Post Season pitching
awards.
With the passing of the
legendary pitcher Denton True Young in 1955, baseball commissioner
Ford Frick decided to honor the legendary hurler by naming a post
season pitching award after him. The “Cy Young Award” has been
awarded every year since 1956.
Don Newcombe of the
Brooklyn Dodgers was the first winner of this prestigious award,
which was given to just one pitcher per year. That practice ended
with the passing of Commissioner Frick in 1966.
His replacement, Lt. Gen.
William Eckert decided to expand the award, and to award it to a
pitcher from each league, and that tradition has continued to this
day. This past season saw Jake Arrieta of the Cubs and Dallas Keuchel
of the Astros.
It is nice to recognize Cy
Young (The nickname is a shortened version of the word Cyclone) since
he has set records that it is safe to say will never be broken. His
511 wins comes to mind. Right now, a pitcher would have to win
twenty-five games a year for twenty years, and then win eleven more
just to tie the record. You have to go back to 1990 to find the last
pitcher to win twenty-five in a season, and then go back another
twelve years to find the next twenty-five game winner.
Young won twenty-five or
more on twelve occasions, and topped thirty wins five of those
seasons. In 1893 he won thirty-four games, but tied for second in the
league behind Frank Killen of Pittsburgh.
Young also started more
games than anyone else, toeing the rubber 815 times. Nowadays
pitchers rarely start more than 33-35 games per season. To match Cy
Young, a pitcher would have to average 35 starts for over
twenty-three seasons.
He also lost 316 games, a
record that no one will ever want to come near. That one is losing 15
games a year for twenty-one seasons, which more than likely won't be
done again either.
Pitching in an era that was
full of contact hitters, Cy held the all-time strikeout record, with
2,803 over his twenty-two years. His highest single season total was
210 in 1905, and he topped the 200 strikeout plateau one other time
in his career.
He is credited with
throwing the first perfect game in major league history, in 1904.
There's a story there.
Rube Waddell of the
Philadelphia A's, one-hit Boston in early May, and taunted Cy Young
into changing his schedule so that they would face each other, and
Waddell said he would repeat his performance. They met three days
later, and Young pitched the perfect game. The twenty-seventh and
last batter Young faced that day was Waddell himself. (Modern day
fans note, there was no pinch hitter for Waddell, who made the final
out, and took a complete game loss.
Born in 1867, Young began
his career with the Cleveland Spiders on the National League as a
twenty-three year old rookie in 1890. He pitched for Cleveland until
his contract was transferred to the St. Louis Perfectos in 1899. That
team was owned by the same man that owned the Spiders, and pulled all
of the best players to his St. Louis team to create a powerhouse. (It
didn't work, as the Perfectos finished fifth) In 1900, the St. Louis
team was re-branded as the Cardinals, as we know them today.
In 1901, Young joined the
Boston Americans (eventually to be called the Red Sox) and pitched
for them until 1911, when he split his time as a forty-two year old
between the Cleveland Naps (Indians) and the Boston Rustlers
(Braves).
He was in the second class
of players named to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937.
Cy Young
Born a twenty years later, in
1887, Walter Johnson had an arm described by Ty Cobb as “the most
powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark”.
“The Big Train” went
5-9 with a 1.88 ERA and his Runs Allowed was very respectable 2.86 in his debut season of 1907. He
would then earn double digit wins for the next twelve years, and then
eighteen of the next nineteen years.
Johnson is second in career
wins with 416, holds the record for most shutouts with 110, (twenty
more than Pete Alexander, and thirty-five more than Young) and
finished with a career ERA of 2.17. He became the first pitcher to
reach 3,000 strikeouts in a career, and was the only one in that club
until Bob Gibson reached that magical number in 1974. And his 3,508
strikeout total would take fifty-five years before Nolan Ryan would
surpass it.
His 1.14 ERA in 1913, and
is still the lowest ever for a pitcher with more than 300 innings
pitched in a season. He won twenty or more games twelve times,
winning thirty twice. He spent the entirety of his career in
Washington, pitching in 2 World Series, winning one in 1924. He was
one of the original five inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame in
1936.
Walter Johnson
While both pitchers are
legends, I feel that Johnson was a better pitcher than Young. In
using the Hall of Fame criteria of ten years in the league, I will
use the top 10 seasons of their careers to compare them. Since Young
pitched in a different era of the game, one that the pitcher's mound
was fifty feet away from home plate, and for a time, it was seven or
eight balls for a walk, the top ten gives us a better gauge of their
careers.
For Young, his top ten years
are as follows:
- YearWonLostERARA189127222.855.18189236121.933.14189426213.945.84190133101.622.72190232112.153.1819032892.083.03190426161.972.46190518191.822.78190721151.992.65190821111.262.05
For those 10 years, he went
268-146 for a .647 winning percentage with a 2.12 ERA and a 3.21 Runs
Allowed.
Johnson's numbers are:
- YearWonLostERARA191025171.372.24191125131.903.32191233121.392.1719133671.141.46191428181.722.13191527131.552.22191625201.902.56191723162.212.90191823131.271.96191920141.492.26
For those 10 years, he went
277-143 for a .671 winning percentage, and compiled a minuscule ERA
of 1.59 and a 2.31 Runs Allowed average. Let that sink in for a
minute. Over ten years, he averaged allowing less than two and a half
runs per game. In 2015, the average pitcher Runs Allowed was 4.36, a
full two runs more than Johnson.
Bear in mind that the ERA
was not officially recognized as a statistic until 1920, so these
numbers were culled from baseball-reference.com
but
these are the statistics that have been handed down for many years as
accurate.
If
it were up to me, and it is most definitely not, each post season,
pitcher would be awarded the Walter Johnson Award.
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