Yankees, A’s, Red Sox, and Rangers, he has a 2.23 ERA.

Santana ranks in the top three in the league in ERA, wins, and innings, and leads the league in strikeouts, batting average against, and base runners per inning. The only advantages Mulder has over him are 10 innings pitched and more exposure. His three extra wins, as my colleague Rob Neyer noted this week on ESPN.com, are as much a factor of luck as anything else.

Boston’s Curt Schilling is having almost exactly the same kind of season as Santana, but slightly worse. As I’ve argued in this space before, Pedro Martinez is having a much, much better season than he’s given any credit for – his ERA is disproportionately inflated by a few truly terrible outings, outside of which he’s pitched as he always does – but he doesn’t match up to Santana even taking that into account. Santana’s teammate Brad Radke is quietly having a very good season, but his 3.41 ERA is a bit deceiving – he has given up a slightly outlandish seven unearned runs, which is part of the reason he’s only 9-6.

Only one pitcher really compares to Santana – the Rangers’ Ryan Drese, who had ERA’s over 6.50 in both 2002 and 2003. His 11-6 record and 3.35 ERA (third in the league) are both impressive, and his 166 2/3 innings pitched (10th) shows good durability.

What’s really astonishing about Drese’s season, though, is that he’s doing half his pitching at the Ballpark in Arlington, which has inflated run scoring by about 23% this year. (The next best hitters’ parks in the American League come in at about 15%.) Drese’s home ERA of 2.16 is less than half the Rangers’ overall home ERA of 4.48.

Drese is nowhere near the pitcher Santana is. He’s a random guy having a great season – to use one indicator of pitching talent, he’s striking out four men per nine innings to Santana’s 10.29.

But Drese is getting results similar to Santana’s thanks to a devastating weapon: the ground ball. Drese is inducing 2.4 ground balls per fly ball this year, and has given up only 11 home runs; compare those figures to Santana’s 0.9 and 24, and you’ll start to see why Drese has had such success in his home park. He doesn’t walk a lot of hitters and no one’s hitting line drives or home runs off him.

That success in Arlington is one of the biggest reasons why the Rangers will enter September with a real chance to win their division, and in context it just might be more impressive than Santana’s dominance. Of course, people rarely realize the importance of extreme environments like the Ballpark in Arlington, and I don’t expect Ryan Drese to get his due anymore than I expect Johann Santana’s season to win him the Cy Young Award.

But comparing the seasons both men are having to the one Mark Mulder is having goes a long way towards showing just how badly mere statistics like wins corrupt how we judge players.