Jacob de Grom / Blake Snell – Cy Young winners

29 of the 30 voters chose de Grom, and I’m OK with that choice, but …

He finished the season with a 10-9 record. No starting pitcher has ever previously won a Cy Young with fewer than 13 wins.

If we could look back upon this from 20 years hence, I don’t think this would be viewed as an exception, but rather as the start of a new trend. As I’ve noted previously, the pitchers’ W statistic is becoming increasingly irrelevant as starting pitchers face ever fewer batters.

Meanwhile Blake Snell won in the American League with 180 innings pitched. No starter had ever won with fewer than 198 innings, but there’s no question Snell was the right choice. Innings or no innings, he had one of the greatest seasons in modern history.

* He was 21-5 with a mediocre team. They Rays were 68-63 in games not started by Snell.

* His ERA was 1.89. Only four American League pitchers have gone below 2.00 in the DH era. I think you have heard of the others: Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez and Ron Guidry.

* Get ready for this one, because it sounds like a misprint. Opponents batted .088 against him with runners in scoring position.

2 thoughts on “Jacob de Grom / Blake Snell – Cy Young winners

  1. Sarah Langs pointed out the following in her Twitter feed:

    “Jacob deGrom: MLB-best 1.70 ERA. Mets went 14-18 in his starts & he went 10-9

    Lucas Giolito: 6.13 ERA, worst in MLB. He went 10-13 & White Sox were 14-18 in his starts

    That’s the same number of pitcher wins and same team record… for the best and worst pitchers in MLB.”

    1. As a rule, baseball writers don’t understand the reason why the Mets’ record was poor in his starts. Run support was a factor, but only a minor factor. The important factor was the Mets’ agonizingly bad bullpen.

      Here’s a truly amazing statistic: in the first seven losses incurred by the Mets during de Grom’s starts, he allowed only 5 runs — and the bullpen allowed 31!!

      At that point (June 2), he was 4-0 with 8 no-decisions, and the Mets were 5-7 in his 12 starts. In four of those seven losses, DeGrom allowed no runs at all. He pitched well in all seven losses, and brilliantly in six of them, allowing 3-0-0-0-0-1-1. With the Brewers or Astros’ bullpen, the team might have won all 12 of his starts, and he would probably have been 10-0, or maybe 9-1. (In two of those starts he did not pitch the required 5 innings to get a win)

      The thing that is difficult for sportwriters to grasp about the changing nature of baseball is that the starter is ever less in control and ever more dependent on the bullpen for his W-L record. It used to be that the only thing out of a starter’s control was the run support, but now he has two key things he can’t control: run support and lots of bullpen innings.

      With Warren Spahn and Bob Gibson, the bullpen was almost irrelevant because they went 9 (or more) if they were not in a coffin, but now that the teams pull the starter after 6 or 7, or sometimes less, the bullpen is as important to the W as run support or even the pitcher’s own performance.

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