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Britton’s Cy Young case complicated by voting trends
- Updated: August 18, 2016
If there’s been a hot topic around baseball over the past week, it’s this: “Could [or should] Zach Britton win the American League Cy Young Award?”
It’s fun to think about, because Britton is a great closer having a wonderful season, and it’s pretty hard to look past that sparkling 0.54 ERA. Furthermore, the AL race is a complete mess without a clear front-runner. Right now, there’s different leaders in ERA (Michael Fulmer, 2.25), FIP (Corey Kluber, 3.01), innings pitched (David Price, 169 2/3), strikeout percentage (Chris Archer, 27.8), average against (Marco Estrada, .190), wins (J.A. Happ, 17) and so on — to say nothing of other pitchers with strong overall cases like Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Aaron Sanchez, Danny Duffy and Cole Hamels.
That being the case, the door does seem ajar for Britton, assuming he remains essentially perfect through the remainder of the season. But regardless of whether you think he should win the award, the more pertinent question is whether he could win the award, and that seems like a pretty tough bar to clear given the recent behavior of Cy Young Award voters — and we can explain why.
Most discussions of whether a reliever could win the award will point back to the times in recent history that a reliever has won it, like Dennis Eckersley in 1992 or Eric Gagne in 2003. But as MLB.com’s Tom Tango has argued, the baseball world has changed so much in terms of how wins and saves are (or more accurately, aren’t) valued that it’s difficult to look back at long-ago ballots and suggest they have a great deal of relevance today. For example, if the 2005 AL Cy Young Award voting was redone today, would Bartolo Colon (21-8, 3.48 ERA, 17.3 percent strikeout rate) again beat Johan Santana (16-7, 2.87, 26.2)? Probably not.
In terms of how voters are likely to consider a reliever today, looking back to how they’ve behaved since 2010 seems to be of the most use, for two reasons. First of all, that was the year that Felix Hernandez famously won the AL Cy Young Award with …
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