Wednesday, October 8, 2014

How did Cy Young Award winners do in the postseason?

Dodgers' season is over. Kershaw looked better yesterday, but he gave up a three-run home run in the 7th inning which ended up being the winning run. It is not officially announced that Kershaw won this year's Cy Young Award, but I think it is safe to assume that he did; he is even in the discussion of winning the MVP. Well, despite the huge success in the regular season, he lost twice in the division series.

I was just curious how past Cy Young Award winners do in the postseason. Obviously a pitcher cannot win a game single-handedly, but at least I wanted to see how they performed. Click below for the stats.



1. Just for a note, David Cone won the Cy Young Award in 1994. He was the winning pitcher of my very first game at the Yankee Stadium (in fact my first MLB game,) so just wanted to say he won one.

2. A lot of them actually did not make playoffs. I guess it is not surprising since, unlike MVP, CYA does not go with how his team did in the season. For last 20 seasons, only 21 CYA winners (of 40) made playoffs while 32 MVPs (of 38, I was not sure of this year's winners) did.

3. For last 20 seasons, average stats of the CYA winners (other than Eric Gagne who clearly was a outlier) are:
19 NL CYA winners: 19.3W 6.3L 2.455ERA 256.8K
20 AL CYA winners: 19.9W 6.1L 2.657ERA 235.7K
Pretty impressive, right?

4. In the postseason their stats when they started are :
11 NL CYA winners: 36GS 18W 13L 2.796ERA 236K 68BB
(If we exclude Kershaw, it improves to 30GS 17W 9L 2.492ERA 189K 59BB)
10 AL CYA winners: 26GS 9W 8L 3.360ERA 176K 64BB
It is not as stellar as their regular season performance, but still solid.

5. '99 Pedro's season is arguably with the very best pitching performance and guess what: he had 0.00 ERA in the postseason as well.


In sum, I've read a lot of people writing about former CYA winners' postseason performance in total and arguing that they were just ordinary pitchers in postseason, but if we take a closer look at specific years when they actually won the CYA, they are still impressive. Duh.

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