So congratulations to Gerrit "Flouncy" Cole, who certainly deserved the 2023, AL Cy Young Award, despite how often I have made fun of his flounciness.
He has done pretty much everything we could have expected from him in his four seasons in New York—and had Brainless Brian actually managed to sign him when he first drafted him, he probably would have brought home a couple rings, too.
Of course, the local press can't help itself in its wild, pendulum swings. Anthony McCarren, whose baseball acumen rivals that of Cashman's, was on SNY last night, speculating that, if Cole keeps going like he has for the last five years of his contract, he could become "the greatest Yankee starting pitcher ever."
Let's not get carried away. Whitey Ford won 236 games despite missing two years to military service, and NEVER had a season with an ERA higher than the league average—despite frequently being held back to pitch against the best teams in the AL.
He also holds the record for lowest ERA for any pitcher whose entire career came after 1920 (i.e, the live ball era), and set the record for World Series wins and consecutive scoreless innings in the Series. Not "the postseason," mind you—the World Series.
Whitey was one of 5 previous, Yankee Cy Young winners, in 1961, his 25-win season. The others are Bullet Bob Turley (1958), Sparky Lyle (first AL reliever to win, 1977), Ron Guidry (1978), and Roger "the Roider" Clemens (2001).
The Cy Young was only started in 1956, and was only give to ONE pitcher in all of baseball, NL and AL combined, for some inane reason, until 1967. That undoubtedly cost Whitey a second Cy Young in 1963, when he was 24-7, 2.74.
That year, Colon went 21-8 with a hard-hitting Angels team. He had a 3.48 ERA, only 8th in the AL, 2 complete games, and no shutouts. Rivera, by contrast, went 7-4, 1.38, with 43 saves, led the AL in games finished with 67, and surrendered only 2 home runs in 80 innings.
Travesty!
Had a two-league Cy Young existed since the beginning of the AL, other Yank winners probably would have been:
—Happy Jack Chesbro (pictured above, for a modern record, 41 wins in 1904).
—Carl Mays (27 wins and 7 saves in 1921, leading AL in both; second in ERA, 336 2/3 innings. Also didn't kill anyone that year.).
—Either Waite Hoyt (22-7, 2.63) or Wilcy Moore (19-7, league-leading 13 saves, 2.28) in 1927.
—Lefty Gomez, in 1934 and 1937 (won the "pitching triple crown" both seasons, and also led AL in shutouts).
—Spud Chandler in 1943 (20-4, 1.64; 5 shutouts, 20 complete games, 1 earned run allowed in 2 World Series, complete-game wins; AL MVP).
—Allie Reynolds (20-8, league-leading 2.63 ERA, 6 shutouts, 160 strikeouts; as well as 6 saves).
But the thing with all these guys? They took the Yankees to the World Series, or won it. Or at least seriously contended.
Not Gerrit Cole, sad to say—and not to say that it was his fault at all. The blame lies elsewhere.
Honorable Mention: Luis Arroyo in 1961
ReplyDeleteAgain, I bring Mel to your attention. How do you win 20 games for a team that finishes 77–85, 25 games out? Like Cole this year, you take Mel out of the equation for that 1965 season and things would've got really ugly.
ReplyDelete20-9 with 18 complete games and an ERA of 2.63. I wish we had young Mel today. He and Cole would win us the division, at the least.
Jack Chesbro was awesome, in the original meaning of the word. 41 wins. Jumpin' Jehoshaphat, that something else.
ReplyDeleteI swear Horace, if you don't sit down and write the bloody book, I will go back through the archives and publish it all under a pseudonym.
ReplyDeleteThe stuff you keep coming up with is brilliant.
Thanks, DickAllen. And it will be out in March.
ReplyDeletePoor Chesbro. He really perfected the spitball—then legal—that year, and had one of the greatest pitching seasons ever. He threw 455 innings and pitched 48 complete games in 1904, finishing with a 1.82 ERA and allowing less than one runner per inning. He beat five, future Hall-of-Famers, and his team scored more than five runs in only 13 of his starts (He won only one game in which he gave up as many as four runs.).
On the last day of the season, with the pennant on the line, Chesbro—in his 3rd start in 4 days—gave up only three unearned runs (the Yanks made four errors behind him), and he hit a triple and a single himself, driving in one of the Yanks' two runs. But he threw a wild pitch—one that some people thought his catcher should've had—to lose the game in the 9th inning.
He was long considered to have "blown" the pennant, and for years afterwards, reporters would trek up to Happy Jack on his Massachusetts farm, to interview him about his colossal mistake.
I don't think even we would be that insensitive.