Kings pitcher Justin Verlander
It was a great year for pitchers as a whole, but one hurler was head and shoulders above the rest. In the least surprising news of the off-season, Kevin’s Kings ace Justin Verlander has unanimously won the 2011 DTBL Cy Young Award, to go along with the American League Cy Young Award which he unanimously won earlier this week.
2011 was an amazing, record-setting year for Verlander. He got off to a hot start, highlighted by his second career no-hitter against Toronto in May. He continued to win games start after start and finished the season with 24 victories, tying the DTBL single season record. John Smoltz won 24 games for the Cougars back in 1996 and Randy Johnson equaled that mark for the Kings in 2002. Since that ’02 season, no pitcher had won more than 22 games in a season. In addition to wins, Verlander also led the league in WHIP at 0.920 and 250 strike outs. That WHIP ratio comes in as the sixth lowest single season value in DTBL history. His 2.40 ERA was pretty good too.
Verlander was almost solely responsible for the Kings tying for the second most pitching points in the league. Only one other King won more than 10 games (Max Scherzer), yet the team wound up leading the league in that category. Verlander accounted for almost 20% of the team’s strike outs as well. The Kings picked Verlander in the third round of the 2009 draft after he had spent two seasons with the Demigods. The Demigods let him go after a very disappointing season in 2008. In his three seasons with the Kings, he has won at least 18 games in each campaign. In fact, he has reached that 18 win mark in four of his five DTBL seasons. He’ll need just 13 wins next year to reach 100 for his career. It has been an impressive early career for Verlander, but 2011 was by far his best year yet.
The Cy Young voting results were not surprising, but very interesting none-the-less. Unanimous decisions for awards are fairly common, but rarely do you see complete agreement in both of the top two spots. Verlander received all ten of the first place votes for the maximum 100 points, while the young Mavericks lefty Clayton Kershaw received all ten of the second place votes for 70 total points. Kershaw, the National League Cy Young winner, won 21 games and was right with Verlander in the other categories. Kershaw had the league’s best ERA at 2.28 and finished second to Verlander in wins, WHIP (0.977) and strike outs (248). These two were clearly the best two pitchers in the league in 2011. Although not quite unanimous, Roy Halladay was the clear choice for third place. He earned eight third place votes with the other two going to his Jackalope and Phillies teammate Cliff Lee. Halladay earned 46 points. Lee finished fourth in the vote with 26 points. There was a bit of a gap following the pair of Jackalope. Former Jackalope, current Moonshiner Jered Weaver finished fifth with eight points. Halladay, Lee and Weaver had numbers which would have made them likely Cy Young winners in many seasons, but not this one.
Click here to view the full 2011 DTBL Cy Young voting results.
I’m going to take this time to mention that I never got around to writing that third piece of my season recap, which was supposed to be a statistical look at how much pitchers dominated the 2011 season. Hopefully, I’ll take the time at some point this winter to delve into this, because after glancing at some of the numbers, it is quite apparent that pitching has never been better than it was this year (in the DTBL, that is). All of the players mentioned above played a huge part in this.
The final award, the Most Valuable Player, will be named next Tuesday. There are plenty of strong candidates for that award as well.