Aroldis Chapman should be the AL Cy Young winner for his historic season

Tuesday 9/9/25

I'm now of the belief that Aroldis Chapman should be the AL Cy Young award winner, allowing that he keeps up what he's been doing for the last two and a half weeks of the season. I don't think there's any way that he wins the award; what I'm saying is that he should if his performance level doesn't dip.

This is one of the all-time great seasons by a closer. His ERA is .98, his ERA+ is 426, his WHIP is .636. He last allowed a hit on July 23. A hit. It's September 9. He last allowed two hits in an appearance on May 27. These are historical numbers. No other pitcher is having a historical season, or a year for someone to look back on someday and think, "Wow," as they peruse the numbers.

An example of this with a reliever: Dennis Eckersley's 1990 season, in which he had a .61 ERA, a 603 ERA+ (!), a .614 WHIP, walking four batters in 73.1 innings. For all of this, he finished fifth in Cy Young voting, which looks silly now. His teammate, Bob Welch, won that year, which I understand and am more forgiving of than most, especially those--whose numbers are so rampant now--who believe modern analytics is all that matter and traditional stats hold no value, which I contend is sheer ignorance when it comes to what the game actually is and how games are won.

We would be wise to consider and understand both types of statistics, and to think critically and apply logic. But to do so, you must understand the game, and sports themselves, and nuance and context--how it goes down on the field. Human psychology and nature as well.

Welch won 27 games that year. Didn't pitch a ton of innings, and not as many as you'd expect to see for a 27-game winner--238, to be exact. That's a lot now, but if you go through the history of the guys who racked up the big single-season win totals, you'll see that they were workhorses. The Athletics turned up the offense for Welch that year. Roger Clemens had an ERA of 1.93 that was more than a full run lower than Welch's 2.95, and he finished second in the AL Cy Young voting.

But what can you say? 27 wins is impressive, and the point of the game is to win and win as much as possible. The vogue now is to say that pitchers have little to no control over whether they get a win, because they're reliant on their team's offense to put up runs, but baseball is more complicated than that. You pitch to scores, to context, to knowing what your team needs--that day, that series.

A pitcher who is up in a game may stick around in that game longer than he would have otherwise, finding more of the plate, giving up runs because he has a cushion, so as to go the distance rather than just six innings, setting up the bullpen for the next series.

The problem is, everyone always thinks everything is equal; or they talk as if it were. A savvy, good pitcher will change how he pitches. He'll read his team. The needs of his team. The mental state of his team.

Here we are thirty-five years later, and no one has won as many games as Bob Welch did during his Cy Young season. No one's come that close. John Smoltz and Justin Verlander had 24-win seasons, which is the highest total in all of that time since. 27 wins really jumped out at you in 1990. Think of how amazing Roger Clemens was in 1986, and he finished with 24 wins. Dwight Gooden was even better the year before, and he also finished with 24 victories.

It's almost as if Eckersley was awarded the 1992 Cy Young--and the MVP, for goodness sake--as a "make up" for losing out in 1990--or 1988, come to think of it--but the problem with an Eckersley and a Chapman, of course, is their low innings pitched total. I get that, too--it can be hard to justify awarding a player as the best pitcher in the league that year if all they threw was some paltry number of innings.

Then again, innings pitched are well down for starters, so the gap is narrowing to some sense. Maybe I shouldn't put it that way--there's supposed to be a big gap. But if starters are throwing less innings, and closers are more or less where they've been since Eckersley's time, the value-gap is surely shortening.

Right now, Chapman has pitched 55 innings. I wouldn't expect him to get to 65. 63 innings pitched--let's say--also stands out, just not the way you want it to. But what he's done has been a hell of thing to see. He'll finish in the top five, or else you'll know that closers aren't viewed as legitimately being up for this award so far as the writers believe. He should also finish in the top ten in AL MVP voting.

For fun, consider the question of what kind of statistical line would be most valuable for a closer?

It's the kind of season that Dan Quisenberry had for half a decade, where a guy throws 130 innings, while saving thirty plus games, or somewhere around there. Goose Gossage had those types of years in his 1970s prime. That's where your highest value for a reliever is. You're getting volume and that guy who slams the door shut on the opponent's bats for your team's latest victory. This kind of closer can go two, sometimes three innings.

Look at Quisenberry in 1983: 139 innings pitched, 45 saves, 1.94 ERA. A couple years later, he got into 84 games. Led the league in saves in 1980, then 1982-85. I think he should be in the Hall of Fame, and he never got close. In fact, he fell off the ballot after just one year of being on it, and has only got a single look from any veterans type of committee since.

Quisenberry's problem was that outside of the years I mentioned above--and you can include the strike-shortened 1981 season as well--that was pretty much it for Quisenberry. He had five top five Cy Young finishes. Four top ten MVP finishes (and finished eleventh another time).

But he had no other good seasons. You'd have to take the reliever version of the Sandy Koufax approach--where a candidate's Hall of Fame case is based entirely on their prime--with Quisenberry. He was a lot of fun to watch with his sidearm delivery. Didn't strike out a lot of batters. Pitched to contact. And wrote poetry. For a while, though, he was close to what I'd call the perfect closer. You got the best of both worlds with him: quantity and quality.

I'm still taken aback, though, at the year Aroldis Chapman is having, despite his relatively sporadic usage, which comes with the position as it's now handled, and, I think, his age. It's definitely an eye-popping campaign that should cause the astute baseball historian--if there are any such things--of fifty or sixty years from now to marvel over as well.

Tarik Skubal will win his second consecutive Cy Young award, and that's fine--it's not going to be some gross injustice or really anything that anyone got wrong--but he's basically just having a really good season. Which is different than what I'm talking about with Chapman.