Awards Season: The Pitchers

Of all eight major awards being handed out this week, the two Cy Youngs are definitely the hardest to call.  I really have no idea who's going to win.  Especially since the best pitcher in each league--Clayton Kershaw and Chris Sale--isn't one of the top three finishers on either side.  With Kershaw you kinda saw it coming, seeing as he missed two months, while Sale was also likely knocked out of contention by the fact that the White Sox simply weren't a very good team.

In the AL, things are made even harder by the fact that Zach Britton isn't even a finalist, which is totally absurd.  I get it.  It takes a lot for a closer to win the Cy Young.  Mariano Rivera never won one.  Neither did Trevor Hoffman.  Dennis Eckersley won both Cy Young and MVP in the same year way back when, but the last reliever to actually earn Cy Young honors was Eric Gagne of the Dodgers in 2003, when he went perfect in save opportunities all year.

Well, guess who went perfect in save chances this season?  That's right.  Zach Britton.  He was absolutely one of the three best pitchers in the American League this season.  That ridiculous bullpen is one of the primary reasons why Baltimore made the playoffs, and Buck Showalter got it from all angles when he decided not to use Britton in the Wild Card Game, which the Orioles ultimately lost to the Blue Jays.  It's possible Britton will be the highest pitcher in AL MVP voting.  I know it's different voters for each award, but how was he not among the top three for Cy Young?

I think it's pretty clear where my "vote" would've gone.  But Britton obviously didn't win.  Either Corey Kluber, Rick Porcello or Justin Verlander did.  Of the three, Porcello probably has the best numbers.  I'm not going to say his 22-4 record is the result of piling up wins against a bunch of No. 3 starters.  That would discredit his other incredible numbers.  A 3.15 ERA (in the AL East) and a WHIP of just over one.

We all saw in the postseason how valuable Corey Kluber is to the Cleveland Indians.  But that wasn't the first time we've seen it.  He won the Cy Young (somewhat surprisingly) in 2014, then was injured for most of 2015, and Cleveland struggled as a result.  He was back to full health in 2016 and went 18-9 with a 3.14 ERA before that monster postseason.  Old reliable Justin Verlander is the third finalist.  I don't think Verlander is going to win, but it was great to see him get back to being Justin Verlander after a rough couple years where people thought he might be done.

My gut tells me Porcello is the winner.  That unexpectedly shiny 22-4 record for a division winner may be too much to ignore.  However, my "vote" wouldn't look like that at all.  They go five deep for the Cy Young, so my hypothetical ballot is: 1. Britton, 2. Porcello, 3. Kluber, 4. Verlander, 5. JA Happ.

On the National League side, the winner is likely a member of the World Champion Chicago Cubs.  They had the winner last year in Jake Arrieta, and this year they've got both Kyle Hendricks and Jon Lester as finalists.  Those three guys started the last three games of the World Series.  With starting pitching that good, did it surprise anybody that the Cubs were able to come back and win the title?

Anyway, I've been saying for about two months now that I think Hendricks was the best pitcher in the National League this season.  Which should translate into a Cy Young Award.  He led the NL in ERA by more than 30 points (Lester, by the way, was second) and didn't allow more than four runs in any of his 30 starts.  Hendricks ended up 16-8 with a 2.13 ERA.  He also had a WHIP under 1.00.  Lester, meanwhile, wasn't too shabby, either.  He went 19-5 with a 2.44 ERA and struck out 197 in 202 innings.  Lester's WHIP was 1.02, and opponents hit just .211 against him.

If he hadn't missed two months, we'd likely be seeing Clayton Kershaw's name here like it normally is (he's the Mike Trout of NL pitchers).  He's still the most dominant and feared starter out there, and the fact that he's still going to draw a handful of votes speaks volumes.  But I'm fine with Kershaw's name being absent from the list of Cy Young finalists.  There were so many solid pitchers in the National League this season that it's not really a surprise, either.  The writers had plenty of guys to choose from,

One of those guys they had to choose from was Washington ace Max Scherzer.  Team USA's starter for the World Baseball Classic opener against Colombia in March, Scherzer continued to prove he's worth every penny the Nationals are paying him.  The best non-Cubs starter out there, he went 20-7 with an ERA under 3.00 while leading Washington to a division title.  Scherzer also had that 20-strikeout game and crushed the rest of the league in that category.  And, for good measure, his batting average against was .199, and his WHIP was sub-1.00.

Taking nothing away from Scherzer, the Cubs probably finished 1-2 in the voting, as they should've.  They were the best team in baseball, and they won the World Series for a reason.  My top five look like this: 1. Hendricks, 2. Lester, 3. Scherzer, 4. Johnny Cueto, 5. Jose Fernandez.