Jacob deGrom wins second consecutive Cy Young Award

The Baseball Writers Association of America named Jacob deGrom the best pitcher in the National League and awarded him his second consecutive Cy Young. This is the first time in franchise history that a Mets pitcher has won the award in back-to-back seasons, and he joins the legendary Tom Seaver as the only player in team history to win the award twice as a Met.

deGrom received all but one of the first place votes. Hyun-Jin Ryu and Max Scherzer tied for second place. Stephen Strasburg took fourth.

The award is the culmination of another stellar year for the righty, who finished the season with a 2.43 ERA and 255 strikeouts in 204 innings pitched. The ERA was good for second in the league, while he finished first in strikeouts.

For a good portion of the season, the award seemed like Hyun-Jin Ryu’s to lose. He owned a minuscule ERA for most of the season and held it under 2.00 until late August. But injuries started to set in, and he had a terrible finish to the season. He still won the ERA crown, but he threw about thirty fewer innings than deGrom. He was also nowhere near as dominant, relying more on soft contact than strikeouts, and finished with just 163 in 182.2 innings.

Even with Ryu having a phenomenal season, Max Scherzer was also his typical dominant self for most of the year. It was expected that should Ryu slip, it would be Scherzer who would be there to grab the award. He was striking out an average of twelve batters per nine innings and looked completely dominant until injures set in for him, too. He stumbled down the stretch and finished with a 5.16 ERA for the month of September. Overall his numbers were still stellar, but they weren’t on par with deGrom’s.

Stephen Strasburg and Jack Flaherty were also certainly deserving of votes, especially Flaherty, who had an unbelievable second half, but once again it was deGrom’s patented consistency that got him the award. Outside of three bad starts early in the year, deGrom looked an awful lot like the Cy Young winner from 2018 and was again deserving of the award one year later.