With apologies to James Joyce, here’s a post on the Cy Young Award, to be awarded this season, for the sixtieth time, to the best pitcher in each league, as voted by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. The idea for this post, and most of the content, are courtesy of commenter No Statistician But. More after the jump.

No Statistician But has been a regular contributor at HHS since this site was established in 2011, and possibly in its earlier incarnation on the BR Blog. He recently sent me a few ideas on Awards related posts, and I’ve chosen to start with this one, in recognition of his frequent contributions to discussions of pitcher performance, a topic of keen interest to him. So, with that introduction, let’s begin.

Suppose the Cy Young Award was restricted to starting pitchers. After all, when the Award was first instituted in 1956, it would have been inconceivable that any pitcher other than a starter could be regarded as the “best” pitcher in the game. Even the name “Cy Young Award” honors the man who is the all-time leader in categories that are the province solely of starting pitchers, categories like Games Started, Complete Games, Innings Pitched, Wins and Wins Above Replacement.

In fact, starting pitchers do account for the large majority of CYA winners. It’s been more than twenty years since a reliever claimed the award, and only nine of the 129 recipients to date have been relief specialists. However, eight of those nine were chosen in a 19 year period (1974-92), amounting to over 20% of the picks for those seasons. What would the choices have been in those seasons if only starting pitchers were eligible for the award?

To answer that question, it is instructive to consider the starting pitchers who have been chosen as CYA winners. In all but the recent past, voters have been guided by traditional, non-sabermetric, statistics and, of these, the most influential have been Wins, Win-Loss %, ERA and Strikeouts. Additionally, voters have strongly favored pitchers on winning teams, presumably on the premise that pitchers on losing teams, however strong their performance may have been, could not have been that valuable, since their teams still lost a majority their games. Thus, in choosing our alternate CYA winners, I will try to emulate how voters at the time might have voted, not how we might vote today with access to an immensity of sabermetric data (that is a topic for another post).

On that topic of sabermetric statistics, it is interesting to note that none of the first seven CYA winners (for 1956 to 1962) led their league in Pitcher WAR, or pWAR. In fact, only one of those first seven honorees even finished in his league’s top 5 in pWAR for the season in question. Instead, six of the seven led their league in Wins (Vern Law being the exception), and six of the seven played on pennant winners (Don Drysdale excepted, and he played on a team that lost a pennant playoff). Even in the “enlightened” times of the present day, it is noteworthy that 34 of the 50 award recipients since 2001 placed first of second in their league in Wins, and a large majority played on teams with 88 or more wins, or fourteen games above .500.

So, who would have been the CYA winners if only starting pitchers were eligible for the award? These are my picks:

• 2003 NL – Replacing Eric Gagne in his 55 save season is the Cubs‘ Mark Prior, with an 18-6 record and 2.43 ERA for a Chicago side that possibly came within an outstretched glove of the pennant. Those totals were good for 2nd in Wins and Win-Loss %, and 3rd in ERA and CYA votes. He also placed 1st in the sabermetric categories of pWAR and FIP.
• 1992 AL – Replacing Dennis Eckersley in his 51 save season is Jack McDowell of the White Sox. He posted a 20-10 record with a career best 3.18 ERA for a Sox team that finished 3rd in the AL West with an 86-76 record. McDowell was one win shy of the league leaders, and he did lead the majors in complete games for the second year in a row. He also finished 2nd in CYA voting that year, and 1st the next season when he led the majors in Wins for a division-winning Sox side.
• 1989 NL – Replacing Mark Davis in his 44 save season (46% of his career total) is Greg Maddux with a 19-12 record and 2.95 ERA for the surprise NL East champion Cubs in their only .500 season in an eight year span (1985-92). The wins were good for 2nd in the league, but that ERA failed to crack the top ten. Nevertheless, in just his third full season, CYA voters still ranked Maddux 3rd on their ballots.
• 1987 NL – Replacing Steve Bedrosian in his 40 save season is Rick Sutcliffe of the Cubs, with an 18-10 record and 3.68 ERA. As noted above, the Cubs were a sub-.500 team that year, but started the season strongly, with a 33-24 record after taking a pair of nail-biters from the defending world champion Mets in June. Sutcliffe’s 18 wins led the league, and his career best 6.0 WAR ranked 3rd, good for a runner-up finish in CYA voting for the 1984 honoree.
• 1984 AL – Replacing Willie Hernandez in his MVP season of 140 relief IP and 1.92 ERA for the world champion Tigers is your choice of Jack Morris, ace of those same Tigers, or the Orioles‘ Mike Boddicker. Boddicker’s 20 wins and 2.79 ERA both led the league, but Baltimore finished no higher than 5th in the AL East despite a respectable 85-77 record. Morris was right behind Boddicker with 19 wins for the wire-to-wire AL East champions who, despite their legendary 35-5 start, held just a 3½ game lead after a mini-swoon that dropped their record to only 39-13 (.750) on June 6th.
• 1981 AL – Replacing Rollie Fingers with his majors-leading 28 saves (remember this was a strike-shortened season) is Steve McCatty of the AL West champion Athletics. McCatty led his league in Wins, ERA and Shutouts and placed 2nd in CYA voting. McCatty and teammate Rick Langford both completed 70% of their starts, as Oakland, for the second year in a row, boasted two such qualified pitchers; those are the only such teams of the integration era.
• 1979 NL – Replacing Bruce Sutter in his 37 save season is J.R. Richard with an 18-13 record, 2.71 ERA and 313 strikeouts for an Astros team recording a then franchise record 89 wins and 2nd place finish in the NL West. That ERA led the majors as did his strikeouts, FIP and H/9, the last three for the second year in a row. The Astros would finally make it to the post-season the following year, but sadly without Richard, after a stroke in that 1980 season cut short his promising career.
• 1977 AL – Replacing Sparky Lyle in his 13 win, 26 save season is Jim Palmer with a 20-11 record and 2.91 ERA in a league-leading 319 IP. This was Palmer’s third straight 20 win season, part of a run of eight 20 win seasons in nine years (1970-78) to match Warren Spahn‘s feat in the NL from 1953 to 1961. A CYA in this season would have been Palmer’s fourth, and third in a row, feats matched by only Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson.
• 1974 NL – Mike Marshall posted a 15 win season with record-breaking totals of 106 games pitched, all in relief, and 208⅓ IP, the last a total that most starting pitchers no longer reach. In his place goes Phil Niekro with his own league-leading marks of 20 wins, 18 complete games and 302⅓ IP, as well as a second-ranked 2.38 ERA. This was Niekro’s age 35 season and the first of six straight 6 WAR campaigns; his 65.5 WAR aged 35 and older remains the all-time record.

So, those are my picks. What about yours?

In Part 2, I’ll go back in time to the CYA’s first eleven seasons, when just one pitcher was chosen as the best of both leagues. Who might the other winners have been if there had been a CYA for each league in those seasons?