Quantity Is No Longer Job No. 1

Let’s play a little guessing game. See if you can identify the pitchers who produced the two seasons below.

Got your guesses ready? Awesome. The answer is… after the break.

Both of these seasons are Paul Skenes. Season A is his 2024 campaign with the Pirates, which was good enough to earn him a spot on the NL Cy Young podium alongside Zack Wheeler and Chris Sale. Season B was 2023, Skenes’ junior year at LSU, when he won a national championship, grew a mustache, broke the SEC single-season strikeout record, and took home a hatful of trophies including College World Series Most Outstanding Player.

In Skenes’ first major league season, he threw only 10 1/3 more innings than he did in his last college season, faced only 11% more batters. His last college season, it bears repeating, ended in June.

I’m sure you’re old enough to remember the debate over Blake Snell’s first Cy Young campaign in 2018. It just so happens that one of our own, Jeff Sullivan, was a dissenting voter in a very close race. He voted for Justin Verlander, who lost out by a razor-thin margin: Four first-place votes, and just 15 total points.

Verlander being involved in a close Cy Young race is nothing unusual. The future Hall of Famer has won the award unanimously twice, but he’s received at least one first-place vote on five other occasions. Three of those races — a win over Gerrit Cole in 2019 and losses to David Price in 2012 and Rick Porcello in 2016 — were even closer than the split decision against Snell.

But what set 2018 apart was the sea change Snell’s Cy Young challenge represented. He threw only 180 2/3 innings that season, becoming the first starter to throw fewer than 200 innings and win a Cy Young in a full season. (So, not counting various strike-shortened campaigns, or Clayton Kershaw’s 27-start MVP year in 2014.)

The 2018 AL Cy Young race was also unusual in that everyone involved seemed to be aware that they were living through a historical watershed moment. Starting pitcher usage had been on the decline for decades, but 2018 was the moment the dam broke and the 200-inning norm was swept away for good.

Verlander himself was instrumental in defining that award race as a referendum on the value of quantity, and Jeff’s contemporaneous award explainer column was grounded in the question of what Verlander’s 33-inning advantage actually meant. He concluded that it was close, but Verlander had been the more valuable pitcher. I didn’t have a vote that year, but I wrote an awards column for The Ringer, in which I came down on the other side of the fence: Snell had been better, if only by a small margin.

For those of you who like irony, I also linked to a story I’d done on Snell earlier that year, in which he talked about how important the 200-inning mark was to him as a personal goal. Six years and two Cy Youngs later, 180 2/3 innings remains Snell’s career high, but he might get there eventually.

All of that is to say: This was only six years ago. We’ve gone from a world in which it was groundbreaking and controversial to have a 180-inning Cy Young winner, to a world in which a 133-inning pitcher is a Cy Young finalist, all in the time since Rihanna released her last LP.

I have no advance knowledge of how the Cy Young voting is going to go. (I tried to poll the electorate, but the most common response I got was “No, I don’t want to buy solar panels! How did you get this number?”) With that said, I expect Sale to win, with Wheeler second (in accordance with federal statute) and Skenes a somewhat distant third.

Most of the time, when a pitcher ends up third in Cy Young voting, none of the voters actually thought he was the best pitcher in the league. This time around, Sale and Wheeler do genuinely seem to be a step above everyone else, but you can’t just put two names on the ballot — you have to vote for five pitchers.

I think there’s a quite reasonable argument for Skenes in third place. For starters, despite his late start to the season, he was sixth in WAR among NL starters. His ERA, 1.96, was positively eye-popping. He struck out a greater percentage of opponents than any NL pitcher with 100 or more innings, with the exception of Snell. And he posted that gaudy strikeout rate while allowing a lower opponent batting average than Sale and a lower walk rate than Wheeler.

Also, Skenes started the All-Star game, which means bupkis in terms of actual performance but speaks to his importance in telling the story of the 2024 season. Awards don’t just reward merit, they tell the story of a season. I’d argue that Skenes was the most memorable and buzzworthy starting pitcher in either league this year. That probably shouldn’t matter when it comes to the top spot on the ballot, but in a race for third against some guy with a mid-3.00s ERA who threw only 180 innings anyway? Yeah, I’d probably knock Cristopher Sánchez or Sonny Gray down a notch.

Which speaks to the real issue here. In 2018, the voters made the collective choice (barely) to change the norms for the minimum innings total for a Cy Young season by a starting pitcher. A similar norm shift is not how Skenes got on the podium.

I went back through the Cy Young vote totals for a fun fact that’s going to appear a couple paragraphs from now, and if you’ve got a few minutes to kill, I recommend you do the same. Because it’s a treasure trove of Remembering Some Guys. Brad Penny! Hisashi Iwakuma finished third in 2013! Ian Kennedy got a first-place vote in 2011 somehow! What a delight.

The point is: Through the 2010s, voters had some bench depth in terms of starting pitchers who combined quantity and quality on a level required of a Cy Young candidate. The 10th-best starter in the NL might have thrown 220 innings and won 18 games, and picked up an odd third-place vote from a hometown beat writer.

That’s not the case anymore. Do you want to know how many pitchers put up a 5.0 WAR season in 2024? Three: Sale, Wheeler, and presumptive AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. That’s it.

I don’t think there are fewer good pitchers now than there were 20 years ago, or even that the problem is necessarily that they’re getting pulled in the fifth or sixth inning rather than the seventh or eighth. That might explain a shift from the 220-inning Cy Young winner to the 180-inning Cy Young winner. But now, so many starters are on workload restrictions, or missing half the season due to injury, that there are more slots on the Cy Young ballot than there are great pitchers who stayed in the rotation all year.

The first Cy Young Award went to Don Newcombe of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956, and as much as we think old-timey pitchers all threw 400 innings a year, his workload would not have been out of place at the turn of the 21st Century. Newcombe threw 268 innings and faced 1,052 batters that year; 2003 Cy Young winner Roy Halladay threw 266 innings, and Verlander threw 251 innings in his Cy Young campaign of 2011. Price faced more than 1,000 batters in a season as recently as 2014.

There are a million ways to express this sentiment, so I tried to find a new one: In Newcombe’s Cy Young year, 241 pitchers appeared in the major leagues, facing a total of 95,233 batters and recording 66,285 outs. That’s 395 batters faced and 275 outs per major league pitcher.

Thanks to expansion, both in terms of teams and games played per team, it took roughly twice as many outs to get through the 2024 season. But three and a half times as many pitchers were required to do it. In 2024, the average major league pitcher faced just 213 batters and recorded 151 outs.

So if the innings threshold for the Cy Young were still 200 — which is what we were arguing about six years ago — you’d have your choice of four pitchers: Wheeler, Logan Webb, Seth Lugo, and Logan Gilbert. Literally not enough to fill out even a single ballot between the two leagues.

Only 20 pitchers even got to Snell’s then-controversial innings total of 180 2/3. Using that innings cutoff, the sixth-most valuable pitcher in the National League this year, according to WAR, was Brandon Pfaadt, who had an ERA of 4.71.

At that point, why bother with a Cy Young ballot?

Listing all the standard disclaimers for WAR — it’s not a precise instrument, don’t just copy the leaderboard for your award ballot, etc. — it is broadly designed to solve the kind of problem posed by the Cy Young Award: Value as a combination of quantity and quality.

So how about this: Two of the top 10 pitcher WAR totals in baseball this year — Skenes and Garrett Crochet — didn’t pitch the 162 innings necessary to qualify for the ERA title. Nor did five other pitchers in the top 25.

A decade ago, the reductio ad absurdum version of the Snell case would’ve gone something like, “Well, if a pitcher with a sub-2.00 ERA only throws 120 innings, would you vote for him over a 200-inning pitcher?”

Now? Yeah, I guess. There aren’t enough good 200-inning pitchers to fill out a five-man ballot for each league. Life gets more ad absurdum with each passing year.

It should not go unnoticed that the American League has a relief pitcher among the Cy Young finalists for the first time since “Cy Young finalist” became a thing. Emmanuel Clase — who’s putting his entire body weight on the disclaimer that award votes do not take the postseason into account — posted a 0.61 ERA and saved 47 games in 50 attempts. WAR doesn’t quite measure the impact of a closer; nevertheless, Clase banked 2.2 WAR in just 74 1/3 innings, and his WPA was the highest of any pitcher in baseball by almost two wins.

This is the first top-5 finish by a reliever since Zack Britton in 2016, and the highest finish by a reliever since 2006 NL Cy Young runner-up Trevor Hoffman. (This is the fun fact I was alluding to earlier, when I got distracted by Brad Penny.)

And you know what? Why the hell not? If high-volume starting pitchers are dying out, we might as well recognize exceptional performances in lower innings totals. That could mean pitchers like Skenes, who dominate in two-thirds of a season, or a lights-out closer like Clase. I mean, you’ve got to vote for somebody.