Why Closers Can’t Win the Cy Young Award

Intro nobody likes relief pitchers compared to their starting counterparts they clearly don't get as much love they don't get paid big contracts they aren't represented well in the allstar game and it's nearly impossible for them to win the sa Young Award but why Emanuel CL has an RA of less than one leave the league and saves is on one of the best teams in the league and still he will not win the award on the outside it looks like he's one of the best pitchers in the league when you dive into it a little deeper though you see that he's fighting a pretty heavy uphill battle relievers have won the sa Young Award before but the last time it happened was in 2003 when Eric G of the Los Angeles Dodgers took home the award so what changed in the past 20 years to make it impossible in today's game well that's what I'm here to find out today why can't relief pitchers win the S Young by the way only 2% of you watching this video are subscribed if you like the video consider subscribing it's completely free and you can always unsubscribe at any time to get an idea Past winners of what makes a Sai Young Award winner today let's look back on the Last 5 Years we have Garrett Cole Blake Snell Justin Verlander Sandy Alcantara Robbie Ray Corbin Burns Shane Bieber Trevor bow Justin Verlander again and Jacob deg Grom seven of these seasons have something in common they LED their respective leagues in BW War this makes sense since bwar is a number that represents how valuable a player is to his team so the most valuable pitchers typically are going to be at the top of the sa young voting when we look at the war leaders by year they are very rarely not winning the young or at least finishing as the runner up Mike Miner was the only one in the past 5 years to not finish in the top two it's pretty clear that in this day and age of Statistics in baseball BW war is a good statistic to use to predict sa Young Award winners now that we know this let's look at every single sa Young Award winner in history and compare them using their BW War right away you can kind of see that this data takes a funnel shape where it starts out with a widespread of war and then Narrows down as you go further on in time there's a pretty interesting explanation for this and I will get into that a little bit later for now though this is quite a bit of data and it's hard to draw any more conclusions from this let's focus on some of the least valuable sa young seasons of all time pitchers who finished with less than five War but still got the award there were nine times where a reliever won the sa Young Award and all nine Seasons fall under this category Bruce sudor Willie Hernandez Raley fingers Mark Davis Sparky Lyall Mike Marshall Steve bedran danis Eckersley and the aformentioned Eric G these nine Seasons all finished with under five War one thing that clearly stands out to me when looking at this graph is the line you can draw right about here where all of a sudden the frequency of these lower War sa young winners drops significantly The Only Winners to the right of this line are Eric G A reliever the two 2020 winners in the 60 Game season and two of the most controversial winners since the turn of the century in Baro colog and Rick porcel the reasoning behind this is It's all about the VALUE pretty simple more advanced metrics started to pick up in popularity around the league and War was one of them it wasn't just about wins and ra anymore voters and fans were starting to care more about the overall value a player provided rather than a few basic stats that didn't really do a great job at evaluating a player's performance this leads to very few winners that have low War like these guys do that also explains this funnel phenomenon that we saw in this graph the Sai Young winners aren't going to be down here anymore because those seasons are not valuable enough there isn't any more up here because these outlier Seasons that we saw before are a lot harder to achieve in the modern game the gap between the best pitcher in the league and a replacement level one is smaller on average there are so many good pitchers in the league it's kind of hard to stand out that significantly anymore so we've established that in order to win the Sai Young in today's game you need to be a valuable player starting pitchers are seemingly much more valuable than relievers they get the big contracts they get the recognition and they get the Sai Young Awards but why what makes them so much more valuable than a reliever or closer a closer pitch is arguably the most important times of a game so shouldn't they be a little bit closer to them a big factor in More innings = more VALUE calculating a player's value is the amount of time that a player plays this makes sense think of a player that gets injured halfway through the season and misses half of the year they aren't going to be as valuable as a player that played all 162 games closers these days don't pitch nearly the same amount of innings that starters do but it wasn't always this way here's a graph of the highest Innings pitch each season by a closing pitcher I defined a closing pitcher as a pitcher that never started a game and got at least 10 saves in that season it doesn't take much of a mathematician to see a trend here clearly closing pitchers are pitching a lot less than they used to 50 years ago in today's game the top closer in terms of innings is going to be right around 80 and it seems to have flattened out as of now starters on the other hand are still out there pitching 180 190 even 200 plus Innings every single year the top starting pitcher in the league typically pitches over two times the amount of innings than the top closer of course this huge gap in Innings is also going to lead to a huge gap in value here is a graph of the most valuable starting pitcher versus the most valuable relief pitcher in each season the data in the 1900s is a lot more noisy and the relievers are sometimes very close to the starters but around 1990 you can see this gap between the two really start to establish itself as the starters and relievers evolved into what we see today and if we overlay that with the Innings graph you can see that the value Gap corresponds pretty well with the drop of the Innings by relievers so so war is a pretty good indicator of who's going to win the sa young and there is a significant Gap in that stat between starters and relievers the relievers have much less value so now you can see the uphill battle that relievers are fighting to win this award let's take a look at the case for Clase's case Emanuel class in 2024 class stats in the season look very good he has a 0.63 erra a 659 ra plus over 57 Innings with a whip of 0.663 his strike rate is rather pedestrian at 23 1.2% which is not typical of your Elite closer he instead pitches to contact with a walk rate of just 3.4% and a ground ball rate north of 60% his BW though is only 3.4 which actually isn't even the highest value for a relever Tanner Scott of the Padres has more with 3.8 when we take a look at the war leaderboard amongst Al pitchers CL is actually tied for seventh based on past results this doesn't bod well at all for class winning the sa young leading the pack is Terk scoble who is the current favorite to win the award unsurprisingly his ra plus of 169 and FIP of 2.66 both lead the AL in terms of starting pitchers his 30.8% strikeout rate is tops in the league as well and 7 percentage points higher than CL his walk rate is also extremely low at 5.4% overall scoble has been one of the most dominant starters not only in the American League but in all of Major League Baseball he's also pitched 155 Innings almost three times as much as CL so not only is he ranked near the top amongst starters like CL is amongst relievers he also has done it over a significantly larger body of work don't get me wrong CLA is having a great season and he's a big reason why the Guardians have been so successful but frankly he's just not nearly as valuable as Terk scoble or Garrett crochet or Cole reagens or Seth Lugo or Tanner Halk for that matter and it really isn't his fault that's just part of the job of being a relief pitcher today but 21 years ago was the last time a pitcher was awarded with a Sai Young and I would be remissed if I didn't go back and investigate that it was 2003 and Eric G was having a Past closer Cy Youngs great season as the closer for the Lost Angeles Dodgers so good he ended up winning the Sai Young but if this season happened 20 years later he would not have won it it would have either gone to Jason Schmidt or Mark Prior if you take a look at these three players numbers it's pretty clear who was the least valuable Jason Schmidt had an RA plus of 180 a sub one Whip and pitched over 200 Innings prior edged him out in the BW category by S and was actually Double G's war in 2003 these more advanced metrics were starting to make their way into the league but they were far less mainstream than they are today that is especially clear after you look at who finished fourth in the voting that was Russ Ortiz who got there solely because he had 21 wins thanks to playing for the PowerHouse Atlanta Braves he led the league in walks and had just 2.2 W not exactly sa young material today G won the award mostly because of his 55 saves that he recorded saves much like wins don't really evaluate pitcher performance g converted all 55 save opportunities he had that season which is impressive but if he played for the Tigers who won just 43 games getting 55 saves would be impossible since the team has to win to record a save it would be unfair to evaluate closers based on their saves since ones on winning teams have a huge advantage in that stat in 2003 saves were looked at as this measure of success for a closing pitcher in 2024 we now know that that's not entirely true here's a little fun fact in 1987 Jeff reardan finished eighth in the sa young voting and 11th in the MVP voting solely because of his 31 saves he had a 4.48 erra over 80 Innings and finished 11th in the MVP voting stats were valued differently in that era saves still held that same value in 2003 when G won the award in 1992 Dennis Eckersley won not only the sa young but also the AL MVP as a closing pitcher surely he had one of the most dominant reliever seasons of all time right well no he stole the award from both Roger Clemens and Mike mucina who both put up Seasons worth over 8 BW War eers Le recorded 51 saves which won him the award if this were done over again in 2024 he would have not won the sa young and definitely would come nowhere close to the MVP these guys would never have a chance at winning the award today because saves don't give you this huge boost anymore thanks to years of research and new statistical developments we now know that it's kind of unfair and statistically it doesn't make much sense to Value stats like those it's just a tough time to be a relief pitcher unfortunately the job of Will it ever change? a relief pitcher in 2024 is a very underappreciated one this is rooted in the fact that they don't have enough volume to go up against the bigname starters with these Advanced value-based statistics like War gaining more and more mainstream attention every year relief pitcher True Value is being realized more and more by fans the only way a relief pitcher is going to take home the sa young anytime soon is if they're pitching multiple Innings per outing and they also have to be very dominant while doing it although the chances of that happening anytime soon are slim to none velocity is going up pitchers workloads are going down there is more resting than there's ever been in the game having a relief pitcher throw over 100 Innings just isn't realistic in today's game if a front office saw that a great relief pitcher is capable of throwing over a 100 innings in a season while still being productive well then they would just convert him to a starting pitcher a good starting pitcher is in much higher demand than a good reliever even Major League Baseball knows this struggle that relievers face and their most recent effort to recognize them was creating their own separate official award for reliever of the year in both the Al and NL in 2014 appropriately naming the NL award after Trevor Hoffman and the AL award after mariana rivera this is a similar reason to why the sa young was first introduced as more valuable position players were dominating the MVP award so pitchers got their own this is a pretty good first step but this award itself doesn't get much attention either when the MLB awards are announced most people are focused on the MVPs Sai Young's Rookie of the Year even Silver Slugger and gold gloves before the reliever of the year so maybe the only thing left to blame is US ourselves the fans it's all our fault we don't talk about relief pitchers we care more about the starters maybe it's on us to make the change the harsh reality is that relief Outro pitchers aren't going to win the Sai Young Award in today's game it's not just about ra it's not just about saves it's about the value that a player brings over a season and unfortunately for relievers that value is often limited by the role Ro that they play Emanuel CL is having an incredible season but the odds are stacked against him because of the way the game has evolved but maybe it's time we change the conversation as fans we have the power to recognize and appreciate the critical role that relievers play in a team success they don't have to win the Sai Young Award to be crowned as valuable players amongst fans if we start talking about it more who knows maybe one day the reliever of the Year award will hold the same weight as the S Young Ward we'll just have to wait and see thank you for watching make sure to subscribe if you enjoy and I'll see you in the next one goodbye