When a 10 win pitcher takes the hardware, you know we’re making progress.
Jacob deGrom celebrates the end of his 2018 season with the final out of the eighth inning in a 3-0 win over the Atlanta Braves on September 26 for his 10th and final win. (Getty Images) Getty
It’s official. The Mets’ Jacob deGrom, owner of a 10-9 record in 2018, is the National League Cy Young Award winner.
DeGrom got the nod over Washington’s Max Scherzer and Philadelphia’s Aaron Nola, who both turned in better won-lost records and who were right there with deGrom in innings, WHIP, FIP and WAR (though deGrom’s miniscule 1.70 ERA was quite a bit better than his two closest challengers and probably put him over the top).
It’s a nice victory for deGrom and for Mets fans who can enjoy a silver lining to such a letdown of a season. But more than that, it’s a victory for a new school of thought in baseball that rewards performance over derivative stats like wins and losses that a pitcher can’t control. While baseball pundits and fans have casually downplayed the stat for years (a common phrase since forever: “Can you imagine what his record would have been if he pitcher for [fill in name of good team]?”). But rarely has such informal sentiment shown up in the Cy Young voting.
Signs of progress did appear eight years ago, when Seattle’s Felix Hernandez took the 2010 A. L. Cy Young Award with a 13-12 record. Voters, who could have gone with Tampa Bay’s David Price and his 19-6 mark, chose to reward Hernandez for leading the league in ERA, innings, and pitching WAR (while losing the strikeout crown to Jered Weaver by exactly one K, 233 to 232). And so it seemed all but official – wins and losses were out, pitching well in and of itself was in.
But the new age view didn’t last. Just two years later, Price beat out Justin Verlander in the American League and R. A. Dickey got the nod over Clayton Kershaw in the National League, both on the strength of won-lost records trumping better overall stats. In some years, the voters had it easy when the pitcher with the most wins also happened to have the best statistical case anyway, such as in 2014 when Kershaw and Corey Kluber took the hardware. But the old schoolers were back in 2016 when they voted the A. L. Cy Young to Boston’s Rick Porcello and his 22-4 record over Detroit’s Verlander (16-9), who led in nearly every other statistical category, including 254 strikeouts to Porcello’s 189 and a 7.2 WAR to Porcello’s 4.8. Nothing against Porcello, who had a terrific year, but his first place finish was most certainly a case of voters not being able to shake the sight of a 22-4 record. Old habits die hard.
But in 2018, we got back to 2010. Ten wins – the fewest ever for a Cy Young Award winner. Not very many years ago, such an outcome would have been unheard of. Given how close the overall statistical battle was among deGrom, Nola and Scherzer, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to see voters break the “tie” with Scherzer’s 18-7 record or Nola’s 17-6, both far better than deGrom’s. It almost feels like the voters were determined to go new school this year – that a vote for deGrom would show them to be with it.
Truth be told, both Scherzer and Nola would have been just as deserving as deGrom in 2018, by any calculation. It wasn’t necessary to vote for deGrom to claim new school credentials. But it’s just as well they did, because it sets a precedent to follow. And that’s good.
I covered the business of sports for Forbes from 2005 to 2014, including a lot of baseball. I like baseball, and I also like numbers. I love it when the two intersect, which is a lot. My first baseball book « Cincinnati Red and Dodger Blue, » about the great rivalry of the 197…
