Is the AL Cy Young Race Cole’s or Too Close To Call?

Last week, Jay Jaffe wrote about the NL Cy Young race and its lack of a clear frontrunner. What struck me about the NL crop of pitchers is that each top candidate has excelled in a specific category that could cater to a certain class of voters. Do you heavily weigh peripheral stats like FIP and strikeouts? If so, you’d probably vote for Spencer Strider, who leads the NL in K/9, K%, K-BB%, FIP, xFIP, SIERA, swinging-strike rate, and CSW%. If you value run prevention over all else, then Justin Steele and Blake Snell, the only big league pitchers with ERAs below 2.50, are your guys. Voters who value both excellence and volume may choose to select Logan Webb or Zac Gallen, who lead the way in innings pitched with solid ERA and FIP numbers. While they (along with NL WAR leader Zack Wheeler) are all close in pitching prowess, odds are I could guess who would come first on your ballot if you gave me a pie chart of your perceived importance of ERA, peripherals, and volume.

The AL race is a bit different. There are deserving candidates who are strong in individual areas of the game, but none stand out as elite compared to top pitchers in previous seasons. Consider Gerrit Cole, whose 187 innings and 2.79 ERA (66 ERA-) pace the AL. He’s on pace to reach the 200-inning threshold for the sixth time in his career, but just last year, 19 qualified hurlers averaged at least as many innings per start as Cole, including several guys who came nowhere near award contention. And while his 66 ERA- is impressive, it’s the worst AL-leading ERA- since 2016, when Rick Porcello led with a mark of 71 as one of the more underwhelming Cy Young winners in recent memory. Before that, you have to go back to 2007 to find a worse top of the class in the junior circuit.

Even though Cole doesn’t compare to premier seasons of yesteryear (including many of his own), he’s still locked in as a top candidate this year and the likely frontrunner. He hasn’t had a better single-season ERA since his legendary 2019 campaign, when he struck out 326 batters and lost a narrow Cy Young race to Justin Verlander. But he’s kept runs off the board despite fewer strikeouts than is custom for him. For the first time since discovering the power of his elevated fastball, Cole has struck out fewer than 30% of batters faced. And while no ERA estimator has him below 3.30, the batted ball data suggests that may not be a fluke. His barrel rate, which has sat between the 15th and 25th percentile over the past three years, has been almost exactly average in 2023, along with his hard-hit rate allowed. Because of this, he’s kept a greater share of fly balls in the yard of any season since his days in Pittsburgh.

According to our new Cy Young projection system, Cole is running away with the award. Per ZiPS’ forecasting, his lead in traditional Cy Young Points (CYP) over second-place Luis Castillo is the same as the gap between Castillo and seventh-place Zach Eflin. FIP-based CYP still has Cole in the lead, mostly due to his league-leading innings total, but there, he’s only narrowly ahead of Kevin Gausman. Gausman’s season feels quite similar to his 2022, when he earned just a single fifth-place vote despite leading the league in FIP thanks to elite strikeout and walk numbers.

This year, Gausman is also underperforming his league-leading FIP with uninspiring contact quality numbers. In many ways, his profile is a poor man’s Strider: better walk and homer numbers, but miles behind in whiffs and strikeouts. He also allows hard contact at a rate that makes Cole look like Tom Glavine. And while he’s limited the long ball effectively, hitters have squared up his pitches to the tune of an 18th-percentile barrel rate and .411 xwOBAcon, 40 points worse than league average. A possible cause of this is pitch mix diversity; Gausman lacks a consistent third offering besides his fastball and splitter. Hitters who correctly guess on the split can ambush it despite its elite movement; per Statcast, its run value per 100 has been cut by a factor of five compared to just two seasons ago.

Two other names that appear high on the FIP-based CYP leaderboard are Twins co-aces Sonny Gray and Pablo López. Gray is the only AL pitcher with both an ERA and FIP below 3.00. But while most star pitchers dominate with some combination of stuff and command, he hasn’t demonstrated great numbers in either. His K%+ sits at just 104, the lowest of anyone sniffing award contention besides George Kirby, who’s on pace for the 10th lowest BB/9 of any starter since integration. Gray, on the other hand, has issued just 8% fewer walks than the average pitcher.

What keeps Gray at the top of the leaderboard is a league-leading 0.38 HR/9 thanks to a 5% HR/FB rate; no other AL starter has a rate lower than 10.5%. While he does dominate the leaderboards in vertical drop on his curveball and sweeper, giving them properties that could limit damage on aerial contact, it’s unlikely that his outlier HR/FB rate is purely the result of skill, especially since his career numbers are right in line with league averages. Gray is above average in barrel avoidance and inducing ground balls, but it’s fair to say his 4.05 SIERA, 3.79 xERA, and 3.75 xFIP more accurately represent his season than his ERA and FIP do.

López’s debut season in Minnesota has been terrific, and he has found a new gear of late. In eight starts since the beginning of August, he’s posted a 1.62 ERA, culminating in the best start of his career: 14 strikeouts over eight shutout innings against the Mets. He’s on pace to set career bests in xERA, SIERA, strikeout rate, WAR, and innings. The new sweeper he introduced this season has worked wonders, holding batters to just a .223 wOBA against. But the biggest improvement has come with his fastball. By adding about an inch of induced vertical break and throwing it three inches higher, he’s transformed it from a tool to set up his changeup into an elite whiff pitch; its 15.6% swinging-strike rate ranks near the likes of Bryce Miller and Freddy Peralta. His ability to get batters swinging at heaters above the zone has enabled a career-high chase rate, and along with it, substantial improvements in walk rate and contact quality. His 3.02 xERA leads the majors, narrowly edging out Strider. López may not be a top candidate at the moment, but could well play himself up the leaderboard with his last few starts of the season.

There are several other candidates in a similar echelon, separated by only a few tenths of a run of ERA or a fraction of a win. Castillo ranks second in traditional CYP with an eerily similar profile to Cole. Both have nearly identical strikeout and walk rates and have overperformed their peripherals, but Castillo has been burned by homers on some mistake secondary pitches. His changeup, once the highlight of his arsenal and among the best in the league, has allowed five homers and a .445 slugging percentage; Cole’s changeup is also rather ineffective, but he uses it less than half as often as Castillo. For the third year in a row, Framber Valdez has proven the effectiveness of spamming the strike zone with pitches that have freakish downward movement. But this year, he’s seen career worsts in groundball rate, flyball rate, and home runs allowed. He’ll primarily be getting down-ballot votes from those who value his innings total, as he and Cole are the only AL pitchers on pace to crack 200. Kirby, Eflin, and Logan Gilbert all have outside cases thanks to their ludicrously low walk rates, and all rank in the top eight in WAR.

Here’s a list of the top 10 in ZiPS-projected CYP, along with their relevant stats this season. I’ve also included jERA, a stat of Jay’s creation which averages ERA, xERA, and FIP.

In recent memory, we’ve had landmark Cy Young votes that signaled progress made in our understanding of the game. Félix Hernández and Jacob deGrom helped hammer the nails into the coffin for the pitcher win statistic. Zack Greinke’s 2009 win, among others, cemented the fact that pitching excellence could be rewarded even if it wasn’t accompanied by team success. Just two years ago, ERA leader and FIP record-setter Corbin Burnes won a close race with Wheeler, who was clearly behind in rate stats but had tossed nearly 50 more innings.

If Strider wins the NL award, perhaps we’ll look back on 2023 as the year voters decided factors that pitchers have complete control over, like strikeouts and walks, are overwhelmingly the most important. This AL race certainly won’t be one of those; the candidates are too close (five hurlers are separated by less than a tenth of a run of jERA) and don’t stand out enough in any individual facets of the game that could separate voters along ideological lines. At the moment, it seems likely that after years of setting strikeout records and being the posterboy of this new, high-octane era of pitching, Cole will take home his first Cy Young award. But each possible winner has excelled in their own way and would be well-deserving of their trophy.