With voting season in full swing, the The Baseball Writers’ Association of America announced finalists for several high-profile awards on Monday. The National League Cy Young was among them, leaving this year’s voters to decide among the Reds’ Trevor Bauer, the Cubs’ Yu Darvish and the Mets’ Jacob deGrom. The question is: Which right-hander do you think they should choose?
When it came to preventing runs in 2020, no qualified NL starter was superior to Bauer, now a free agent whose platform year came at an ideal time. The 29-year-old easily paced his league in ERA (1.73). He also ranked second in the NL in strikeouts per nine (12.33), third in K/BB ratio (5.88) and fWAR (2.5), fourth in bWAR (2.7), fifth in FIP (2.88) and sixth in innings (73).
Darvish equaled Bauer’s bWAR, but he upended him in the fWAR category (3.0; first). The resurgent 34-year-old also finished No. 1 in his league in FIP (2.23) while placing near the top in ERA (2.01; second), BB/9 (1.66; second), innings (76; third) and K/9 (11.01; eighth).
And there’s simply no slowing down deGrom, who’s the back-to-back winner of this award. The 32-year-old didn’t have the quite workload of Bauer or Darvish, as deGrom dealt with some injuries and wound up with 68 innings. As always, though, he was dominant. DeGrom finished first in K/9 (13.76), second in FIP (2.23) and fWAR (2.26), fourth in ERA (2.38) and K/BB ratio (5.78), and seventh in bWAR (2.6).
Looking at the exemplary numbers these three posted in 2020, it appears voters are going to have a hard time settling on a pick. There’s no wrong answer among the three, but which one do you prefer? (Poll link for app users)