The Greatest Non-Cy Young Seasons in History

Bryce Harper won the National League Most Valuable Player this season, and the vote was unanimous. Kris Bryant won the NL Rookie of the Year, and the vote was unanimous. Josh Donaldson‘s American League MVP victory wasn’t quite as clear-cut — 23 to seven over Mike Trout — and Dallas Keuchel’s AL Cy Young even less so — 22 to eight over David Price.

Still, most of the major award victories were fairly one-sided, and they all came down to just two parties duking it out for the top spot. And this is how it usually goes. Occasionally, there’s some discrepancy between the last couple candidates, but more often than not it’s pretty clear who will take home the hardware at year end. If there is any controversy, it’s almost always between just two guys. Very rarely do you see three players eligible for the same award, all of which with a legitimate case to win.

And yet, the 2015 NL Cy Young vote looked like this:

Jake Arrieta emerged victorious, in my opinion rightfully so, but it’s clear by the vote that there was no obvious winner. And it probably came as a surprise to some that Clayton Kershaw didn’t receive more top-two votes and make the race even closer than it actually was.

I mean, Jake Arrieta finished with an ERA that started with a one, and had one of the best second halves in baseball history. Zack Greinke finished with an ERA that started with a one, and it was the lowest we’d seen since Greg Maddux in ’95. Clayton Kershaw finished with a FIP that started with a one, and it was the second consecutive year we’d seen him do that. The ERA wasn’t much higher.

Trying to pick an obvious winner from those three is like trying to pick which duffle bag full of $100 bills you want to take home without having the chance to count every last note. Just close your eyes and pick at random. Either way you’re walking out of that room with a big bag full of money.

It’s great that Arrieta won, because he totally deserved it, but it’s an equal bummer that Greinke and Kershaw didn’t win, because they totally deserved it, too. It’s a shame that seasons like the ones Greinke and Kershaw just had will go down in the record books unrecognized, solely because “sweet lord the caliber of the pitching talent in baseball today is unbelievable what a time to be alive whiffs everywhere.”

The consolation prize for Greinke and Kershaw is that they’re not alone, and they don’t have to go unrecognized. We just witnessed one of the greatest trios of single-season pitching performances in baseball history, so let’s give the runners-up of present and past their due.

There’s an issue with attempting to do an exercise like this with pitchers, and it’s the same struggle I had when examining the historical nature of Kershaw’s five-year stretch earlier in the month. The issue, of course, is how radically pitcher usage has changed in the last half century. It’s nearly impossible to rack up 10+ WAR as a pitcher these days, because in order to so you almost have to throw 250+ innings, and that just doesn’t happen anymore. So instead of using one methodology to determine the greatest non-Cy Young winning seasons in history, I’ve used several. It’s up to you to decide which one you like best. This post isn’t going to have a definitive answer. It’s all about perspective.

The way I’ve done things here is examined all qualified pitcher seasons since 1967, which is when they started giving out a Cy Young Award to each league. That decision seems pretty foolproof. Then, I’ve selected the top 20 pitcher seasons, using three different methods.

The first is simply by ERA and FIP, of course using ERA- and FIP- to adjust for park factors and the era’s run environment. There’s no unanimous agreement whether it’s better to use ERA or FIP to determine a pitcher’s value, so instead we’ll use a split of the two. The ones who rise to the top are the ones who prevented runs at an elite rate, and also overpowered batters with elite strikeout, walk and home run figures. The second method is by WAR. This, of course, gives more weight to workload, and less weight to overall dominance. Again, we use a mix between ERA (rWAR) and FIP (fWAR). The third method, and the one I like the best, is a mixture of the first two methods! Mixtures everywhere! Using some quick math, we can determine standard deviations above the mean from each of the first two methods and use a split of those two z-scores to give us a ranking that weighs both dominance, by ERA and FIP, and workload, by WAR.

Boring explanation, over and out. Sortable tables!

We begin with the ERA and FIP method, which reveals that Pedro Martinez’s 2003 season was the most dominant qualified pitcher season in history not to win a Cy Young, as he lost to Roy Halladay in the voting. Of course, this immediately reveals the one flaw in relying solely on ERA and FIP, in that it ignores innings. The reason Halladay won the award, despite a combined ERA/FIP that was 20% worse than Pedro’s, is that Halladay threw 266 innings that year — 80 more than Martinez.

In Kershaw’s case, one finds that only four pitchers in the Cy Young era have ever posted a better combined ERA/FIP and not won a Cy Young. In Greinke’s case, one finds that nobody has ever posted a better adjusted ERA and not won a Cy Young.

As one might expect, when we switch over to WAR, a bunch of seasons from 40 years ago jump to the top of the list. The 2003 Pedro season from above disappears entirely. Pedro’s runner-up, 1990 Roger Clemens, drops from second to eighth.

But Kershaw remains! Kershaw’s 232.2 innings pitched led the major leagues this season, and so he was able to accumulate enough WAR — both by ERA and FIP — to stay in the top 20.

Now, for the table I find most interesting. Taking into consideration both overall dominance and workload, we find that Kershaw and Greinke each have a case for two of the 20 greatest pitching seasons in the last half-century to not win a Cy Young Award. Kershaw slots one spot ahead of the ’03 Martinez season in our first table, as his 50-inning advantage over Martinez is barely enough to outweigh the five percent deficit in combined ERA/FIP.

Our all-time greatest pitching season to not win the Cy Young is Tom Seaver’s 1971 season, in which he posted a combined ERA/FIP 44 percent better than league average — he was essentially as dominant as Kershaw and Greinke this year — while pitching 286 innings. That year, Seaver was edged out by Fergie Jenkins, who finished with a 69 ERA-/FIP- over an unthinkable 325 innings.

Sorting this final table by year brings us to our conclusion, which is that Greinke and Kershaw’s seasons stand the test of time, with regards to multiple historical pitching seasons in the same year not being recognized with a Cy Young. The last time two pitchers had years like the ones Kershaw and Greinke just had and came away empty-handed was 2003, when Pedro lost to Halladay and Mark Prior lost to Eric Gagne. Not since Greg Maddux and Kevin Brown lost to Tom Glavine in ’98 has Major League Baseball seen a more historical trio of pitching seasons in the same league than the ones that Jake Arrieta, Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw just had, and nothing like that had ever happened before then. Greinke and Kershaw may go down as runners-up, but they should be remembered as some of the greatest runners-up the game has ever seen.

For those interested, the full spreadsheet used for this post with all 3,915 pitcher seasons since 1967 — Cy Young winners and all — can be found right here.