Max Scherzer Is Going to Win the Cy Young, And That’s Okay

When the American League Cy Young Award winner is announced on Wednesday night, Detroit’s Max Scherzer is almost certainly going to defeat Yu Darvish of the Rangers and Seattle’s Hisashi Iwakuma, potentially by a lot. Look at those wins! Twenty one of them, against only three losses! There’s absolutely no question that some percentage of the voters are going to simply see “21-3 for a playoff team” and cast their ballot without a second thought. It’s sad, even infuriating, but it’s true. Even though pitcher wins don’t matter, even though we’ve made progress from things like peak-level Johan Santana losing out to Bartolo Colon in 2005 because the Twins weren’t very good that year, in this context: yeah, they still do.

That fact of life has caused a nearly unlimited amount of aggravation among many of us, but it can also obscure this very important truth: just because Scherzer had the best record and we hate that many voters will focus on that, it doesn’t automatically mean that he’s not actually the best pitcher in the American League. He might be, or he might not be — there’s plenty of candidates — but nor is his likely victory going to be some sort of travesty.

That’s partially because of the non-win numbers, which we’ll get to in a second, but partially because even though wins tell you almost nothing about a pitcher’s skill, it’s still really, really hard to do what Scherzer did and not be among the best pitchers in baseball. For example, since the Cy Young was first given out to Don Newcombe in 1956, only five starters have done the same as what Scherzer did this year — collect at least 12 wins and have at least seven times as many wins as losses, basically fulfilling the “oh my lord look at his record I have the vapors now” requirement:

Year	Name	Wins	Losses
2013	Scherzer	21	3
2008	Lee	22	2
1995	Maddux	19	2
1995	Johnson	18	2
1981	Seaver	14	2
1978	Guidry	25	3

Cliff Lee, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, and Ron Guidry all won the Cy Young in those years, as you’d expect, and Tom Seaver might have done the same had he not run into the rookie season of Fernando Valenzuela, though they each received the same amount of first-place votes.

Now look at those same pitchers in terms of RA9-WAR, and where they ranked among their leagues:

Year	Name	RA9-WAR	League Rank
2013	Scherzer	6.2	3
2008	Lee	8.3	1
1995	Maddux	11.0	1
1995	Johnson	8.5	1
1981	Seaver	5	5
1978	Guidry	11.5	1

Other than Seaver, who somehow lucked his way into a .218 BABIP that season with a career-worst 4.71 K/9, each of those pitchers were actually either the best pitchers in their league by RA9-WAR or very close to it. They had a ton of wins and few losses, but they earned it through excellence — as well as, of course, playing for quality teams. (Four of the six went to the playoffs.)

Scherzer, you’ll notice, isn’t at the top of his league. Iwakuma was, and a popular argument for his candidacy is that in five more innings than Scherzer, he allowed four fewer runs, though that seems to be lost without a whole lot of context. If you back Iwakuma, RA9-WAR is a great way to do it. But if you prefer Scherzer, who finished a still-excellent third in RA9-WAR, you can point to the fact that he trounced Iwakuma in FIP-WAR (6.4 — 4.2) and had the lowest OBP against and lowest OPS, which is good if your definition of “best pitcher” is “allowed the fewest baserunners.” That’s not to say there’s a right answer or a wrong answer, just that the race is really so close that you can make the numbers support whomever you like.

You can still have other favorites for this year’s AL Cy, too, even beyond the three finalists. If you like ERA or FIP, you can easily support Scherzer’s Detroit teammate Anibal Sanchez, who managed to keep even more runs off the board in front of that same lousy Tigers infield defense. If you like K/BB ratio, no one even made it to 5.00 other than David Price, who had 5.59. Prefer the simplicity of missing bats? No one did it better than Darvish, either by SwStr% or by K/9, especially when he just had the third-best K/9 season by anyone other than Johnson since 1900. xFIP? That’s the great Felix Hernandez. Or if you still like quality starts for some reason, James Shields had the best percentage. All that, and we haven’t even touched on what a good year Chris Sale had.

This isn’t like the National League where Clayton Kershaw is going to just destroy the competition; here, there’s something like five or six different American League pitchers with valid cases to be made. I absolutely see the case for Iwakuma, for example, and if Sanchez had pitched more innings, I might be backing him. For me, it came down tightly to Darvish and Scherzer, and I very narrowly came out Scherzer, but your milage may vary in several directions.

I’ll get on board with the idea that Scherzer probably doesn’t deserve to win by the amount that he’s going to. But just because he’s the best at something we discard doesn’t mean he’s not the best at the things that matter, too.